Deftly charting the sweeping socio- political changes of the Sixties that began with the Civil Rights movement and culminated with angry protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam, REBELS WITH A CAUSE is told through the eyes of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Begun in 1960 with a handful of members and high ideals, SDS became a nationally powerful antiwar organization with over 100,000 members. But in 1970 the group began to disintegrate amidst internal conflict and government counterintelligence crackdowns.
In the aftermath, some went militant as the ill-fated Weather Underground; others channeled their activism through prominent careers as journalists, politicians and professors. Mixing eloquent contemporary testimony from SDS members such as writer/professor Todd Gitlin, Senator Tom Hayden and NPR commentator Juan Gonzalez with scintillating archival footage from the front lines of the movement, Helen Garvy’s REBELS WITH A CAUSE chronicles the values, motivations and actions of a generation that lost its innocence-and helped change America.