From The Oregonian:
Campus radical group rises again
Thousands of small white and red flags symbolizing Iraq war deaths spread like flowers in front of Reed College and flutter in the breeze at Lewis & Clark College.
The flags -- each representing Iraqi and U.S. deaths -- mark the work of a fledgling student activist group that has sprung up at both campuses: Students for a Democratic Society.
Yes, SDS is back.
The radical student group that shook college campuses during the height of the Vietnam War in the 1960s is budding quietly on campuses across the nation. For baby boomers, SDS evokes images of sit-ins, rallies, marches, clashes with police, students taking over buildings. Or in the case of the Weathermen, an SDS spinoff, blowing up buildings.
But for college students today, SDS offers a model for organizing political action for a new generation in a new century, says Matt Wasserman, 21, a senior SDS member at Reed.
"Going to a march once a year is not necessarily going to make any difference," he says. "I want SDS to be part of stopping this war."
Even if it means confronting police.
At least 14 Lewis & Clark students, including four SDS members, joined those from Olympia and Tacoma last weekend at the Port of Portland to protest the shipment of Stryker vehicles to Iraq.
A video posted on the Northwest SDS Web site and YouTube shows Tacoma police using tear gas against protesters in scenes reminiscent of the 1960s. Danielle Hurley, 19, a freshman and SDS member at Lewis & Clark, says she was hit in the arm and three places in the back by rubber bullets and tear gas.
Both the Reed and Lewis & Clark SDS are recruiting students to join an anti-war rally Sunday in the South Park Blocks of downtown Portland.
So far, only Reed and Lewis & Clark have organized SDS chapters in Oregon. In Washington, chapters meet at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, and Western Washington University in Bellingham.
The five chapters are small, collectively drawing at least 100 active members. More than 60 showed up for a regional SDS meeting at Reed and Lewis & Clark in November.
But they draw more students to hear speakers and other events. At Reed, hundreds of students helped plant the 120,000 white flags the represent Iraqi deaths and another 3,000 red ones symbolizing U.S. soldiers killed in the war.
The new SDS chapters, unlike the old, have no elected leaders. They include a diverse group of left-wingers, including Marxists and anarchists, says Mary Sackley, 21, an SDS member and a junior at Lewis & Clark.
"I like the idea of seeing SDS as a real way for students to have a collective voice politically across the nation," says Sackley, in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., where she was attending a National Conference on Organized Resistance.
College Republican groups also have expanded on Oregon college campuses, from six chapters to 23 in the past year, including one at Lewis & Clark, says John Swanson, chairman of the Oregon Federation of College Republicans.
SDS doesn't have much impact on the larger world, says David Merryman, 19, a freshman at Lewis & Clark and chairman of the College Republican chapter there.
"I don't like their tactics, and I don't think encouraging students to interfere with troop deployments at the Port of Tacoma is good for anyone," says Merryman, whose Republican group, also formed last September, draws about 24 students.
The new SDS members say they are committed to non-violence but also to action, even if it requires civil disobedience.
Within weeks of opening their chapter last fall, four Lewis & Clark SDS members were arrested in an anti-war demonstration after refusing to leave the office of Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore.
"We needed to take a stand," says Sackley, one of the students arrested.
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The new SDS has a broader agenda beyond Iraq war that includes protesting "American imperialism" and other root causes of war, human rights violations and environmental degradation.
Reed SDS students are trying to get Coca-Cola machines off campus, alleging the company mistreats workers in Colombia and exploits fragile water systems in India.
SDS member Leah Savitsky, 18, a Reed freshman, says she wants to help build a national student movement.
"I feel obligated in my morality and my position in society, because I'm a citizen in this world, to take some action," she says.
Her mother, Terri Cohn knows about SDS. Cohn grew up in San Francisco and attended the University of California at Berkeley, a center of student dissent, during the early 1970s. She respects her daughter's decision to join SDS but worries about her safety.
"We live in a time when people should stand up and make their feelings known," says Cohn.
The original SDS, founded in 1962, called for the creation of a "new left in America." Seven years later, a radical splinter group called the Weatherman took over the SDS national office and shut it down.
The old SDS was active on many Oregon college campuses, often supporting other causes such as the Black Student Union's occupation of Eliot Hall at Reed College, recalls Maurice Isserman, a Reed SDS member during the late 1960s and now a history professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.
Portland swarmed with activists and "absorbed us," says Isserman, co-author of the book "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s."
Several former SDS leaders, now in their 50s and 60s, revived the new SDS last spring and staged an official founding convention in Chicago in August. Isserman says he's encouraged that today's college students, not the elders, will reinvent SDS for the 21st century.
"I found them refreshingly non-doctrinaire, non-nostalgic and very thoughtful about what they are doing," he says. "They are attracted to the 1960s as a model of activism, but they don't think they are living in the 1960s."
Bill Graves: 503-221-8549; billgraves@news.oregonian.com
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