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Three hundred and fifty marchers gathered to protest, marching westward down the streets of Philadelphia. From City Hall to 37th and Walnut streets, activists condemned the Institute for Cooperative Research, accused of conducting research for the U.S. war in Vietnam. The protestors, students and professors alike hailed from across the Northeast and represented Penn, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Temple.

It was Oct. 16, 1965.

Joel Aber, the leader of Penn’s newly formed Students for a Democratic Society, labeled the building a “genocide factory,” “designed to implement the murderous plans the Establishment wishes to employ,” according to a Daily Pennsylvanian article at the time. Counter-protesters taunted the activists as they traversed the streets, screaming “Commies,” “Draft-dodgers” and “Traitors.”

The night before, folk singers and speakers stood downtown above a crowd of over 1,000. “I admit being a traitor,” cried a singer. “I am a traitor to imperialism, neo-colonialism, murder [and] torture.” Hours earlier, Penn administrators had worried about Penn’s under-wraps research and the threat of civil disobedience.

Letters between campus officials revealed concerns that student activities could include throwing themselves on the stairs of “the University’s hidden, top-secret bacteriological warfare unit.”

On Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016, Students for a Democratic Society restarted at Penn. Advertisements on Facebook asked, “Do you want to build student power? Do you want to fight systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, economic exploitation, and imperialism?” harkening back to the first meeting on Oct. 13th, 1965.

Determining a mission

Back in 1965 at 8 p.m., few more than 20 students gathered on the second floor of the Christian Association. One boy who wore only khaki was “angry-looking,” according to a Daily Pennsylvanian article documenting the meeting, sitting deep in thought, while another girl sat alone, too shy to speak to her peers. Students collected in small groups, chatting informally.

But once the meeting commenced, “the individuals ceased being entities unto themselves and began an attempt to fuse their many different ideas and goals into common ones,” Daily Pennsylvanian writer and 1969 College graduate Daniel Chaykin reported at the time. The budding activists discussed the pragmatics of protest. How could they communicate their message to the general student body? What national protests should students involve themselves with? Were any attendees interested in volunteering? What was Penn SDS’s ideology?

One student suggested using evaporated milk to ensure that signs couldn’t be removed. The boy in khaki complained that educating “bourgeois” Penn students wasn’t an important priority. Another mentioned protesting a war helicopter company.

Three years earlier, the national SDS movement had begun in Port Huron, Mich., where liberal and socialist college students came together to redefine the Left. By 1965, the organization had collected over 25,000 protesters.

Next Monday, the newest Penn SDS will have its third meeting in Houston Hall.

Lucas Lipatti (left), Penn junior and president of SDS, and Christian Urrutia (right), Penn junior and SDS member, are two of the many people revitalizing the Penn SDS group.

Lucas Lipatti, Penn SDS’s new president, says the group is only in its “embryonic stage,” and is still maneuvering what role it wants to play on Penn’s campus.

Lipatti said that SDS could see itself working with Penn Socialists, SOUL, Students for Justice in Palestine and the Progressive Jewish Alliance in the future. Police brutality, gentrification, military research and creating a more visible anti-war movement in the city are potential issues SDS hopes to address.

The organization will remain committed to its original values, but it plans to increase focus on transgender issues.

“The main thing is to learn from the past and use the techniques that we can, but not to try to emulate it.” Lipatti said. “I am interested in what Penn SDS did in the ‘60s, but it’s a new generation now.”

Fear of communists

Students in 1965 worried that the communist bend to the group would compromise more moderate anti-war efforts, while the national SDS branch was under federal investigation.

Some at Penn did not support the movement, condemning peace groups that advocated for everything from “the welfare state to socialism to communism.” In April 1965, 1968 College graduate Raymond Wilson and 1968 College and Wharton graduate Nancy Woldorf argued in The Daily Pennsylvanian that peace groups like SDS were hypocritical for “abhor[ring] violence against armed opponents,” while “advocat[ing] force against legally disarmed victims.”

Penn faculty had mixed reactions. A chemistry professor said the accusations and suppression of free speech would make “America a nation of zombies,” while a political science professor contended that the group had perhaps stirred up “controversy out of proportion to their small numbers.”

Penn President Gaylord Harnwell said that the ICR had no direct relationship with the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, SDS began protesting lecturers delivered by professors about classified research at elite universities. By March 1966, Penn SDS secured representation in a student government debate on Vietnam War efforts.

Strengthening and solidifying

While Penn SDS continued to protest the war, the group also expanded its focus, further implicating University policies. SDS planned to restructure Penn’s approach to education, inviting over 3,500 faculty members to participate in small seminars as a criticism of large lectures.

“In a community of scholars, there should be some mechanism by which students and faculty can come together on equal terms to study those things pertinent to the current society,” an organizer said to the Daily Pennsylvanian at the time. “We want an alternative to the whole system that treats students as raw material to be processed as components for the industrial society.”

By February 1966, the effort registered 500 students.

In the decade of student protest, SDS became a prominent force on campus. In December 1968, the group gathered on College Green with seven policy goals for Harnwell. Students’ demands included full transparency regarding the purpose of the University City Science Center, a more democratic process for making University decisions, financial support for West Philadelphia and affordable housing. Harnwell wrote an individual response to each demand.

Meanwhile, the DP also covered SDS students nationally, working in states from Arizona to North Carolina, as well as FBI investigations into the group at Yale and Wesleyan. In 1977, the DP reported that the FBI had tried to influence the paper’s coverage of the Penn SDS and maintained at least four informants on campus. The SDS in partnership with other groups led a petition to deny submitting information to the FBI.

By the 1970s, Penn SDS had faded into the past, only returning in 2008 to protest U.S. military engagements overseas and support student power.

But in 1965, it was still unclear what the SDS was going to be. For Chaykin and his readers, Students for a Democratic Society was just budding, simply “composed of different types of individuals with differing ideas and views, none of whom seemed quite sure of what the new group’s purpose was going to be.”