Introduction Movements Eras Organizations Index Contributions
About Organizations
Black Panther Party Black Liberation Army American Indian Movement FALN Weather Underground Earth Liberation Front Animal Liberation Front MOVE Republic of New Afrika Symbionese Liberation Army Los Macheteros United Freedom Front May 19th Communist Organization Young Lords George Jackson Brigade Students for a Democratic Society Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Industrial Workers of the World Communist Party USA Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Brown Berets Socialist Workers Party African People's Socialist Party Nation of Islam
About Students for a Democratic Society
Port Huron & the Founding of SDS (1960–1962) The April 1965 March & the Turn Against the War Draft Resistance, Dow & the Oakland Seven (1966–1969) The Columbia Occupation (1968) Chicago 1968, the Conspiracy Trial & the 1969 Split
THE APRIL 1965 MARCH & THE TURN AGAINST THE WAR

When Lyndon Johnson began sustained bombing of North Vietnam in early 1965, SDS called the first national demonstration against the war — some 25,000 people at the Washington Monument on April 17, 1965, far beyond anyone's expectations — and its president Paul Potter asked the question that defined the era: "What kind of system is it" that produces such a war?

The march transformed a small campus organization into the center of the antiwar movement; chapters multiplied from dozens to hundreds. It also placed SDS under the surveillance machinery — FBI COINTELPRO–New Left operations, military intelligence, and campus red squads — whose informers and disruption programs would shadow every chapter for the rest of the decade.