THE SOUTHERN ORGANIZING COMMITTEE FOR

ECONOMIC & SOCIAL JUSTICE

The Southern Organizing Committee for Economic & Social Justice (SOC) is a South-wide, non-profit, multi-racial, multi-issue network of people and organizations working in their communities for economic, social, and environmental justice.

Organized in 1975, we draw upon a long heritage of the Southern struggle for justice. We have steadily linked veterans of the social justice struggle with new generations of people coming into the movement. We descended from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which worked for racial and economic justice against the police-state terror that dominated the South in the 30's and 40's. We are also the product of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which was an interracial group of Southerners that confronted segregation and racism from 1948 until 1974.

SOC does not presume to be the social justice movement in the South, rather, we are as our name implies --- an organizing committee. We have a history of good working relationships with virtually all other social-justice groups in the region.

The Environmental Justice Project (EJP):

Our Environmental Justice Project is guided by the seventeen (17) Principles of Environmental Justice [October, 1991, National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit]. In 1991, our EJP began to serve 11 southern states where developing and existing local organizations of people are literally fighting for their lives. In 1992, we convened a task force of environmental justice activists and called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 4 (Southeast Office) to act on the various contamination crises in our communities. Our main priority was getting relief from air, water and soil pollution from Superfund sites, petrochemical plants, refineries, incinerators, DOE/DOD military complexes and other sources. This task force has struggled to make the U.S. EPA more responsive to community issues. In November 1996, SOC helped organize the African American Environmental Justice Action Network (AAEJAN). AAEJAN was formed as an independent working group to better enhance the work of almost 75 community groups fighting for environmental justice (EJ) in 11 southern states.

Through the EJP, SOC is the catalyst for a progressive, grassroots campaign that is enabling emerging organizations and community leaders to empower themselves. The Environmental Justice Movement will impact the lives of people of color like never before in the next few years, and it is in communities of color that our major work is centered. We also work in low income white communities and strive for principled coalitions with them.

In addition, SOC is a leader in the EJ community helping to shape policy and design effective response strategies. We work with other regional and national EJ groups, farm worker networks, and national/regional EJ networks such as the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and others. Our Director is an active member of the U.S. EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee (NEJAC), which sponsored a public meeting in Atlanta (January 1995), where hundreds of SOC affiliates testified to EPA Administrator Browner and others about their concerns.

Our environmental justice work is grounded in a new definition of the "environment" which includes all life conditions where we live, work and play. This work is closely connected to all issues that have reached a crisis stage in our region and nation.

Other Justice Work:

We support:

Principles that Guide Our Work:

1. We are committed to work for basic change in our society, to the end that the needs of the people come before profits for the few;

2. We recognize the struggle of people of color for freedom as the force that has consistently pushed our society in a more humane direction and which --- when joined by European Americans in coalition --- has created a better life for all of our people. Therefore, we seek to provide a framework which first empowers people of color and low income-whites in race and income specific to organizational formations to analyze their respective historic realities, and pursue a developmental process that empowers them to organize their communities and form biracial or multi-vocal, and mixed income coalitions in their local communities and at state and regional levels, and come together in struggle, as we strive to combat the racism that has undermined such unity in the past;

3. We contend that just as racism has corrupted our democratic ideals at home, so it has poisoned our policies abroad, justifying the exploitation of developing nations and the suppression of national liberation movements worldwide. Militarism squanders precious resources on weapons that threaten the world with destruction, while our people lack housing, health-care, education, and other social needs. We seek to build a grassroots peace movement that works for new policies based on respect for all the world's people and the use of our resources to meet human needs; and

4. We believe that poor and working people hold the key to social and economic change by grassroots organization.

SOC's co-chairs are Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Anne Braden. Our Environmental Justice Project is based in Atlanta. Our mailing address is P.O. Box 10518, Atlanta, GA, USA 30310; phone (404) 755-2855; fax (404) 755-0575, and E-mail socejp@igc.apc.org

Our Director is Connie Tucker and can be reached at the Atlanta Office. Also in Atlanta is the Coordinator of the African American Environmental Justice Action Network (AAEJAN), Thanisizwe Chimurenga. We also maintain an auxiliary office in Louisville. The mailing address is SOC, P.O. Box 11308, Louisville, KY, USA 40251, (502) 776-7874.