Expressing an urgency foreign to a Kennedy administration unwilling to risk its shaky power base, the introduction concentrates on two “events too troubling to dismiss”: the reality of “human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and “the enclosing fact of the Cold War.” As New Left historian James Miller observes, the students who founded SDS drew their political theory primarily from “the tradition of civic republicanism that links Aristotle to John Dewey.” At the same time, they were acutely aware of how much they owed to the freedom movement, which was “exemplary because it insists there can be a passage out of apathy.”
Like King’s wing of the movement, the Port Huron Statement maintained a cautious hope that the Kennedy administration might be convinced to play a substantial role in addressing “human degradation.” Released several months before Kennedy reluctantly committed federal force to the integration of the University of Mississippi (thereby abandoning all hope for further support from the white South), the statement damns the administration with the very faintest of praise:
It has been said that the Kennedy administration did more in two years than the Eisenhower administration did in eight. Of this there can be no doubt. But it is analogous to comparing whispers to silence when positively stentorian tones are demanded. President Kennedy leaped ahead of the Eisenhower record when he made his second reference to the racial problem.
Calling for an aggressive alternative to Kennedy’s gradualism, the statement emphasizes the need for voter registration, pointing toward the collaboration with black activists that culminated in the Freedom Summer of 1964. Earlier, during SNCC’s 1962 voter registration campaign in McComb, Mississippi, SDS leader Tom Hayden had met Bob Moses, whose political philosophy exerted a major impact on the Port Huron deliberations later that year. Transmitted through mimeographed copies of the Port Huron Statement, the vision of participatory democracy fueled the moral imaginations of the students who founded local chapters of SDS in Boston, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, and Madison.
Many of those same imaginations had been attracted to the movement by the political songs on the 1963 folk revival classic The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Dylan dealt directly with both of SDS’s main concerns: “Masters of War” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” focused on the cold war; “Oxford Town” and “Only a Pawn in Their Game” on racial justice. Several other political songs that elicited a strong response when Dylan performed them in concert were omitted from the album: “The Ballad of Emmett Till” and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” which Columbia Records vetoed for fear of lawsuits from right-wing lunatics.
Thousands of college students streamed south to help register voters in Mississippi. Often romantic in their politics, sometimes naive about the depth of white supremacy, almost all shared a conviction of righteousness. They were responding to King’s plea to let freedom ring and to the folk songs they took with them to the base camps dotting the Mississippi Delta, “looking like a strange mixture of kids going to camp and soldiers off to war,” one of them wrote home.
Many of the students looked to the folk revival for perspectives and information excluded from the nightly news. The framers of the Port Huron Statement belonged to the first generation raised on television; many of them were enthralled by the moral dramas the SCLC constructed for the nationwide audience. In the early days of the movement, TV coverage usually placed viewers in a position closer to the demonstrators than to the authorities resisting their demands. White middle-class viewers in the North gazed into the steely eyes of state troopers snatching American flags out of the hands of schoolchildren in Jackson, Mississippi, shared the tension as the Freedom Riders—white ministers wearing clerical collars and well-dressed young black men—were swept away by the hurricane of violence in the Birmingham bus station. In her autobiography, Joan Baez describes King’s constant awareness that the whole world was watching his every move. Walking beside King during an SCLC-sponsored campaign in Grenada, Mississippi, Baez responded angrily to the crowd harassing the marchers:
They looked particularly pasty, frightened, and unhappy on this day, not at all like a “superior race.” I whispered to King, “Martin, what in the hell are we doing? You want these magnificent spirits to be like them?,” indicating the miserable little band on the opposite curb. “We must be nuts!” King nodded majestically at an overanxious cameraman, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Ahem . . . Not while the cameras are rollin’.”
The SCLC’s most effective use of the media strategy occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, where fire hoses and police dogs deployed against black schoolchildren made a clear moral statement in living rooms and dens throughout white America.
However biased in favor of the movement TV coverage might have seemed to George Wallace or Spiro Agnew—the godfathers of Rush Limbaugh’s “liberal media” hallucination—white students seeking the meanings behind the SCLC’s carefully orchestrated morality plays found television useless. Many of them turned to folk music, to Baez, Dylan, Phil Ochs (“Talking Birmingham Jam,” “Too Many Martyrs (The Ballad of Medgar Evers),” and the devastating satire “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”) and Peter, Paul & Mary (“Very Last Day,” “If I Had a Hammer,” and the hit version of “Blowin’ in the Wind”). The folk singers provided the kind of insight the students sought.
But there were limits to the folk revival’s political vision. Especially after the catharsis of Freedom Summer, the folkies had trouble building bridges to ordinary black people. Despite the presence of Odetta, Josh White, and a few other black folk singers, the folk revival was mostly a white thing. If the goal was brotherhood, this wasn’t a problem that could be ignored. The black presence at folk concerts was pretty much limited to the small group of black Bohemians who had decided to check out what was happening over on the newly accessible white side of town. Amiri Baraka, who had been one of them, observed that most of those Bohemians preferred to listen to the R & B on the jukeboxes in the black taverns where they went to loosen up and relish a less contrived sense of community. Part of the problem with the folk revival was that it failed to attract the black listeners who preferred Motown, Sam Cooke, or even less “historically correct” versions of gospel or the blues.
The folk revival’s sense of the blues reveals the core of the problem. For the vast majority of the folkies, the blues were something strummed on the front porches of picturesque Southern shacks by grizzled old men descended directly from Mark Twain’s Jim. They’d suffered, but they endured, and cool stuff like that. Given the number of humanities majors and aspiring writers in the crowd, the echo of the literary noble savage shouldn’t come as any surprise. What the folkies didn’t want in their blues was electricity, drums, any tinge of the fallen modern world. Which was a real problem since by 1960, a good three quarters of those grizzled old black men were hanging out in Chicago, Detroit, or other points north, trying to get paid while they set out the basics of rock guitar for the more attentive if less earnest rock and rollers. The Folkways record label, probably the definitive source of material for the folk movement, shunned all contact with urban blues, thereby isolating Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker from the American white folks with the greatest theoretical interest in black culture. Anyone getting his or her sense of black life from Folkways liner notes