History Commons^™

“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., Hannah C. White

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

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 …