Southern Student Organizing Commitee

SOUTHERN STUDENT ORGANIZING COMMITTEE. Founded in April 1964, the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC) was a Nashville-based organization of young white southerners who sought to bring progressive change to the South. Throughout its five-year existence SSOC actively supported the civil rights movement, emerged as the leading southern voice against the Vietnam War, called for reform on southern campuses, participated in campaigns to organize southern workers, and became a staunch advocate of the women's liberation movement. Though smaller and less well-known than the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), SSOC was the first organization to try to bring white southerners into the major social justice movements of the decade. In 1969, internally divided and alienated from the other major student groups by its regional orientation and besieged by law enforcement agencies that considered a group of white activists to be a grave threat, SSOC disbanded.

"We'll Take Our Stand," the manifesto adopted at SSOC's founding meeting, articulated the organization's goals, which included abolishing segregation and eradicating poverty, and declared that the group's leaders were committed to creating "non-violent political and direct action movements" on campuses across the South. Initially conceived as a staff organization that would coordinate activities on predominantly white southern campuses, SSOC evolved into a membership group with chapters throughout the region. While SSOC's founders, galvanized by the Black freedom struggle, maintained strong ties to SNCC, later members identified more closely with SDS, a result of the young southerners' growing radicalism and the rise of militant separatism within SNCC.

Throughout SSOC's existence, southern distinctiveness, the view that the South was a fundamentally unique region, was a defining feature of the group. For instance, by 1968 SSOC had begun to argue that the South was trapped in a colonial relationship with the North, exploited by northern capitalists and forced to fight in a war in Vietnam that did not serve its interests. And over the course of its life, the activists, hoping to enhance SSOC's appeal to white southerners, placed the group within a tradition of indigenous white southern radicalism, a tradition which included the abolitionism of the Grimke sisters, the interracialism of the early Tom Watson, and the unionism of Winston County, Alabama, men who refused to serve in the Confederate Army. Appalled by SSOC's regional chauvinism, SDS broke ties with the group in early 1969. Abandoned by SDS, wracked by factionalism, and harassed by the FBI and police “Red Squads,” SSOC voted to dissolve shortly thereafter.

Greene, Christina. “’We’ll Take Our Stand’: Race, Class, and Gender in the Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964-1969.” In Hidden Histories of Women in the New South. Edited by Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovse, Theda Perdue, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994, pp. 173-203.

Joye, Harlon. “Dixie’s New Left.” Trans-action 7, no. 11 (1970). Pp. 50-56, 62.

Michel, Gregg L. Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee,
1964-1969. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.