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CRAIG WERNER is a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he teaches courses on Black Music and American Cultural History. He is the recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Is Gonna Come
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Media-fed memory has reduced SDS to a cluster of chaotic images: Tom Hayden endorsing guerrilla warfare in the streets of Newark; the Weathermen rampaging through the Days of Rage; students seizing the administration building at Columbia University, angry hecklers drowning out Ted Kennedy at the University of Wisconsin; the whole world watching blood flow in the streets of Chicago outside the 1968 Democratic Convention. Even when distorted by revisionism and nostalgia, those images nonetheless reflect the passion, confusion, and profoundly misguided ideological romance of the late sixties. Sometimes it seemed that no one, not even the people who wrote it, remembered the founding document of SDS, the Port Huron Statement.
The Port Huron Statement bears disquieting signs of its academic origin: turgid prose and telltale indications of the ideological hairsplitting that would tear the New Left apart. But its vision of a living political community dedicated to economic accountability, world peace, and racial justice remains vital in a time when a “liberarl” president has overseen the dismantling of the welfare state and widened the yawning chasm between rich and poor. Seen by its framers as an attempt to make America live up to its own betrayed ideals, the statement celebrates the concept of participatory democracy. It envisions politics as a way of “Bringing people out of isolation and into community,” helping them find “meaning in personal life.” Addressing a political context in which Southern “Dixiecrats” and conservative Republicans controlled Washington, the statement endorses what in retrospect seems a fairly conventional, if unusually hopeful, liberal agenda. Although its calls for nuclear disarmament and corporate reform were never seriously considered, large parts of the statement read like a rough draft of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
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