Port Huron Statement

The Port Huron Statement is the manifesto of the American student activist movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), written primarily by Tom Hayden, then the Field Secretary of SDS, and completed on June 15, 1962 at an SDS convention at what is now a state park in Lakeport, Mich., a community north of Port Huron.

The Port Huron Statement challenged what it viewed as most Americans' complacency with the status quo, though it blamed much of such complacency upon the efforts of an entrenched power elite to maintain its status,

"The apathy here is, first subjective — the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events. But subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation — the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision making. . . . The American political system is not the democratic model of which its glorifiers speak. In actuality it frustrates democracy by confusing the individual citizen, paralyzing policy discussion, and consolidating the irresponsible power of military and business interests."^[11]

Although some critics have accused The Port Huron Statement of espousing Marxist beliefs,^[12] the statement itself strongly condemned communism.