PERSONAL STATEMENT: FIFTY YEARS LATER, STILL MAKING A STATEMENT
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2012 AT 4:16PM
(Photo: The Michigan Daily)This article appeared at The Michigan Daily on October 25, 2012.
Few Ann Arbor residents know that The Statement, the Daily’s weekly news magazine, is named in memory of the Port Huron Statement, drafted by myself as the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society 50 years ago.
This week, the University will host a conference to explore the legacy of what many Ann Arbor students birthed half a century ago.
The vision of the Port Huron Statement lives on. The first principle of last year’s Occupy Wall Street movement was a call for participatory democracy, the guiding concept of the Port Huron Statement.
From SDS to Occupy, students have led movements demanding a voice. We believed in not just an electoral democracy, but also in direct participation of students in their remote-controlled universities, of employees in workplace decisions, of consumers in the marketplace, of