Against the Current: Student Organizing
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Historical Context
The documents gathered on this page show the ambition of the students organizing at the University of Texas at Austin during the early and mid-1960s. Students were articulating a comprehensive vision of what the university ought to be and demanding a fundamental reordering of the relationship between students, faculty, and administrators. SDS platform documents from this period challenged the university's treatment of students as passive subjects of administrative authority, arguing that students "live in a world set apart from the reality which surrounds it" and that their "private lives are regulated by the University" while they remain "excluded from any voice in the conduct of the academic affairs which are vital to their education" (SDS n.d.). The remedy they proposed was structural change: student-faculty control over academic affairs, a formal bill of rights, and the abolition of what they called the "make-believe, powerless student government" that served administrative interests rather than student needs (SDS n.d.).
This vision of student power extended beyond the campus. Documents contained within Embree's Papers (1933-2023) connect UT students directly to the broader civil rights movement, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizing in Mississippi and direct correspondence with President Lyndon B. Johnson demanding federal intervention against police violence in McComb, Mississippi. That the same students organizing for civil rights nationally were simultaneously being surveilled by campus police, the Austin Police Department, and the FBI speaks to how threatening authorities found even the most principled and nonviolent forms of student organizing (Dreyer 2006). The Freedom Platform, endorsed by Alice Embree, Gary Thiher, Dick Reavis, and others, asked plainly, "Why the hell are students second-class citizens denied even basic Constitutional rights?"—a question the university's response would answer more clearly than any administrator intended (Embree Papers 1933–2023).
Student Interracial Committee (SIC)
In 1964, this informational flyer circulated among members of SIC and identifies Alice Embree (misspelled Embry) as part of its steering committee, giving details as to her work in the context of civil rights activities on the UT campus. It is worth noting that although UT academics had been integrated, African American students continued to be subjected to discrimination via segregation in campus housing arrangements. Student demonstrations against campus housing segregation were held at Kinsolving Dormitory, and Embree played an active role in helping plan and organize the demonstrations (Wang 2016). The reason for holding the demonstrations at Kinsolving is that one of the residents of the dorm was Lynda Bird Johnson, daughter of President Lyndon B. Johnson, which Embree knew would draw media attention (Wang 2016).
Following student demonstrations and the possibility of litigation in court, policy changes were made in May 1964, when the Board of Regents made the decision to ensure complete integration in terms of housing facilities at the university (Wang 2016). The SIC flyer also notes that some segregated establishments in Austin did not fall under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, reinforcing why student organizing remained necessary even after the Act's passage. As Embree herself later reflected on the close relationship between UT police and agencies like the FBI and Secret Service, "There we were in the streets, protesting Lyndon's war and trying to integrate the dorm where his daughter lived," a connection between student activism and the presidential political spotlight that would shape the surveillance of campus dissidents throughout the decade (Dreyer 2006).
The integration of university housing in 1964 demonstrated that organized student pressure could force institutional change and set the stage for the escalating conflict between students and administrators that would follow.
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"Boat Ticket to Africa"
The handbill you may choose to interact with behind the content warning on the carousel below is a propaganda tool aimed at mocking African Americans as part of an overall campaign targeting them. Entitled “Boat Ticket to Africa,” this document was written in 1961 by George Lincoln Rockwell, the media-savvy head of the American Nazi Party (ANP). The offensive and racially charged language used in this document is consistent with the ideas of white supremacy promoted by Rockwell, who openly modeled himself after Adolf Hitler, referred to himself as the “American Fuehrer," and tried to adapt Nazism to an American context, making it more visible and usable in U.S. politics (Berger 2003). Rockwell is directly responsible for feeding contemporary white power movements, Holocaust denial, and broader political extremist networks (Berger 2003).
Materials of this sort were circulated in the very same social environment where UT students lobbied for civil rights and desegregation. The ANP relied on highly visible and provocative tactics to attract attention and spread their message, despite having relatively small memberships (Berger 2003). Within the context of this exhibit, the document demonstrates the racial hostility that formed part of the broader environment of animosity in which activists like Embree were organizing.
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SDS Platform
This undated SDS platform document lays out the intellectual and political foundation for the student organizing that was taking shape in the mid-1960s at UT Austin. It opens with a blunt diagnosis of the student condition: students, it argues, "live in a world set apart from the reality which surrounds it," their private lives regulated by the university while they remain excluded from any meaningful voice in the academic affairs that shape their education (SDS n.d.). They suffer, the document continues, from "arbitrary decisions made according to administrators' personal beliefs rather than according to a well-defined law" and are offered in place of genuine democratic participation only "the palliative of a make-believe, powerless student government which is mostly dominated by petty student politicians seeking only the gratification of their egos" (SDS n.d.).
The proposed solutions are structural and the students call for student-faculty control over all academic matters, arguing that administrators "should be their servant" rather than the arbiters of university life (SDS n.d.). It proposes the formation of an independent union of students, operating outside the existing student government, that could pursue genuine reform through petitions, conferences, and demonstrations. And it advocates for the creation of a Faculty-Student Council with real and exclusive control over the academic domain, on the grounds that the university had become less responsive to the needs of students and faculty and was instead being run "primarily in terms of efficiency in producing human parts for the economic and, to an alarming degree, military machines" (SDS n.d.).
Read alongside the other documents on this page, the SDS platform indicates the coherent intellectual framework that authorities found so threatening. The platform's vision of an independent student union pursuing reform through demonstrations and petitions was a blueprint for exactly the kind of organizing that Embree and her fellow activists were carrying out on campus and that Lt. Bert Gerding of Austin Police Department, Chief Allen Hamilton of UT Traffic and Security Services, and the FBI were simultaneously working to monitor and suppress (Dreyer 2006). That the university's surveillance apparatus was training its attention on students who were, at their core, arguing for the right to participate in decisions regarding their own education speaks to how fundamentally different the institution and its students understood the purpose of a university (Dreyer 2006; Lerner 2020).
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