A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times

2 | Experiencing the Sixties at the Intersection of SDS and SNCC

I begin with this song, written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, that became a favorite of folks in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and of people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. The words symbolize what the sixties meant for me as an individual spending my college years connected to both SDS and SNCC. At the end of this chapter, I will discuss some of the lessons I learned as a result of my association with both groups. First I want to address what it was like to be a black person, a woman, and—to use a term that I will explain fully later—a “little person” within the SDS community. Looking back today with all our current understanding of past and present social discriminations and hierarchies, my association with SDS was not one of being or feeling “less than” but one that was enriching and empowering for me. How was this so?

The answer lies, I think, with my own personal background, the surrounding historical activism, and the openness and commitments within early SDS. Growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, I lived with what I would categorize as a face-to-face miniracism, which was part of my daily life even as a young child. Usually this kind of racism was manifested in petty meanness, a series of not-so-subtle exclusions and put-downs, like the public library finding an excuse not to award me a reading prize that I deserved, being excluded from a girls’ glee club that held dances with boys’ choruses, or my ninth-grade math teacher refusing to help me catch up after I’d been out for several weeks with the German measles. “You’re too dumb to learn algebra,” she told me. When I taught myself and did exceptionally well on our final exam, she said, “Well, I don’t know how you did it. I know you didn’t cheat, though, because I watched you through the entire exam.”

Occasionally, it was dangerous or physically painful. When I was six, we moved from one all-white neighborhood to another. Initially, our new neighbors threw stones into our home and once tried to set the house on fire. The most frightening experience was when a white man, after imbibing at the neighborhood bar, entered our backyard waving a gun and threatening to kill my father and me if we did not leave at once.

I still remember how it felt when shortly after we moved in, one of the older boys in the neighborhood attacked me, repeatedly punching me in the stomach. Later, when I was in high school, my mother found and sent me to a University of Michigan dentist in Providence. After my first visit, he scheduled me on his lunch hour when there were no other patients in the office. He did not give me Novocain, I soon figured out, because he wanted to finish quickly before his afternoon patients arrived. Although my cavities were not especially deep and I stopped going to him after two or three visits, this process hurt enough that I was terrified of going to the dentist for years.

From a young age, I heard adults talking about their own challenges navigating through American racism. Many, like my mother, were never able to find employment close to the level of their education, training, or abilities. Among the various recollections she shared with me about her life as a black woman were her experiences here at the University of Michigan in the early twenties. In 1921, she graduated from high school in Ann Arbor at fourteen with a stellar record. Rather than being embraced by the university for her accomplishments, her initial attempt to attend was rebuffed by a university official telling her she was too young to be admitted and should go to work instead. Afterward, one of her best friends, Letty Wickliffe, also African American and already at Michigan, informed my mother of a university regulation that allowed any state high school graduate to attend summer school and then matriculate at the university if they maintained a B average. My mother got in through this back door.

She graduated in only three years at the age of seventeen while working to help support her mother and brother. Her father, a barber who had had a shop and family living quarters at 117 E. Ann Street, had died when she was nine years old. Next my mother went on to the university’s law school. She explained to me that the law school had accepted her and a number of other black students, not realizing their race because they all had graduated from predominately white universities. To undo this situation, she believed, the law school unfairly flunked them all out.

Nevertheless, she was proud of her connection to the University of Michigan and was so determined that I attend that she found a job in Michigan at the beginning of my junior year in high school to be certain to qualify for in-state tuition. This meant she lived apart from my father and me until I graduated from high school. Then we moved to join her in Detroit. “You don’t need college counseling,” she told me, “You are going to the University of Michigan, unless you can’t get in, and then you’ll have to go to Michigan State.” “The Victors,” with all its flourishes and grandeur, was one of the few songs she could sit down at the piano and play from memory throughout her life and one of the first songs she taught me, along with “The House I Live In,” an ode to democracy and diversity.

Still, neither my parents nor I thought that my years at the University of Michigan would be racially diverse. We knew I would be attending classes and living in a dorm with white students when I enrolled in fall 1961, but we expected that my social life would be spent exclusively in the company of other African American students. In addition to obtaining a first-rate education, my mother encouraged me to make lifelong friendships and connections among the other black students in college and, of course, as was common at that time, to look for a husband. “It’s unlikely,” she would remark, “that you will be in the company of so many bright and gifted young black folks, all in one place, ever again.” After so many years of being the only black child in my neighborhood and the only black student or one of two at school, I was really looking forward to no longer being the black student and becoming a part of the larger group of the some three hundred black students then on campus.

