Founded 1960
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Disbanded 1970

Militant antiwar and antiestablishment student organization

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was the most prominent organization of the New Left: the protest movement of the 1960s in which middle-class college students, most of them from urban or suburban areas, opposed the Vietnam War (1954–75), racial discrimination, and the growing economic gulf between rich and poor. Members of SDS rejected what they considered the materialism and conformity that characterized America in the 1950s and promoted “participatory democracy”—a system in which individuals and communities would have a direct voice in shaping the national agenda.

From the drafting of the SDS’s philosophical manifesto, “The Port Huron Statement,” in 1962 until 1965, the group concentrated on improving economic conditions in northern ghettos. In the latter half of the 1960s SDS rose to...