A History of the Student Freedom Riders of the South

After the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 and the freedom rides in 1961, SNCC had established itself as the most prominent and effective student activist group in the south. SDS did not spring up out of nowhere in response to the civil rights movement like SNCC did but was rooted in a leftist tradition going back to the labor wars of the late 19th and early 20th century. The campus group eventually birthed an adult organization called the League for Industrial Democracy,. described by Palmer Berman as something like a think tank for the Socialist Party. In its modest way it occupied the exact spot in American life where European style social reform or social democracy, American style liberalism and the trade unions came