Meredith MacVittie

History 574

April 3, 2008

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee went through three stages during it’s peak in the 1960s and early 1970s. The first was the formation of a community within a social struggle. The second was a change in strategy that took place after August, 1964. The third was after the election of Stokely Carmichael in May, 1966, and involved the resolution of differences between blacks and the exclusion of white activists due to a more militant view.

February 1, 1960 marked the beginning of the student-centered African American resistance movement for equal civil rights in the United States when four students decided to sit at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter, which was segregated, in Greensboro, NC. The students were able to motivate others from their school to sit-in at the lunch counter in subsequent days, sparking national attention and other non-violent demonstrations. More importantly, it inspired others to become more empowered.

The first conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was held April 16-18, 1960 in Raleigh, NC. It was mainly organized by Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who made sure to maintain the autonomy of the college students, rather than implementing a top-down approach from the adult leaders of the protest movement. Another conference was held in Atlanta in October, and in between the movement dwindled to just the more hardcore activists. SNCC had to decide whether to be the organization to implement active protest, or to serve as a way for autonomous local organizations to communicate.

The Freedom Rides, begun by CORE, fell into the hands of SNCC after the first ride was discontinued due to violence in Alabama. Despite the danger, the SNCC protestors stood by their mantra of non-violence and serving jail time rather than posting bail, which they had begun in earnest during the earlier Rock Hill, SC jail-in. The Freedom Rides also revealed the quandary the Kennedy administration felt in how much they should support the protestors with regard to alienating southern whites. During the summer of 1961, SNCC split into a protest wing and a voter registration wing due to the need to get directly involved in social change, as well as the funding voter registration drives could bring the organization. At the same time, James Forman became their executive secretary, bringing together the two factions.

Robert Moses joined SNCC as an organizer in the summer of 1961, and traveled to McComb, MS to set up voter registration drives. He also assisted the more rural, neighboring counties with voter registration, which included literacy tests, leading to both his arrest and beating on separate occasions. Three local students were also arrested for six weeks at a sit-in, which created outrage. The McComb situation demonstrated that separating social action from voter registration was, in essence, meaningless, and all that was required was the willingness to help out in some way. At the same time, SNCC began to associate itself with more leftist causes and organizations, realizing that non-violent protest was not always an appropriate response.

The Albany movement began in October 1961 when Cordell Reagon and Charles Sherrod arrived in Albany, MS, as SNCC field secretaries who sought the support of the local black school, Albany State College. They initiated sit-ins and freedom songs became popular partially thanks to this particular movement. In December, activists from Atlanta arrived for a sit-in, which sparked mass arrests. Martin Luther King and others from SCLC arrived and organized a protest march at which 250 people were arrested, including King. Though the Albany movement was unsuccessful since all major protests and marches were crushed, it served as a valuable training ground for activists in many organizations, including SNCC.

In 1962 and 1963, SNCC began to become more diverse in terms of age, race, and background, as well as more militant; anyone who signed up knew there was a possibility of being arrested. The operating budget also grew, which allowed them to hire more staff and support more volunteers. Charles Sherrod and Bob Moses directed SNCC operations in Georgia and Mississippi, the two most important battle grounds. By the third general conference, April 12-14, 1963, SNCC volunteers, even white workers, had gained the trust of many southern blacks by showing the ability to identify with their struggle.

            The Kennedy administration was harshly criticized by SNCC for their lack of support, but also used to the organization’s advantage. A lawsuit filed by Robert Moses in January, 1963 brought attention to the fact that more and more people favored federal intervention to force local officials into compliance with desegregation, though the administration was still evasive. These pleas for a more forceful reaction from the Kennedy administration led to the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. John Lewis, the new chairman of SNCC, met with Kennedy in June and helped to organize the march, also delivering a speech, the original version of which was controversial due to its tendency towards inciting revolution. In fact, many SNCC members felt the march was too moderate, and believed the proposed civil rights legislation didn’t go far enough.

During the summer of 1964, Moses and Allard Lowenstein wanted to import around 1,000 white, northern students to instigate a confrontation between state and federal government, as the administration wouldn’t stand for white students to clash with police. Differences emerged over the role of whites, especially in leadership. Sam Sirah, a white activist, formed the Southern Students Organizing Committee in order to include more whites in the movement. SSOC intended to become an affiliate of SNCC, however, relations remained shaky throughout 1964. SNCC’s refusal to eliminate communists from its organization was also a bone of contention, though mainly with HUAC and outside organizations like the NAACP. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was designed as an alternative to the national Democratic Party in order to pose a challenge at the Democratic National Convention.

