What Is The Port Huron Statement

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The Port Huron Statement
The Port Huron statement was given by a group of students that were a part of the Students for a Democratic Society and was primarily written by Tom Hayden. Tom Hayden was a student at University of Michigan then he went to Mississippi in 1961 to report on SNCC’s voter registration project. The group of students that helped in the writing of the Statement were from colleges such as Harvard, Michigan, University of Texas, etc. This wide ranging group of people provided some unique insight. This made the statement use ideas from religious idealism, Marxism, and liberalism. This statement was a manifesto that was completed in June of 1962. The statement talks about how when they were kids they felt like America was one of the safest countries in the world and we had nothing to worry about because we were the strongest country. They say that as they grew the comfort of being protected at all times was getting weaker and there are multiple things that make us feel less and less safe as we learn new things and different countries progress to where the United States was. They talk about the status of man in the statement and how it should be changed because it was unacceptable the way that it was and it was stripping man of his human rights.
When the writers of the Port Huron statement were children they said that the United States was the wealthiest and most powerful country that was on the planet. We were the only one with a nuclear bomb so all of the other countries were scared of us as a country at this time. They felt pretty much invincible at this time and they thought no one was even close to getting a nuclear bomb so we were ahead of everyone else. But, the writers of the Port Huron statement said that...

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...at changed America in a big way. The security that people lost made people talk out against the nuclear bombs and made people think in different ways because they had the constant thought in their gut that thy could die at any time and this was very unsettling. They students and Tom Hayden also talked about race issues and how we think of other human beings as being lesser even though they are not. The Port Huron statement made everything more modern in the sense that they were thinking ahead of their time because everyone at this time was pretty much racist and no one knew any other reality so they did not even think to treat them as equal humans. So this statement was very important in that I taught people how to think and gave them suggestions of how we can become better and it also talked about the nuclear threats that they faced and how bad it could have been.

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