The New Left and the Black Movement, 1965–1968
The New Left and the Black Movement, 1965–1968
DOI:10.14325/mississippi/9781934110171.003.0002
This chapter traces the Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) relationship to the black struggle through the most tumultuous years of the black movement’s existence: Black Power’s proclamation, the great urban rebellions of 1967, the Black Panther Party’s rise to prominence, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. More than at any other time in SDS’s brief life, these were the years that SDS’s young white activists were challenged to understand their own racialization and, in bits and pieces, slowly began to see the “constructedness” of their own identities.
Keywords: Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, black movement, Black Power, urban rebellion, Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King Jr