Though warned of the dangers in the rural state, three students in the MS project went missing on June 21, 1964. Their bodies were discovered on August 4. The missing students brought national attention to the movement. The Freedom Schools, organized by SNCC, were also successful, especially in areas that had already seen civil rights success. Black children attended the schools during the summer, learning about creative writing, art, journalism, foreign language, and the history of civil rights. The MFDP plan, which was the replace the normal delegation at the Democratic National Convention, was less successful. Because of its lack of success, some members of SNCC became disillusioned, going so far as to suggest forming an alternative state government by 1968.

Several leaders of SNCC took a trip to Africa in 1964, where they met up with Malcolm X. SNCC began an intellectual solidarity with African nations struggling for independence. Upon their return, Forman proposed the Black Belt Program, to expand black volunteers throughout the South. The Waveland Retreat, which took place in November 1964, attempted to focus SNCC ideologically. Once again, the question of white leadership and involvement in SNCC among poor blacks in the south emerged. In addition, several female staffers complained their talents were wasted due to organizational sexism.

When Martin Luther King’s supporters clashed with Alabama state authorities, Forman mobilized many of SNCC’s workers from Mississippi to Selma, Alabama. This, however, caused internal conflicts. Stokely Carmichael, a believer in a black-oriented movement who was skeptical of non-violence, soon traveled to Lowndes County, Alabama. He was instrumental in forming the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent political party, which took a black panther as its mascot. The group was at first unintentionally all-black: there were simply no whites who wanted to join. Julian Bond was elected as a Democrat to the Georgia state legislature, after a Supreme Court decision on legislative reappointment created a mostly-black district near SNCC’s Atlanta headquarters. This lead SNCC to expand the scope of their work in other cities across the country, as well as to evaluate their staff.

SNCC's radicalism lead to it being classified as a group of the "New Left," who supported a radical interracial movement. SNCC appeared to offer an outlet for discontent to many young radicals, more so than other civil rights organizations; however, this was mainly the result of a lack of discipline and structure. Their policy of non-exclusion and loose communist ties were also brought up again in 1965. SNCC solidified its anti-war policy during this time; although nearly all SNCC staff members were opposed to the Vietnam War because of the hypocrisy of defending freedom abroad but not in the south, many community organizers failed to see the relevance. Some were also fearful of being too critical of the Johnson administration, lest any federal support dwindled. Some thought an anti-war stance would show solidarity with all suffering people, while others thought it would lead to more red-baiting. Eventually, the killing of a SNCC volunteer in Alabama on January 3, 1966, led SNCC to support dissent with the US military and the draft.

The Atlanta Project began in 1966 with an influx of black separatists from the North. Bill Ware became the head of the Atlanta SNCC chapter due to his campaign to help Julian Bond take office. At the March, 1966 SNCC staff meeting, the Atlanta staff members proposed their idea of white exclusion. They were even opposed by Stokely Carmichael, who himself was accused of separatism due to his work in Lowndes County. At the major national retreat in May, 1966, which most Atlanta Project members did not attend, Carmichael was named executive chair, in keeping more with the radicalism of the times and the organization. This, however, contributed to the deterioration of SNCC's public image; even with verbal reassurances it was plain that there was an internal rift in the organization and that the leadership was now younger and more militant. At a march in Mississippi in support of James Meredith, who had been recently shot, Willie Ricks popularized the term "Black Power" in a positive sense. Though Martin Luther King thought it to be "an unfortunate choice of words," even he couldn't deny that almost a decade of non-violence had not yet changed the minds of many southern whites.

Black hopes had been "raised, but not fulfilled" by the civil rights movement as of the summer of 1966. SNCC was no longer constrained by white perceptions of their organization or movement. Carmichael explained SNCC's intent to undermine existing social order rather than creating a new one, and mentioned other groups, such as the Irish and Jewish-Americans, who had used the political process to achieve their goals, making violence unnecessary. Journalists missed Carmichael's more subtle messages, instead inflating his more inciting statements and equating black power with black separatism. Moderate leaders attempted to co-opt the idea for their own gain as well, hosting black power conferences. Because of this, the black power movement became separate from SNCC, which began to recognize its own limitations. Two police confrontations, one in Philadelphia and one in the Summerhill section of Atlanta, reinforced the violence for which SNCC was blamed.