Instead I ended up as the only black undergraduate in VOICE, the SDS chapter on campus. Once in my sophomore year, thinking my parents would feel better about my association with VOICE if they met the whole crew, I asked my mother and father to come to campus on an afternoon when everyone was gathered at Casey and Tom Hayden’s house. (After all, my parents had been active in the Progressive Party.) My mom and dad walked through the Arch Street house in a circle, from the living room through the bedroom around to the kitchen and back out the front hall, engaging in polite conversation as they met everyone. By that time, my father, a former optometrist, had lost his sight. When we reached the sidewalk, he and my mother prepared to leave and go back to Detroit. His parting words, spoken with great disappointment, were, “Martha Susan, I may be blind, but I am certain that there was no one in that house that looks like you.”

At the time, I just shrugged my shoulders and mumbled something about his being correct. I really had no explanation for him and couldn’t have articulated why I was in VOICE other than to say it was where I felt I belonged on campus. I do know that in SDS/VOICE, I found an absence of the kinds of racism and racial stereotyping that had always been a part of my life. There was complete inclusiveness without the subtle put-downs, paternalism, and assumptions of ignorance that I have found in most other similar situations. There were no “put-ups,” either—that is, the excessive adulation and praise that can be typical in some leftist groups. As I think about that little circle of Joan and Mark Chesler, Mickey (Miriam) and Dick Flacks, Barbara and Al Haber, Casey and Tom Hayden, Nancy and Andy Hawley, Sharon Jeffrey, Bob Ross, Dick Magidoff, Nancy Hollander, and others, in part, I believe it was because they were just good people. Also, from the little I know of their backgrounds, I suspect that most of these early VOICE members had already had interracial experiences and had already wrestled through quite a bit.

Most importantly, many SDSers had already had direct contact with the early stages of the Black Freedom Movement and understood that this movement had the potential to greatly liberalize—maybe even radicalize—American society and politics. For example, Casey Hayden was involved the early sit-ins in Austin, Texas; Tom was part of the 1961 Freedom Rides; and VOICE members had raised food and supplies for black residents of Haywood and Fayette Counties in Tennessee who lost their residences and jobs when they tried to register to vote in 1959 and 1960. Through this connection with black activism, SDSers had direct experience with black students and community members engaged in a heroic struggle, thus learning that there were indeed strengths in the black community and qualities worthy of admiration. They also saw firsthand the bravery and courage required to be black in America during the fifties and sixties.

Although both my political and social life centered around SDS/VOICE, I did pledge a predominately black sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. This was another legacy from my mother and her friend, Letty Wickliffe, whom I called Aunt Letty. Aunt Letty was a founding member of the chapter at the university, and my mother crossed shortly afterward. (I was a little amazed the sorority accepted me, given my activism and related dressing down.) One day I might be in the Fishbowl staffing a political table and the next, I might be dressed in sorority colors, holding a yellow cloth duck and marching in formation with the other pledges. I was comfortable with this duality, feeling at home in both places, though eventually my efforts to support the Southern Freedom Movement took up more of my time and the sorority less.

Just as with race, I did not feel any particular restrictions or put-downs as a woman in VOICE. Whenever I have spoken or written about what it was like to be a young woman while working for SNCC in the South or doing support work in the North, I have said that I had no real idea of what the men were thinking, I only know how I was treated, and I never had a sense of being held back or held down. I pretty much did whatever it was I could think up to do. It was the same for me as a member of VOICE. I felt free to initiate and direct activities rather than just follow the plans made within the organization. My first year on campus, I started fund-raising for SNCC and, in my sophomore year, began and headed a Friends of SNCC chapter there. Soon we had an office in the Student Activities Building, but the Friends of SNCC group was initially based in the women’s Osterweil Co-op where I and several of the key members of the chapter—Helen Jacobson, Sue Wender, and Jill Hamberg—lived. We were all also VOICE members. Helen really served as Friends of SNCC cochair, and we ladies figured out what we were going to do.

We held one of the earliest concerts for the SNCC Freedom Singers in the country and quickly organized a citywide food drive after receiving a letter from Bob Moses, head of SNCC’s Mississippi project, explaining that local Mississippians who tried to register to vote often lost their means of support and needed food. Our vanload of food was the first response to the national outreach Moses had made. The two Michigan State University students who drove the truck to Mississippi over the Christmas break were immediately arrested, and our support work turned to keeping them safe in jail, raising bond money, and campaigning to get their charges dropped. Our work for the Southern Freedom Movement not only enjoyed the full support of VOICE members but also benefitted from their sharing organizing tips with us.

Several times, we reformed our Friends of SNCC group as an ad hoc committee for other causes. Once, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we young women played a significant role in organizing a national protest against the US blockade of the island. I spoke with Helen Jacobson recently, and those years were so active, we can’t remember which other protests our little ad hoc committees worked on and which were more under VOICE’s umbrella. Things were overlapping and mutually supported. I do recall that more than once, I called Quaker activists Fran and Johan Eliot, who had lent us their van to take the food we raised to Mississippi, to ask to use their van again to go to protest marches in Washington, DC. I also remember that we demonstrated locally against the visit of South Vietnamese president’s wife Madame Nhu to the United States and on another occasion against the murder of Patrice Lumumba, carrying picket signs that read, “I don’t want to live in Uncle Tshombe’s cabin.”

