d with 1200 a decade later.
University students, many of whom were to play a seminal role in the antiwar movement, were known in the 1950s as the 'silent generation' because of their lack of involvement in causes. According to Chafe, their numbers had grown from 15 percent of the college population in 1940 to 44 percent (six million) in 1965, more than 75 percent of whom came from families with higher than median incomes . A number of these baby boomers had participated in the civil rights struggles in the South where, according to Gitlin, they "first acquired a taste for direct action and a distaste for the euphemisms of power."
Their restless spirit had been displayed in the campus uproars at Berkeley known as the Free Speech Movement during the winter of 1964-1965. Chafe said, "precisely at that moment, the military escalation in Vietnam occurred, providing the issue that would fuel student activism for the next half dozen years."
A mixture of older and newer student radical and liberal groups led the protests against the Viet
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