After its founding, SSOC came to be formally tied to the SDS as a fraternal organization with a regional mandate in the South, and joint SDS-SSOC chapters existed at some schools like the University of North Carolina.
In 1967, SSOC organizers led by Gene Guerrero and Lynn Wells, worked with TWUA on a unionization drive in North Carolina textile mills, involving more than 300 students in the campaign.
In 1968, Gene Guerrero and Howard Romaine were among the SSOC activists involved in founding Atlanta's widely circulated underground newspaper, The Great Speckled Bird.
During its last year, it changed the post to two secretaries, Mike Welch and Lyn Wells, and added a newspaper called The Phoenix, to SSOC's list of publications.
SSOC conferences had a variety of topics but were a way for southern activists, who often felt isolated on the conservative and largely segregated campuses of the time to meet like-minded students from other places and draw strength and inspiration from their activities.
Through a traveling teach-in on Vietnam and American foreign policy that toured southern states between 1967 and 1969, SSOC helped to organize the antiwar movement in the south.
What SSOC organizer Ed Hamlett called "the radical beer-drinking five" on southern campuses became the long-haired pot-smoking hundreds (or thousands), and instead of getting ideas from mimeographed pamphlets, they could turn on the nightly news and see massive demonstrations and dramatic trials like those of the Chicago 7.
However, in the 1990s, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, Gregg Michel, decided to write his dissertation on SSOC and began contacting and interviewing old activists, and organized a reunion of them in Charlottesville, VA in 1994.
After the breakup of SSOC, two former members, Howard Romaine and Sue Thrasher, were instrumental in forming the Institute for Southern Studies with Julian Bond.