Uptown, Chicago, Illinois

During Freedom Summer of 1964, while teams of northern college students traveled South to join voter registration campaigns among African Americans, a small group moved to Chicago to help the city's poor people to take control of their communities and to demand better city services. They targeted a neighborhood known as Uptown, a one-mile-square section five miles north of the Loop, the city center. The residents, many only recently transplanted from the poverty of the Appalachian South, lived in crowded tenements or in once-elegant
mansions now subdivided into tiny, run-down apartments. Four thousand people lived on just one street running four blocks, 20 percent of them on welfare. Chicago civic authorities had also selected this neighborhood for improvement. Designating it a Conservation Area under the terms of the Urban Renewal Act, they applied for federal funds in order to upgrade the housing for middle -income families and, in effect, to clear out the current residents. In contrast, the student organizers intended to mobilize the community "so as to demand an end to poverty and the construction of a decent social order." With the assistance of the Packinghouse Workers union, the students formed
Jobs or Income Now (JOIN), opened a storefront office, and invited local residents to work with them to halt the city's plans. They spent hours and hours listening to people, drawing out their ideas and helping them develop scores of other programs. Confronting the bureaucracy of the welfare and unemployment compensation offices stood high on their list. They also campaigned against Mayor Richard Daley's policy of "police omnipresence," the fleet of squad cars and paddy wagons that continually patrolled the neighborhood. To curb police harassment, they demanded the creation of civilian review boards. They also helped to establish new social clubs, a food-buying cooperative, a community theater, and a health clinic. Within a few years, Uptown street kids had formed the Young Patriots organization, put out a community newspaper, Rising Up Angry, and staffed free breakfast programs. Chicago JOIN was one of ten similar projects sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Impatient with the political drift of the nation, most especially the cold war and chronic poverty, twenty-nine students from nine universities had met in June 1960 to form a new kind of campus-based political organization. SDS soon caught the attention of liberal students, encouraging them to make their voices heard as the nation's largest college population to date. By its peak in 1968, SDS had 350 chapters, enlisted between 60,000 and 100,000 members, and won a following of a million or more students committed to a mandate--participatory democracy--that would enable people to control the decisions affecting their lives. SDS began by pulling students into
a campaign to reform the university, especially to disentangle the financial ties between campus-based research programs and the military-industrial complex. A decision to take its commitment to the nation's cities sent small groups of students to live and organize in the poor communities of Boston, Louisville, Cleveland, and Newark as well as Chicago. Ultimately, few of these projects succeeded in mobilizing the poor into political action. Organizers learned quickly they could not combat unemployment by protesting against local government. Nor did their campaigns for better city services, such as garbage collection or recreational facilities, necessarily build movements that lasted beyond the initial protest. Nevertheless, organizers did succeed in bringing many neighborhood residents "out of isolation and into community." By late 1967 SDS prepared to leave JOIN in the hands of the people it had organized, which was its goal from the beginning. Far from discouraged, SDS was just beginning to shape a generation of political activists. In June 1962 in Port Huron, Michigan, its founding members had issued a declaration of principles, drafted mainly by graduate student Tom
Hayden. "We are people . . . bred in at least modern comfort, housed  now in universities," they opened, "looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." The dire effects of poverty and social injustice were not the only things that dismayed them. They pointed to a deeper ailment in the body of American politics. Everyone, including middle-class students like themselves with few material wants, suffered from a sense of "loneliness, estrangement, and alienation." The Port Huron Statement thus defined SDS as a new kind of political movement that would bring people "out of isolation and into community." Through participatory democracy, not just the poor but all Americans could overcome their feelings of "powerlessness [and hence] resignation Before the enormity of events." As one organizer explained, programs like JOIN were attempts to create a poor people's movement as well as a means for
students themselves to live an "authentic life" outside the constraints of
middle-class society. Initially, even Lyndon Baines Johnson promoted the ideal of civic participation. The Great Society, as the president called his domestic program, promised more than the abolition of poverty and racial inequality. In May 1964 at the University of Michigan the president described his goal as a society "where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents," where "the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community."
By 1967 the Vietnam War had upset the domestic agendas of both SDS and the Johnson administration. If SDS had once believed they could work with liberal Democrats to reduce poverty in the United States, they now interpreted social injustice at home as the inevitable consequence of dangerous and destructive foreign policies pursued by liberals and conservatives alike. SDS threw its energies into the movement against the war in Vietnam. President Johnson, meanwhile, pursued a foreign policy that would swallow up the funding for his own plans for a war on poverty and precipitate a very different war at home, Americans against Americans. As hawks and doves lined up on opposite sides, the Vietnam War created a huge and enduring rift. SDS member Richard Flacks had warned that the nation had to "choose between devoting its resources and energies to maintaining military superiority and international hegemony or re-channeling those resources and energies to meeting the desperate needs of its people." Ultimately, even President Johnson himself understood that the "bitch of a war" in Asia ruined "the woman I really loved--the Great Society." The dream of community did not vanish, but consensus appeared increasingly remote as the United States fought--and eventually lost--the longest war in its history.