Date on Senior Honors Thesis
5-2021
Document Type
Senior Honors Thesis
Degree Name
B.A.
Department
History
Degree Program
College of Arts and Sciences
Author's Keywords
Anne Braden; civil rights; Black Power; Black Panther Party; interracial organizing; communism
Abstract
This thesis focuses on the final years of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), including the organization’s split in 1973. During the late sixties and early seventies, SCEF operated, with its headquarters in Louisville, as an interracial southern civil rights organization that focused on organizing whites in the struggle against racism, oppression, and exploitation. This thesis unpacks SCEF’s relationship with Louisville’s Black Panther Party and examines the ways in which interracial organizing grew to be more problematic during the turn of the decade with the rise of nationalism, Black Power, and a new attention to the intransigent racism that continued from the 1960s and into the 1970s. This thesis also explores the turn of sixties radicals to emerging “third world” Marxist-Leninist groups that aligned themselves with liberation movements in China, Cuba, and Vietnam.
Recommended Citation
White, Hannah C., "“Attracted by the light but repelled by the heat”: the final years of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) and the turn to the New Communist Movement in the South." (2021). College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses. Paper 289.
Retrieved from https://ir.library.louisville.edu/honors/289
Lay Summary
This thesis focuses on the final years of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), a southern civil rights organization that aimed to organize whites in the struggle against racism. This thesis also unpacks the SCEF split of 1973 and the organization’s conflict with the Louisville Black Panther Party during the same year. By unpacking SCEF’s final years, this thesis will also explore the New Communist Movement and emerging Marxist-Leninist groups of the South during the 1970s.
