Constance Curry – affectionately known as “Connie” – was born into a newly emigrated, working-class Irish family during the Great Depression. For the first ten years of her life, her family was constantly on the move, chasing work in the textile industry before finally finding a stable job in the mills of Greensboro, North Carolina. Connie’s parents regaled their children with Irish poetry, song, and the stories of Irish revolutionaries. “It is clear to me,” she later wrote, “that the Irish struggle got planted deep in my heart and soul at an early age, and that its lessons and music and poetry were easily transferred to the southern freedom struggle.”
In college, Connie got involved in student organizing with the progressive National Student Association (NSA). In 1953 – shortly before the Civil Rights Movement began – she was elected by the NSA to represent the students of the South. As a ferocious White backlash against the movement developed, students of the NSA felt that young White southerners were ready to chart a more progressive path than their elders… if they had some support. And so, in 1959, the NSA launched the Southern Project, which aimed to build a multiracial network of student supporters of the Civil Rights Movement across the South. Connie was the Southern Project’s first director.
In February of 1960, Connie was driving through Greensboro when she heard the news on the local radio: four Black college students had been arrested, for refusing to leave the Woolworth’s lunch counter. From that moment, the sit-in movement spread like wildfire, and Connie began showing up to witness, document, and build relationships with the student activists. She used her directorship of the Southern Project to spearhead a newsletter about the student-led movement, which was distributed throughout the NSA’s national network. The newsletter gave students across the country updates on the violence their fellow students in the South were facing, what the needs of those students were, and what local actions could be taken to offer support. Connie’s newsletter contributed to a surge of northern support, and laid the foundation for the northern networks that would later support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC.)
When the sit-in leaders gathered later that year to form SNCC, Connie was one of the few White people in attendance, and became the first White woman on SNCC’s executive committee. She gave SNCC leaders the keys to her Southern Project office to make use of the resources there, introduced them to her NSA network and funding sources, and even used funding for the Southern Project to directly pay SNCC’s bills. She never asked for permission to do any of this… and no one from the NSA chose to question her.
Connie stepped away from SNCC in 1964, as the organization moved away from campus organizing. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, she accepted a new position as the southern field representative for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), where she worked for eleven years to ensure that the promises of the Civil Rights Movement’s landmark legislative victories were kept. She was the AFSC liaison for planning the Poor People’s Campaign, and was in a meeting with Martin Luther King the day before he was killed. From 1975 to 1990, she served as the City of Atlanta’s Director of Human Services, under the city’s first two Black mayors: Maynard Jackson, and Martin Luther King’s dear friend, Andrew Young. As the era of mass incarceration picked up steam, she fought diligently against the New Jim Crow. She also turned toward writing, helping to chronicle many of the untold stories of the civil rights era. Connie Curry died in 2020, at the age of 86.
Additional Resources
Connie Curry:
- Deep In Our Hearts, chapter 1.
- Hands on the Freedom Plough, part 2.
Cate Fosl Interviewing Constance Curry.
Voices Across the Color Line Interview with Constance Curry.