Southern Student Organizing Committee
The Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) was a student activist group in the southern United States during the 1960s, which focused on many political and social issues, including African-American civil rights, opposition to the Vietnam War, worker's rights, and feminism. It was intended in part to be SDS for Southerners and SNCC for white students; at a time when it was dangerous for SDS to attempt to organize in the Deep South, and when SNCC was starting to discuss expelling white volunteers. It was felt that students at the traditionally white and black colleges in the South could be more effectively organized separately than in an integrated student civil rights organization; however this was controversial and initially opposed by advisors like Anne Braden. Sue Thrasher and Archie Allen of the Christian Action Fellowship were among the founders of the group, with the support of Bob Moses and others.[1] At its inception the group had close ties to controversial Louisville, Kentucky radicals Carl and Anne Braden and their organization, the Southern Conference Education Fund;[2] but later a deliberate effort was made to put some distance between the SSOC and the Bradens to avoid the appearance that the SSOC was a Communist front.
After its founding SSOC came to be formally tied to the SDS as a fraternal organization with a regional mandate in the South, and joint SDS-SSOC chapters existed at some schools like the University of North Carolina. A monthly organ, The New South Student, was published on a regular basis. In 1967 SSOC organizers led by Gene Guerrero and Lynn Wells worked with TWUA on a unionization drive in North Carolina textile mills, involving more than 300 students in the campaign. In 1968 Gene Guerrero and Howard Romaine were among the SSOC activists involved in founding Atlanta's widely circulated underground newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird.
SSOC considered itself a distinctly Southern organization and sometimes embraced traditional Confederate symbols and language. In 1968 SSOC staged a series of antiwar protests called "Southern Days of Secession," in which they urged Southerners to "secede" from the Vietnam War.[3]
For some Southern Universities, even though SSOC had a presence, the numbers were so small in comparison to the size of the student bodies that it could not gain traction as anything but protest theatre. For example, SSOC organizers came to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, connected with a few individuals and left buttons and flyers with them and then departed. Of 26,000 students, only about ten were recruited.
Early in 1969 these individuals gathered in a highly resonant hallway and staged an "organizational meeting". On audiotape it sounded like hundreds were attending and a motion was made to follow SDS's example at Columbia University and take over the campus Administration building the next day.
The tape was "leaked" to the Administration of U.T. and to the surprise of the participants the next morning the campus was flooded with Police, the windows of the Admin. building were shuttered with wooden boards and a truck was backed up to the doorway blocking entry while keeping the Administration locked inside. One of the members volunteered to brandish a toy water-pistol machine gun and parade back and forth in front of the building. Everyone else stayed out of sight. The individual was arrested and subsequently released. Nothing more happened. [4]
Over time radicals in SDS increasingly saw SSOC as too liberal and too timid. SSOC finally dissolved itself in 1969 as the result of an internal struggle with members of Progressive Labor, a Maoist sect, after members of PL had successfully passed a resolution at an SDS convention condemning SSOC's "anachronistic" regionalism and breaking the ties between the organizations.[5][6]
After the breakup of SSOC two former members, Howard Romaine and Sue Thrasher, were instrumental in forming the Institute for Southern Studies with Julian Bond.
Raymond Luc Levasseur, later the leader of the United Freedom Front, worked with the SSOC.[7]
See also
References
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- ↑ Ernst, John and Baldwin, Yvonne. "The not so silent minority: Louisville's antiwar movement, 1966-1975" Journal of Southern History (February 2007). Retrieved April 24, 2010.
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- ↑ Personal recollection of Russ Reina
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- ↑ "The Kudzu: Birth and Death in Underground Mississippi" by David Doggett, in Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press ed. by Ken Wachsberger (Tempe, AZ: Mica's Press, 1993), p. 213-232. Doggett, who was at one point a candidate for president of SSOC, states that the conflict inside SSOC was a power struggle between a clique of SSOC headquarters staffers who were secretly Communist Party members, and insurgents from the Progressive Labor Party who had gotten control of some of the local branches.
- ↑ "Raymond Luc Levasseur" Imprisoned Intellectuals. Retrieved Sept. 3, 2010.
Further reading
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