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"We'll Take Our Stand"

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Appendix "We'll Take Our Stand" Nashville, April 4, 1964 It has been 35 years since a group of young intellectuals calling themselves th e Southern "F ugitive Group" met here in Nashville and declared their hop es of sto pping th e clock and preventing social, spiritual and econ om ic forces which are today still coming of age in th e South. They wrote a state­ ment called "I'll Take My Stand" in which the y endorsed the feud al agrarian aristocratic order ofthe South and opposed what the y saw coming in the new order- widespread industrialization and urbanization with democracy and equality for all people. We do hereby declare, as Southern students from most of the Southern states, representing different economic, ethnic and religious backgrounds, growing from birthdays in the Depression years and the War years, that we will here take our stand in the determination to build together a New South which brings democracy and justice for all its people . Just a few years after th e Fugitives took their stand, Franklin D. Roo sevelt assumed the presidenc y of the U.S. and called our Southland "America's number one domestic problem." He talked about the need s of those Americans who were ill-hou sed, ill-ted , ill-clothed. Today, in 1964, when a majority of our nation is living in affluence which makes the specters of poverty and racism tenfold more inexcusable, a Southern is in the White House. Yet the struggle for equal opportunity for all men- white and non ­ white, young and old , man and woman, is by no means completed. Our Southland is still the leading sufferer and battle ground of the war against racism, poverty, injustic e and autocracy. It is our intention to win th at strug­ gle in ou r Southland in ou r lifetime-tomorrow is not soon enough. Our Southland is com ing of age, the y say. But we both hope and fear for her new industries and her new cities, for we also are aware of new slums, newly unemployed, new injustices, new political guile-and the Old as well. Is our dre am of democracy to be dashed just as were Jefferson 's dreams and the Populist struggles lost in the blend offeudal 228 ApPE NDIX power, racial fear and industrial oligarchic opportunism? Only as we dare to create new movements, new politics, and new institutions can our hopes prevail. We hereby take our stand to start with our college communities and to confront them and their surrounding communities and to move from here out through all th e states of the South-and to tell the Truth that must ulti­ mately make us free. The Freedom movement for an end to segregation inspires us all to make our voices heard for a bq~innin~ of a true democracy in the South for all people . We pledge together to work in all communities across the South to create non -violent political and direct action movements dedicated to the sort ofsocial change throughout the South and nation which is necessary to achieve our stated goals. Our region must be an exemplar of the national goals we all believe in, rather than a deterrent to them: - Not only an end to segregation and racism but the rise offull and equal opportunity for all; - An end to personal poverty and deprivation; - An end to the "public poverty" which leaves us without decent schools, parks, medical care, housing, and communities; -A democratic society where politics poses meaningful dialogue and choices about issues that affect men's lives, not manipulation by vested elites; - A place where industries and large cities can blend into farms and natural rural splendor to provide meaningful work and leisure oppor­ tunities for all-the sort ofsociety we can all live in and believe in. We as young Southerners hereby pledge to take our stand now together here to work for a new order, a new South, a place which embodies our ideals for all the world to emulate, not ridicule . We find our destiny as individuals in the South in our hopes and our work together as brothers. Notes Introduction 1. Southern Patriot, December 1964. 2. Interview, Sue Thrasher (interviewed by Ronald Grele), 15 December 1984, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University, New York, New York. 3. "The Role of Culture in the Movement," Southern Student Organizing Committee Thirtieth Reunion and Conference, 9 April 1994, Charlottesville, Virginia, in the author's possession . 4. Will D. Campbell to Deborah Cole , 30 September 1964, box 52, folder 20, Papers of Will D. Campbell, McCain Library and Archives, University Libraries, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi. 5. Interview, Ronda Stilley Kotelchuck, 4 September 1994. 6. "1968-1969-Zenith & Dissolution," SSOC Reunion, 6 July 2002, Nashville, Tennessee, in the author's possession . 7. Jennifer Frost, «An Interracial Movement of the Poor»: Community 01;!janizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2001),5. 8. The Progressive, 61 :7 (1997),40. 9. Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Random House, 1973), 537; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black AlVakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 102; Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minn esota Press, 1989), 316 n.52; William A. Link, William Friday: Power, Purpose, and American Higher Education (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 142-143. 10. John Shelton Reed, "Flagging Energy," in John Shelton Reed, Kicking Back: Further Dispatches from the South (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 48 . The perceived novelty of SSOC has brought it to the attention of others, though they are more judicious in their remarks than Reed . See, for instance, Charles Reagan Wilson, "Creating New Symbols from Old Contlicts," Reckon: The Magazine ofSouthern Culture I, no . I & 2 (1995): 17,20. II. Sara Evans, PersonalPolitics:The Roots ofWomen)s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979); Bryant Simon, "Southern Student Organizing Committee: A New Rebel 230 NOTES Yell in Dixie" (Honors Essay: University of North Caro lina at Chapel Hill, 1983). 12. Ha rlon Ioye, "Dixie's New Lett," Trans-action, 7, no. 11 (1970),50-56, 62; Christian Greene, " 'We'll Take O ur Stand' : Race, Class, and Gender in the Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964- 1969," in Hidden Histories of Women in the New South, Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Theda Perdue, and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, eds. (Columb ia: University of Missouri Press, 1994 ), 173- 203 . 13. For examples of this scholarship, see Terry H . Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (N ew York: Oxford University Press, 1995); James Miller, «Democracy Is in the Streets»: Prom Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge, Mass.: Ha rvard University Press, 1994 [first edition: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987]); Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up]: American Protest against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1 975 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winsto n, 1984 ); Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield, assisting author, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement ofthe Vietnam Era (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 ); Blanche Linde n-Ward and Carol Hurd Green, American Women in the 1960s: Changing the Futu re (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993). 14. Works that ignore white student civil rights activists in the South include Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1 965 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil R ights in MississijJjJi (Urbana : Unive rsity of Illinois Press, 1994); Fred Powledge, Free At Last]: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 199 1); Do ug McAdam , Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Howell Raines, My Soul Is R ested: Movement Days in the DeepSouth Remembered (New York: Penguin Books, 1983 [first edition: New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1977]). In his excellent bibliographic essay at the end of his important book on the civil rights movement in Mississippi, Charles Payne is critical of top -down, white-focused civil rights histor y. Yet his essay ignores the contributions to the movement of grass-roots white activists. Charles Payne, I've Got the Light ofFreedom: The Op;ganizingTradition and the MississijJjJi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of Californ ia Press, 1995), 4 13--441. 15. The number of works that focus on young progressive whites in the SOUtl1 has begun to grow in recent years. Among these works are Jeffrey A. Turner, "From the Sit-Ins to Vietnam: The Evolutio n of Student Activism on Southern College Cam puses, 1960-1970," History of Higher Education Annual, 21 (200 1): 103-1 35; Co nstance Curry et aI., Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Stephen Eugene Parr, "The Forgotten Radicals: The New Lett in the Deep South, Florida State U niversity, 1960-1 972" (P h.D.Dissertation: Th e Florida State NO TES 231 University, 2000); William J. Billingsley, Communists on Campus: Race) Politics and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina (Athens: University ofGeo rgia Press, 1999); Douglas C. Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism) Christianity) and the New Left in A merica (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
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