Legacy & Retrospective
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Then and Now
By the time a visitor reaches this page, the documents presented in this exhibit have told a specific and detailed story about a student who organized against segregated dormitories, wrote for an underground newspaper, and spoke at a rally against the war in Vietnam and found herself at the center of a surveillance apparatus that included UT Traffic and Security Services under Chief Allen Hamilton, Austin Police Department Lieutenant Burt Gerding—Austin's "red squad" cop—and the FBI's COINTELPRO program, which was specifically targeting SDS nationally and working to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the New Left by whatever means necessary (Dreyer 2006).
Gerding boasted that he always had informers inside SDS, and the Hamilton files confirmed that even the editor of The Daily Texan was providing names, photographs, and information about SDS activities to both Gerding and Hamilton (Dreyer 2006). Embree herself understood the political architecture behind this surveillance network, evident not only in her facetious postcard to Chief Hamilton, signing off as "Your friendly campus agitator," but also in her own later reflection on why the surveillance was so extensive (Embree Papers 1933–2023). As she said, "The Chairman of the UT Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, was also a honcho in the Democratic Party. I think the UT police had such a close relationship with other agencies—DPS, the FBI, the Secret Service—because of the presidential spotlight. There we were in the streets, protesting Lyndon's war and trying to integrate the dorm where his daughter lived" (Dreyer 2006).
The Daily Texan, April 24, 2001
Published in The Daily Texan on April 24, 2001, "Struggling to Be Heard" places the campus protests of the 1960s within a recurring pattern of conflict between UT students and administrators over the terms of free expression on campus (Daily Texan 2001). The retrospective traces decades of student challenges to university authority, casting Embree and her SDS colleagues as participants in a long institutional struggle over who holds the power to define the boundaries of debate on campus (Daily Texan 2001). Significantly, the article draws attention to the inconsistency of university speech and assembly policies, rules that were vague enough to be selectively enforced yet severe enough to carry real consequences for students who ran afoul of them (Daily Texan 2001).
This observation cuts to the center of what the 2001 retrospective identifies as a structural problem at UT. The rules governing campus speech and assembly were not simply vague or inconsistently applied but deployed within a political context in which the university's leadership was directly tied to the national Democratic Party establishment that students were organizing against (Lerner 2020; Daily Texan 2001). The retrospective argues that students were not simply trying to disrupt the existing order but to compel the institution to establish consistent and transparent terms for campus life, a demand the university repeatedly deflected through surveillance, disciplinary proceedings, and administrative obstruction rather than genuine engagement (Daily Texan 2001). Embree's case, viewed through the lens of the 2001 article, becomes a defining example of exactly that pattern: a student whose activism was not met with dialogue and transparency but with probation, appeals presided over by conflicted administrators, and a surveillance network that extended from campus police all the way to the FBI (Dreyer 2006; Abernathy and Peterson 1967; Erwin 1967, Lerner 2020; Embree Papers 1933–2023).
From UT to the World: Alice Embree and Global Activism
In the article "A Chile Connection," Alice Embree recounts being one of 126 UT students who participated in the Texas-Chile Leadership Exchange Program, which ran from 1959 to 1967 under the guidance of Dr. Joe Neal of the University's International Office (Embree 1984). She traveled to Chile in 1967 as a member of the final delegation, and the program ended that year, its ninth, when Board of Regents Chairman Frank C. Erwin, Jr. canceled it, citing Embree herself as his reason and referring to her as "the Embree girl" (Wang 2016; Embree 1984). Following her placement on disciplinary probation in 1967, Embree left the University of Texas and moved to New York City, where she wrote for the underground newspaper Rat Subterranean News and worked with the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), an organization founded by SDS activists through which she continued to address U.S. foreign policy and imperialism in Latin America directly (Hield 2023; Embree 1984). Through that work she encountered the New York women's liberation movement, which she later described as a transformative political awakening (Hield 2023). She returned to Austin in 1969, became a founding member of the Fly-By-Night Printing Collective, which later became Red River Women's Press, and contributed to one of the first anthologies of feminist writing, Sisterhood is Powerful (White 2018; Hield 2023).
After the Women's Press was flooded in 1981, Embree returned to UT as a clerical worker in the Spanish and Portuguese department and earned her bachelor's degree in 1982, eight months pregnant, and her master's degree in 1987 (Wang 2016; Sokolove 2021). She married artist Carlos Lowry in 1980, and they had two children (Hield 2023). She continued organizing in Austin on women's liberation, labor, community, and healthcare issues and was still participating in protests as late as 2017, when she was arrested at an Austin demonstration against the Senate vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Hield 2023). In 2025, she met with the student team that revived The Rag after nearly fifty years, a publication whose relaunch was itself prompted by contemporary threats to free speech on campus that Embree and her peers would have recognized immediately (Polishook 2025). When asked about her lifetime of commitment to social change, Embree said: "It's a marathon, not a sprint" (Sokolove 2021).
Below are other collections from Hidden Histories that draw upon information from the Alice Embree Papers:
The Spies of Texas
After Chief Hamilton's death in 2005, his son discovered his father's secret files while cleaning out his office and sold them to Half Price Books, which recognized their historical value and arranged to donate them to the Briscoe Center. But crucially, Half Price Books first located Alice Embree as a representative of the student activist community and gave her first access before the donation, which is how she and Thorne Dreyer, a founding editor of The Rag and SDS member, were able to gain access to the collection before it was donated (Dreyer 2006). Dreyer and a crew traveled to Dallas, where they spent several hours scanning and photocopying the entire collection before it was donated to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin (Dreyer 2006).
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