SDS grew out of the student department of the old socialist League for Industrial Democracy, reorganizing in 1960 and finding its voice at a June 1962 convention in Port Huron, Michigan. The Port Huron Statement, drafted by Tom Hayden, announced a generation "bred in at least modest comfort, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit," and proposed participatory democracy as the answer to the Bomb, racism, and the managed society.
Early SDS worked inside the civil-rights movement — members went south with SNCC and into northern slums with the ERAP community-organizing projects — and its first arrests came on picket lines in Chester, Newark, and the San Francisco Bay Area, an apprenticeship in the jailhouse politics that the war would soon generalize.