Alice Embree & Student Dissent at UT Austin, 1963-1967

Who is Alice Embree?

     Alice Embree is a lifelong activist, writer, and organizer whose work has spanned more than six decades of social justice movements in Texas and beyond. She grew up in Jim Crow-era Austin, the daughter of parents who supported school desegregation at a time when few white families did, and arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1963 already shaped by a deep conviction that the distance between American ideals and American reality demanded action (Sokolove 2021; Hield 2023). As she later reflected, "We'd been raised to believe certain things about the country and suddenly they appeared not to be true at all, like 'we're all created equal'" (White 2018).

     At UT, she became a prominent figure in the civil rights and anti-war movements, serving on the steering committee of the Student Interracial Committee (SIC), rising to leadership within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and co-founding The Rag, one of the country's pioneering underground newspapers (White 2018; Dreyer 2006). Her activism made her a target of coordinated surveillance by campus police, the Austin Police Department, and the FBI, and ultimately led to discipline by the university in 1967 (Dreyer 2006; Zamarripa 1967). After leaving UT, she continued organizing across causes ranging from women's liberation to workers' rights to Latin American solidarity, and in 2021, she published her memoir Voice Lessons through the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the first account of the 1960s and 1970s activist movements in Texas written by a Texas woman who was there (Hield 2023).

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