Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary The Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) was a Trotskyist youth group of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the United States of America.
[4][5] The initial YSA central leadership was comprised two rival groups: Wohlforth, Robertson, and Mage who had come over from the YSL, and SWP majority supporters represented by Nora Roberts, Bert Deck, and others.
In late 1961 at the second YSA convention, held in Chicago, the SWP central leadership arranged the removal of Wohlforth and Robertson from the YSA on age grounds and replaced the initial majority group with Barry Sheppard and Peter Camejo from Boston, Sheppard as national chairman and Camejo as national secretary.
[7] An early activity of the YSA was a national campaign in defense of three of its members who were students at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Tom Morgan, Ralph Levitt, and Jim Bingham, who were indicted in 1963 by local prosecutor Thomas Hoadley under a little used anticommunist statute.
He in turn recruited a number of fellow students, including several who went on to become prominent in the Socialist Workers Party leadership of the next two decades.