Rebels with a Cause

This is a wonderful addition to the number of excellent documentary films that enable young people today to learn what the world-changing movements of the sixties were all about. Interviews with committed activists, all of whom are working in some form of educational, political, union, or social work activities today, will move those who do remember as well as those who wonder about the connections among the civil rights, antiwar, and SDS movements. Like Freedom on My Mind, Berkeley in the Sixties, Eyes on the Prize, this film shows the amazing efforts some young people made to try to get government to live up live up to its ideals, to make the U.S. a participatory democracy, not just one in name only.

Helen Garvy has put together a moving, revealing history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest of the protest organizations of the mid 1960's, as told by many of the people who were active in SDS at that time. The film offers an insightful look at the motivations, perspectives, and politics of those times. One of its significant messages is that, contrary to media revisions of the past twenty years or so, the protest movements of the 1960's and 1970's were in fact quite effective in bringing about significant social change in the U.S. A straightforward, inspiring look at the empowerment that comes from actually doing something to change the