Liberty International (organization)
The Society for Individual Liberty (SIL) was founded in 1969 by Don Ernsberger and Dave Walter, who became its directors, after libertarian activists were expelled or later defected from Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) during and after their 1969 convention in St. Louis, Missouri.During the struggle and aftermath, the Anarcho-Libertarian Alliance, YAF Libertarian Caucus and two anarchist chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) worked together, and eventually organized into a loosely knit association that became known as SIL.[10] The factional infighting came to a climax when a libertarian YAF member held up his draft card and lit it on fire on the convention floor, causing a 30 minutes fracas of punching, shoving and hostility,[11] which lead to membership purges of many libertarian leaders, including Karl Hess, hitting the California delegation especially hard, which included Dana Rohrabacher, Shawn Steel, Ron Kimberling, Rod Manis, Pat Dowd, and John Schureman, while revoking the active status of twenty-six YAF chapters.[15][16] Although SIL encompassed a diversity of minarchists and anarchist libertarians, the organization adopted a black flag within a dollar sign to become its official symbol.[23] They sponsored educational conferences, developed a large series of one-page issue papers, created a Libertarian Speakers Bureau, published a monthly newsletter Society for Individual Liberty News and a monthly magazine The Individualist, edited by Roy Childs, worked to charter campus chapters at major universities, and published books, including A Liberty Primer by W. Alan Burris in 1979.