LATER DEVELOPMENTS

1965–1968

In February of 1965 the United States bombed North Vietnam and introduced ground troops directly in fighting the Viet Cong. Campus chapters of SDS all over the country started to lead small, localized demonstrations against the war. The first teach-in against the war was held in the University of Michigan. Soon hundreds more, all over the country, were held.

Nationally the SDS continued to use the draft as an important issue for students, as the universities had begun to supply student's class rankings, used to determine who was to be drafted. The University of Chicago's administration building was taken over in a three day sit-in in May. Rank protests and sit-ins spread to many other universities.

The Winter and Spring of 1967 saw an increase of the protests at many campuses. Berkeley again became a center of radical upheaval over the university's repressive anti-free-speech actions, and an effective student strike with very wide support occurred. SDSers and self-styled radicals were elected into the student government at a few places. The Anti-War movement really began to take hold among university students. However, harassment by the authorities was also on the rise.

In the Fall of 1967 the school year started with a large demonstration against university involvement in the war in allowing Dow recruiters on campus at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Although peaceful at first, the demonstrations turned to a sit-in that was violently broken up by the Madison police and riot squad. A student strike then closed the university for several days.

1968–1969

In the spring of 1968, National SDS activists led an effort on the campuses called "Ten Days of Resistance" and local chapters cooperated with the Student Mobilization Committee in rallies, marches, sit-ins and teach-ins, which culminated in a one-day strike on April 26. About a million students stayed away from classes that day, the largest ever student strike in the history of the United States.

In the summer of 1969, the ninth SDS national convention was held at the Chicago Coliseum. Many factions of the movement were actually present: The Young Socialist Alliance, Wobblies, Spartacists, Marxists and Maoists of various sorts.

Each of the delegates were given the convention issue of New Left Notes, which contained a manifesto, "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows." The document represented the position of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) wing of SDS, most of which subsequently turned into the Weather Underground Organization.

The RYM and the National Office faction, led by Bernardine Dohrn, voted by about 500 to 100 to expel the Progressive Labor Party, and then walked out of the conference hall with that 500. By the next day there were two SDS organizations, neither of them recognizable to an older SDSer. In the Fall of 1969 many of the SDS chapters also split up or disintegrated.

The Weatherman faction evolved into a small underground organization that first took to street confrontations and then to blowing things up. SDS was fully defunct by 1972.