Both in SNCC and in SDS, the slightly older women were my role models. They were more important to me than what the men in both organizations thought and did. Many of these women were so exceptional that they set a standard I didn’t expect to achieve, but I hoped I could just be a bit like them. Through civil rights activism, I met and sometimes worked with women like Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Through SDS, I came to admire Elise Boulding (a sociologist and another Quaker activist), Millie Jeffrey (Sharon Jeffrey’s mother), Mickey Flacks, and Casey Hayden. With the exception of Sharon’s mother, who held high positions in the UAW and the national Democratic Party, none of these women held any powerful offices or positions, but they certainly modeled strength and independence. With women like these in view, men’s opinions and actions faded into the background.

Of course, I grew up with women who also demonstrated these qualities in daily life. I think particularly of my mother—who became the major breadwinner in our family after my father’s sight failed—and my Aunt Letty. A lifelong Republican, Aunt Letty became a major force in Ann Arbor community issues after she retired from teaching gifted and special needs children.

I suspect my relationship with SDS men was somewhat limited, since I did not expect to date within that group. Among my race-conscious parents’ greatest fears regarding my SDS/VOICE affiliation was that I would bring home a white husband and as a result not remain an integral part of the black community. At the same time I felt I belonged in VOICE, I also felt as my parents did that my future life and work should and would be within the black community. We agreed that it was my responsibility to use whatever skills and talents I developed for the benefit of my community, and, further, it was my duty to strive to go as far as I was able educationally. For my parents, this meant earning a professional degree, specifically becoming a minister, doctor, or lawyer. My mother, in particular, wanted the satisfaction of seeing me graduate from the University of Michigan Law School.[2]

My main identity in SDS/VOICE was not so much as a black person or as a young woman but more as what some of us called ourselves then, “a little person.” SDS “little persons,” as I recall, were both male and female. We were the younger, first- and second-year students rather than upper-class and graduate students. We had no name recognition on campus, like Tom Hayden and Bob Ross, and we didn’t say much at the Friday-night “Studies on the Left” sessions held in the Haydens’ basement, partially because we didn’t always do all the heavy reading. Our role was clear: we were the audience—there to listen and learn.

As “little persons,” however, we were not diminished. I felt we were at the beginning of the same path the big people had already walked. We were right there going to all the events and meetings with all the other SDS folks. I had no sense that the “big people” were formally or informally doing things together that excluded us “little people.” We were all dealing with really BIG ideas, envisioning really BIG roles for ourselves as well as originating and connecting to the BIG social movements of our time. We were all singing along with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan when they were performing in high school auditoriums in Ann Arbor. We were all listening to people like Michael Harrington and Mario Savio when they came to campus. It was so wonderful, exciting, and empowering.

I would use these same words to describe what is was like to live the sixties connected to both SDS and SNCC—wonderful, exciting, and empowering. It was a time of learning new lessons and grasping fresh ideas. Although we activists often talked about college as irrelevant, as unrelated to the real world we were seeing, I believe that our activities and discussions within SDS/VOICE heightened our interest in and understanding of certain college classes. The classes, in turn, sometimes offered insights into political activism and regularly strengthened the skills we needed for our SDS/VOICE work and discussions. (Of course, when I brought up this notion of the irrelevancy of school with my parents, it gave them something else to worry about, a position they couldn’t even begin to fathom.) At the same time we talked about academic irrelevancy, we were still doing the college thing, some like me less wholeheartedly than others, reading Camus, taking Philosophy 101, and studying other world cultures as well as our own.

When I spent my junior year at Wayne State University, I took one of my most exciting and life-changing classes. It was about the history of Reconstruction. Because of my exposure in SDS and SNCC to social change, I understood quickly from our readings and the material presented in class that the Emancipation Proclamation did not actually free anyone. I saw that the actions of tens of thousands of slaves, who began freeing themselves and crossing into union lines, actually made the Proclamation imaginable. Additionally, the slaves’ actions made slavery a central issue of a war that was supposed to be limited to preserving the union. I learned that thousands of slaves escaped the South and joined the Union army as requested in the Proclamation and so fought for their freedom two times over and helped Lincoln win the Civil War. What a concept—my slave ancestors, without outside guidance, acting in their own self-interest and thus determining a national policy that in turn was favorable to the slaves’ interests. This was a huge personal and political lesson for me as a young person involved in social activism and one I don’t think was shared by the other members of the class, who were all white and not connected to SDS or SNCC. At the same time I recognized how history can be distorted, with Lincoln remembered as the “Great Emancipator” and the slaves who did so much to gain their freedom remembered with the passive term “freedmen.”

