Young Socialist League and Young Socialist Club of Wayne County collection

The Young Socialist League (YSL) was established in February 1954 when the Socialist Youth League (SYL) merged with a faction of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) in an effort to regroup socialist youth in the United States. The Socialist Youth League was the youth chapter of the Workers Party, which was led by Max Shachtman and changed its name to the Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1950. The Young People's Socialist League was founded in 1907 and was the youth chapter of the Socialist Party of America, until the Socialist Party forbade the YPSL from working with the SYL. In 1957, the National Executive Committee of the YSL proposed joining the Socialist Party, which had merged with the Social Democratic Federation to become the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation (SP-SDF). This led to the development of a left-wing caucus within the YSL that was opposed to the merger, due to the SP-SDF's support of labor bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. The left-wing caucus was then forced out of the YSL due to their dissenting opinion. In 1958, the SP-SDF recreated the YPSL, and the YSL merged with the YPSL in August 1958.

The Young Socialist Club of Wayne County was established in August 1957. It was the only socialist youth group in the Detroit, Michigan area at the time, and was formed in an attempt to group all left-leaning youth tendencies around the Young Socialist magazine, the magazine of the Young Socialist Alliance, the youth arm of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The Club held public forms and business meetings in a SWP hall and sold the Young Socialist magazine at Wayne State University, which defined the Club as Trotskyist. The Club attracted members from Detroit who had become interested in socialism after the city experienced a period of unemployment.