Photo: Cathy Cade at courtesy of the Bancroft Library. Heartened by the activism of their fellow white collegians, the students in the new group believed that SSOC, as an organization devoted to coordinating local activities, was poised to lead a progressive movement of young white southerners.Asian/Pacific Lesbians marching in the 1989 San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade. As a result, SSOC quickly gained legitimacy among activists on predominantly white southern campuses, particularly those where student anti-segregation work pre-dated SSOC’s founding. In fact, more than at any other time during the group’s existence, civil rights issues dominated SSOC’s agenda in 1964. creation, the group did not allow discussions about its structure and program to prevent it from actively participating in the civil rights struggle. In the weeks and months following SSOC’s. You don’t have to have all the ultimate answers before you act.” SSOC’s early history suggests that the activists fully agreed with Rollins. Metz Rollins, a black minister who had been involved in the Nashville movement, counseled the students not to “talk yourselves to death. In a speech at SSOC’s first Southwide conference in Atlanta in November 1964, J.
Connie Curry, the director of the United States National Student Association’s (NSA) Southern Project, also extended invitations to the conference, writing to students at 20 southern schools, “There is a feeling that a need exists for white Southern students who are involved in the Civil Rights movement to meet together and exchange ideas about things which are most relevant to their situation.”3 SNCC staffer Walter Tillow assisted by contacting progressive student groups on more than 20 predominantly white southern campuses, while Sam Shirah and Ed Hamlett promoted the meeting at the colleges and universities they visited in February and March. They then appealed to their friends in established student organizations to spread the word about the conference. They sent announcements of the conference to potentially interested students whose names they had culled from the Southern Patriot or obtained from Anne Braden. For two months, though, Sue Thrasher, Archie Allen, Ron Parker, and the other organizers had worked hard to publicize the conference throughout the region. A large Nashville contingent certainly would be present since activist students at Vanderbilt University, Peabody College, and Scarritt College had called the meeting. As April 1964 approached, no one knew how many young white southerners would travel to Nashville for the Easter weekend meeting on white student activism in the South.
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