Port Huron Project 3: We Must Name the System July 26, 2007

Reenactment of a speech originally given by SDS President Paul Potter at the March on Washington in April 1965. In the speech, Potter said, “The President mocks freedom if he insists that the war in Vietnam is a defense of American freedom. Perhaps the only freedom that this war protects is the freedom of the warhawks in the Pentagon and the State Department to experiment with counter-insurgency and guerrilla warfare.”

This is the third in a series of re-enactments of protest speeches from the New Left movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Each performance in the project is staged at the site of the original speech and is delivered by an actor to an audience of invited guests and passers-by. The project is named after the Port Huron Statement, the visionary manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical student group formed in 1962.

Official Website: http://www.porthuronproject.net