Before taking the class on Reconstruction, I had already learned several key lessons and new ideas related to social activism outside of the classroom. The fall semester of my first year on campus, Curtis Hayes, a young man from SNCC’s McComb, Mississippi, project came to the Guild House ministry on campus to describe SNCC’s work and philosophy as the organization moved into community organizing. Also that fall, I heard Bob Ross giving a speech out on the Diag. He included in his talk a description of how VOICE members had gotten the previous dean of women fired because of her racially discriminating actions. There it was, from Curtis and Bob, a huge lesson—people my age could come together and do something to fight against racism. Even though I had been following the southern student movement from afar since I was in high school and wanted to join it, this message was not solidified for me until I met activists around my age face to face.

The next semester, I learned more about the Southern Freedom Movement when Tom Hayden came to campus fresh from jail in Albany, Georgia, and then invited VOICE folks to a 1962 SDS/SNCC spring conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. SDS members Sharon Jeffrey and Mike Zweig, along with my dorm mate Kathy Inness, local activist Dick Sleet, and I, put in $5 each for gas, packed up oranges and sandwiches, and rode back and forth at night to attend this weekend conference. The sessions consisted of reports by SNCC field secretaries on the community organizing work they were doing and the demonstrations they were holding. Music began and punctuated every session. In between, we sat on the grass and talked with individual SNCC folk about what they hoped to accomplish.

There were less than one hundred people at this conference. Together they were the core of the predominately black student groups that ended segregation and won the vote in the South as well as the predominately white groups that spearheaded the antiwar protests that ended the war in Vietnam. As I watched history unfold in the sixties, I learned that in the right historical circumstances, just a small number of dedicated people could have a huge effect on events.

That same semester, I also learned more about the purposes and goals of SDS when I helped type Hayden’s early memos that led to the Port Huron Statement. In those days multiple copies were made by first typing a stencil that would be run off on an ink-filled roller. My typing skills were fairly basic and my recollection is that we were sometimes working with handwritten notes, so I had to read everything I was typing word for word while continuing to check for typing errors.

Through these connections, I learned to think on a much broader and more concrete scale. When SNCC people talked about building a civil rights movement in Mississippi, they insisted that addressing the needs of black people in Mississippi would by definition take care of the needs of black people everywhere else in the country. When SNCC people talked about community organization, they talked about building a South-wide mass movement based in the people hardest hit by racism that would move the country as a whole in a more liberal—perhaps radical—direction.

SDSers were also talking and writing about racism and different methods of organizing. They were talking about making needed change in ever-widening circles from campus issues to issues in our home communities to national and global ones. The Port Huron Statement in particular set lofty goals like ending war, hatred, and hunger.

Within these discussions was a new basis for how we would live our lives. Rather than choosing a standard profession or job, our profession or lifetime job would be working to make a better world and fighting for social change. This was not the kind of charity work that people today seem to be following in the tradition of the sixties. (I get a little upset when I see the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday turned into clean-up, sweep-up activities.) It was not about “giving back” or “helping those less fortunate” or doing something for other people. It was about making social change with the understanding that we are all linked together on this earth. It was a “doing with”—not “doing for”—people who were not treated fairly.

I learned to organize on an open-door basis. Both organizations essentially took in whoever came, and they refused to redbait. While involved with both groups, I met people with various political philosophies, religious beliefs, and humanitarian concerns—all able to unite for larger, more encompassing goals. In the early sixties, I believe this was a key ingredient in the ability of both organizations to function and grow.

In both groups, I learned the power of song. In the South, the Movement tapped into the great musical and oratorical traditions as well as the cultural rituals of the southern black community. In Ann Arbor, SDS/VOICE members tapped into traditional labor songs and contemporary folk music. We even had our own local African American folk singer, songwriter, and guitar player Bill McAdoo. Although he had graduated by the time I arrived, we still listened to and memorized his self-titled record of social protest songs about bringing peace to the world and social justice to the South.

Most important of all, both SNCC and SDS were involved in issues on the highest and most profound level. We organized and sang about freedom in the South, and SDS pledged to create a safer and more peaceful world. Today, it seems clear that my own early experiences with racism led me to seek ways to get rid of it and to believe that my generation could make things different for the next generation. That is exactly why I could belong in VOICE, because it was all about working for justice and peace. Being in SDS/VOICE and SNCC, I did learn that I had a hammer, a bell, and a song with which to push for a better world. I am so glad that I had the good fortune to experience the sixties connected to both organizations. I hope when we—both academics and veterans of the Movement—remember this historical period, we will start at its center. It was about young people, oppressed people, and people without any of the trappings of traditional power, like the slaves a hundred years earlier, knowing they could change their life circumstances. At heart it was about peace and justice, justice and peace, peace and justice, justice and peace. Sing with me: