By Scott Cendrowski
The State News
In the spring of 1970, former President Richard Nixon had escalated the war in Vietnam with a bombing campaign in Cambodia, four students were slain by National Guardsmen at Kent State University - and at MSU, striking students were pleading their case against the war and against authorities for weeks.
The anti-war sentiment energized thousands of MSU students against involvement in Vietnam during the late 1960s. Already, the civil rights movement had mobilized black people throughout the country, and now students were taking a stand against the inequities in American policy.
On campus, MSU Interim President Walter Adams led thousands in a peace march from the Auditorium to the Capitol, professors gave out blanket grades to save their students from the draft and student organizations corralled the masses to protest the war.
Students found a voice with campus protests and Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, an anti-war and pro-social-change student organization with roots in Port Huron.
Meanwhile, undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agents infiltrated SDS, trying to undermine its student leaders through anonymous letters and tactics bordering on violation of the First Amendment. An FBI file obtained by The State News details its infiltration of SDS and its monitoring of The State News during the late 1960s and early '70s. The infiltration turned into a badly kept secret, as most former SDS members knew the FBI and other governmental agencies were following their actions.
Protests of the times changed large, public-university campuses from complacent institutions to epicenters for social change with thousands of youths leading the charge. In 1965, 56 demonstrators were arrested at a sit-in protesting the city of East Lansing not adopting an open occupancy law for fair housing.
As much of a national issue as the Vietnam War was, former students, professors and SDS members from MSU say their efforts in bringing thousands of students to war protests aided in ending the war by helping diminish public support for what almost all of them deemed an "unlawful enterprise."
Part One
A social revolution
The beginning of Students for a Democratic Society was rooted in the 1962 Port Huron Statement, a draft of ideals and social values declaring the need for a sweeping social movement in the United States. It was created in Port Huron, and shortly after, as other social movements progressed, it expanded to large public universities nationwide.
After the group's expansion to campuses from Columbia University to the University of California, Berkeley, the FBI became more interested in the activities of the college organization.
In an FBI file obtained by The State News titled, "COINTELPRO-NEW LEFT-DETROIT," are countless documents, showing the FBI infiltrated SDS with undercover agents, sent anonymous letters to the student organization in attempts to create internal turmoil and was very active throughout MSU's campus, gathering intelligence on left-wing political activities.
Other government agencies worked undercover apart from the FBI, such as the Michigan State Police. The MSU Library's Special Collections has several "red files" about left-leaning MSU students and professors, some going back to the 1950s.
In a document dated Aug. 20, 1969, the FBI sent a letter signed, "An Angry Black Brother" to SDS leaders, including lines such as, "Since when do us blacks have to accept the dictates of the lillywhite SDS.
