Southern Student Organizing Committee

The civil rights movement of the 1960s often generated intense opposition by many southern white students. But a small number of white, southern students become [Page 1326]involved in the efforts to overcome the legacy of Jim Crow. They began to join the sit-ins and picket lines led by African American students. The Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) gave organizational voice to that growing number of students on mainly white, southern campuses, and, in doing so, according to Rev. Will Campbell, helped to transform those campuses.

Formed in April 1964 by 45 student delegates from some 15 predominantly white, southern campuses, SSOC grew to more than 500 members in close to 50 chapters before its demise in June 1969. Maintaining close relationships to organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), SSOC was variously described as the “white students' SNCC” or the “Southern New Left,” according to Gregg Michel, the only historian to write a book on the group. On many campuses, SSOC chapters were the only radical or progressive organization, and they took on a range of issues from academic freedom to in loco parentis regulations. They often spearheaded efforts to desegregate their campuses and the surrounding towns. They also sought to improve the wages and working conditions of non-academic campus employees.

SSOC became heavily involved in civil rights organizing efforts, from Mississippi, in the “white folks project” of the 1964 Freedom Summer, to the integrated Virginia Students Civil Rights Committee project in Southside, Virginia. SSOC later became one of the leading southern organizations in efforts to end the war in Vietnam, sponsoring “peace tours,” along with the Southern Conference Education Fund, in six southern states. Many of those campus speaking engagements were compelled to break barriers against free speech on campuses in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia. SSOC members also helped organize the Vietnam Summer educational efforts across the South during the summer of 1967.

SSOC staff and members assisted labor organizing drives among textile workers, migrant workers, tobacco workers, and campus employees throughout the South. During one textile workers organizing drive in North Carolina, more than 300 college students, sons and daughters of both mill owners and mill workers, demonstrated their support for the union efforts. SSOC also worked with organized labor in organizing a Southwide grape boycott in support of the United Farm Workers' efforts. It garnered student support for mine workers and for the democracy movement within the United Mine Workers union.

SSOC was also involved in efforts to end the death penalty, challenge inhumane prison conditions, and defend political organizers facing repression through the courts. A number of women in SSOC were involved in the early stages of the women's liberation movement in the South and continued that involvement after SSOC's dissolution.

The Southern Student Organizing Committee was disbanded by about 100 people, including members of warring SDS factions, who attended an open conference to discuss the fate of SSOC and the “southern movement” in June 1969 at Mt. Beulah, Mississippi. SSOC fell to the sharpening sectarianism on the New Left, which would also lead to the destruction of SDS 6 months later. Yet, in its 5-year history, it left its mark on a changing South and broke significantly and visibly with the notion of a “solid South” of whites desperate to defend the old patterns of racism.

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