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118 CHAPTER FOUR Building a Southern Movement IN OCTOBER 1963, Anne Braden was wondering why Samuel C. Shirah Jr., the campus traveler for the White Students Project operated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc), was late with an article for the Southern Patriot on the reaction of Birmingham-Southern College students to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing on 15 September. Perhaps, she mused, Shirah had not contacted her because he was disappointed with the response he had received. Shirah might have believed that Braden, editor of the Southern Patriot and field secretary for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (scef), would be disappointed in his inability to goad white students in Birmingham to action. Braden hoped that this was not the case. “I’m not going to be critical if he didn’t set the world on fire with the Birmingham-Southern students,” she wrote in a letter to a mutual acquaintance. “Actually, I was rather amazed that he even thought he might get them to move. It is not the place I would expect the revolution to start.” Braden believed that an apathetic reaction by Birmingham-Southern students was newsworthy: “It reminds me of that old, old story about the cub reporter who went to cover the wedding and came back and told his editor there was no story because the groom didn’t show up.” Even if students at the small, all-white, Methodist-affiliated college showed no inclination toward action, it was important to know why. Did fear prevent them from acting? Was there some other reason?1 Shirah, a former Birmingham-Southern student, had faced a number of difficulties in his attempt to organize Birmingham students. After hitchhiking from Atlanta to Birmingham on the afternoon of the bombing, Shirah found it difficult to navigate safely in the city. On the first night, he slept in a closet at the Birmingham-Southern radio station, where he had worked as an undergraduate . He met with some students, but on his second day in town a dean at the college ordered him to leave the campus and never to return. He spent most of his time attempting to set up a program that would bring Birmingham-Southern students together with students from nearby Miles College. However, fear of Building a Southern Movement 119 reprisals suppressed the number of interested students, and those who were interested wanted to do so without Shirah’s help, since his affiliation with sncc made him dangerous.2 Shirah’s experiences illustrate some of the obstacles that full-time activists faced when trying to mobilize students in the Deep South. Even though Shirah was a native Alabamian, his relationship with sncc made him an “outside agitator ”inBirminghamandotherplaceswhereresistancetosocialchangewasstrong. His predecessor in the White Student Project, Bob Zellner, another Alabamian, later called attention to the obstacles that prevented organizers from reaching southern students by drawing a comparison with the Soviet Iron Curtain. “For two years, I worked to cut through the cotton curtain to the minds of Southern white students,” Zellner declared in a January 1964 Southern Patriot article.3 sncc was not the only organized effort to spread the movement throughout the region. Starting in the late 1950s and continuing throughout the 1960s, a number of organizations—the U.S. National Student Association (nsa), the Congress of Racial Equality (core), liberal religious groups such as the ymca/ ywca and the American Friends Service Committee, Students for a Democratic Society(sds),andtheSouthernStudentOrganizingCommittee(ssoc)—sought to pull together the strands of activism that had appeared in the South as a result of the sit-in movement. Their halting efforts revealed the challenges inherent in organizing a regionwide student movement. Conservatism and apathy, racial divisions, and strategic and philosophical difficulties presented obstacles to the new student movement. Nevertheless, by the middle of the decade, activists had achieved some successes, most notably the development of a loosely connected network that lessened the sense of isolation often felt by student activists on individual campuses. “Sandlot Politics” and Social Change: The NSA Even before the advent of the sit-in movement, the nsa had made the elimination of segregation and racial discrimination one of its foremost goals, a stance that made the organization controversial in the South. The nsa had been formed in 1947 as a confederation of student governments, and most white schools in the South refused to join because of the group’s liberalism. Nevertheless, some black colleges and universities maintained nsa membership, and a few white institutions, including...

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