Stokely Carmichael became the main identity of SNCC, so much so that the organization was seen almost as something that existed just to boost Carmichael and his ideas. Lewis resigned in June, 1966, at which time over two-thirds of SNCC staff members were located in urban areas, a major shift since 1961. Many paid staff members left SNCC because they could no longer support themselves on the low wages provided. Because staff members of SNCC had no cohesive idea of what to do with the organization, little formal training, and few substantial projects to work on, funds and success dwindled. The issue of whites in the organization continued to come up, however, and at the retreat in December, 1966, it involved several days of discussion. Eventually, whites were forced out, including the seven long-term white staff members at the conference, who abstained from the vote. Despite its radical influence in outer politics, SNCC was being torn apart by internal issues.

Rap Brown was elected SNCC chair in the spring of 1967, when Carmichael felt he had become too controversial; however, Brown would also prove an anathema to moderates and whites. Some staff members were arrested for inciting riot in Atlanta. A riot that broke out near Fisk University and SNCC headquarters was blamed on SNCC, though only a few members participated. Another protest took place at Texas Southern University when officials failed to approve a "Friends of SNCC" chapter, at which a police officer was killed, and five students were charged with his murder. The worst clash, however, took place at South Carolina State College. Brown believed that America was headed towards a race war, and that armed self-defense was a valid strategy for blacks. When Carmichael was arrested, Brown called it a "declaration of war," leading to a night of violence in Cambridge, Maryland, in which governor Spiro Agnew sent National Guard troops. This led to Brown's indictment on riot charges, which established a pattern of supression for high-profile revolutionaries by the government. FBI threats kept SNCC in a state of disunity. Some government agencies also recruited revolutionaries to work to enforce security or plan schools in such organizations as the Community Action Program, which they thought would mitigate violence.

An internal SNCC article leaked outside the organization in which some SNCC members were critical of Israel within the Israel-Palestine conflict, showing much more sympathy for the Palestinians. This enraged many liberal Jews, and SNCC was accused of anti-semitism, which caused them to loose support from some liberal organizations, mostly those funded by whites. In addition, many members of SNCC became critical of Marxism and argued that only racism was oppressing blacks, and that class had nothing to do with it. Throughout 1966 and 1967 SNCC staff members toured the countries of revolutionaries, such as the Soviet Union, Vietnam and Cuba. Stokely Carmichael took his own unsanctioned trip around the world, delivering a popular speech in Cuban, and eventually embracing a Pan-African view, agreeing to eventually settle in Guinea. Upon his return to the US, the Black Panther Party was being created in San Francisco by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, with the intention of eventually merging with SNCC. In the end, however, even the more militant factions disagreed about the future of the Black Power movement.

Stokely Carmichael, speaking of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in April, 1968, expressed the dismay of the black community that a leader with so much popularity had been killed by whites. The riots that ensued showed exactly how disunified the black community was. Rap Brown was charged with carrying a weapon across state lines while under indictment, and sentenced to five years in prison. SNCC decided to elect someone without so much national recognition in 1968, and decided to kick Carmichael out of SNCC and elect a nine-member governing committee. However, Phil Hutchings, as the spokesman, was seen by the media as the new leader, despite his lack of influence. Cleveland Sellers and Willie Ricks were also expelled from the organization, and Forman departed in 1969. Eventually Brown gained control again, switching the name to the Student National Coordinating Committee, though he later fled to Canada, and still later was convicted of inciting riot in Maryland for his role in Cambridge in 1967. Eventually, SNCC only had offices in New York, Atlanta and Cincinnati. As projects and involvement tapered off, and the organization still had no coherent philosophy, the FBI stopped investigating SNCC, membership plunged, and they became ineffective in the 1970s.

SNCC was extremely important and highly influential in the development of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. They used group-centered and grassroots tactics not seen in most other organizations of the time, and focused on young people and communities. However, the black power sentiment of SNCC’s later years overshadowed its early insistence on sustaining a non-violent struggle, and issues of racial identity and ideology eventually overshadowed other work.