Appeals, Manifestos, and Statements by Bernardine Dohrn
This article is part of The Port Huron Statement at 50, a forum on the document that sparked a generation of activism. From the Boston Review
As the 1960s dawned, appeals, manifestos, and statements poured from the pens and typewriters of a new generation burning with the need to trumpet a new morning. These writings have in common a wild impatience, a brassiness required to speak out and act up, a fierce vision of human dignity, the daring to address the nation and world with the language of human rights, and the willingness to tear away blindfolds. The Port Huron Statement was neither the first nor the last such declaration, but echoing from and through David Walker’sAppeal, Walt Whitman and Seneca Falls, Ginsberg and Fannie Lou Hamer, it became, in many respects, a keystone of this pamphleteering era.
When four black, adolescent college students sat down at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960, their defiance ignited similar actions across the South. Their confrontational acts, flouting immoral laws through non-violent direct action, served as a catalyst for similar group rebelliousness in city after city, and spread campus to campus. Just five weeks later, students at Atlanta’s six historically Black