SNCC: The Importance of its Work, the Value of its Legacy
by Charles Cobb
The time was 1960, the place the U.S.A.
That February first became a history making day
From Greensboro all across the land
The news spread far and wide
That quietly and bravely youth took a giant stride
Heed the call
Americans all
Side by equal side
Brothers sit in dignity
Sisters sit in pride
—Ballad of the Sit-Ins by Guy Carawan, Eve Merriam and Norman Curtis
Greenwood MS, June 1966, on the Meredith March. SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) calls for "Black Power."
Beginnings
You can never tell when a spark will light a fire. So, on February
1, 1960 when four Black students attending North Carolina A&T
College sat down at the lunch counter in a Greensboro, North Carolina
Woolworth Department store, ordered food, were refused service and then
remained seated until the store closed, few could have predicted how
rapidly similar protests would spread across the south; or the lasting
impact on the south and the nation of the sudden direct action by these
students.
Over the next two months, student sit-ins spread to 80 southern
cities and were involving thousands of young people, most of them
attending historically black colleges and universities like A&T,
although in several cities high school students launched and led
sit-ins. Two and a half months after Greensboro—the weekend of April
15-17—student sit-in leaders gathered at Shaw College (now Shaw
University) in Raleigh, North Carolina to meet one another, share
experiences and to discuss coordinating future actions.
Ella Baker, one of the great figures in 20th century civil rights
struggle had organized this gathering. She was then executive director
of Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), a group she had been instrumental in organizing. In the 1940s
she had been the NAACP’s director of southern branches, and in the early
1950s deeply involved with supporting southern Black community leaders
facing economic reprisals because of their civil rights activities. As
the sit-ins unfolded, she recognized that beyond energetic protests, the
students were bringing something fresh and new to civil rights struggle
and at the Shaw conference encouraged them to consider forming their
own organization. Thus was born the Student Non-violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”). Her fundamental message to the
students was, “Organize from the bottom up.” She emphasized her belief
that, “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
Ella Baker provided a corner of the SCLC office in Atlanta to SNCC.
In this cramped space SNCC’s sole staff member was Jane Stembridge, a
volunteer stirred by the sit-ins who was the white Georgia-born and
raised daughter of a Baptist preacher. A newsletter—The Student
Voice—was created and circulated to student protest groups. It mainly
provided information about what the various SNCC-affiliated campus-based
organizations were doing. The first check to SNCC—$100—in support of
its existence and efforts, came from Eleanor Roosevelt.
Soon, however, discussion among some of the students turned to what
beside sit-ins could be done by young people, especially outside of
urban centers. Within a year of SNCC’s founding, a small group dropped
out of school and became the first SNCC organizers or “field
secretaries.”
These organizers, armed with the names of grassroots contacts Ella Baker had developed over many years, even decades, began digging into southern black belt communities. By the fall of 1961 SNCC had established two significant organizing projects: Southwest Mississippi and Southwest Georgia. Both regions, rural and containing majority Black populations, were characterized by violent and vicious opposition to Black voting rights with terror and reprisal encouraged and supported by state and local government in response to any civil rights activity.
The Black Organizing Tradition and SNCC
Community organizing is a very old tradition in Black America.
Slaves, after all, were not sitting-in at the plantation manor dining
room seeking a seat at the table; nor picketing the auction block in the
town square. They were organizing—sometimes an escape, or sometimes a
rebellion, and constantly, the ways and means of survival in a new, very
strange and hostile land. Ella Baker, and the community leaders she
introduced them to, brought SNCC field secretaries into this organizing
tradition. And what these Black community leaders wanted help organizing
was voter registration campaigns. Black people had the numbers; if they
could get the vote they could begin to dismantle the system of
oppression that had dominated Black life for all of the 20th century;
indeed, since the abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876. Mississippi
NAACP leader Amzie Moore put this on the table at SNCC’s second
conference in October 1960. And SNCC’s black belt organizing efforts
increasingly revolved around voter registration.
SNCC organizers embedded themselves in rural black belt communities
to work to empower some of the poorest of the poor in America. This was
a relatively new, even radical approach to civil rights struggle. The
ruthless white violence directed at any civil rights effort in the rural
deep south black belt engendered belief that little was possible
through direct organizing efforts. More traditional civil rights
organizations did not concentrate much effort in this geography or among
this category of people, giving priority instead to legal battles to
strike down laws enforcing white supremacy and segregation. So in some
respects, despite the existence of some truly heroic NAACP leaders, SNCC
organizers were also entering virgin political territory. And they were
embraced by local people in these communities; invisible as actors in
the civil rights struggle but who had long desired change. Out of this
work emerged new voices from the grassroots like Mississippi’s Fannie
Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who became a powerful national spokesperson
for civil rights. She was also, at 46-years-of-age in 1962, SNCC’s
oldest field secretary. This kind of close relationship with people at
the grassroots would characterize SNCC during its entire existence.
Youth
No civil rights action in history had ever swept the South the way
that the sit-in movement did; certainly no action driven and led by
young people. SNCC’s youthfulness was important to what it was and what
it became. The number and manner in which young people began emerging as
leaders in the civil rights movement in 1960, was unprecedented. As
Martin Luther King put it at a Durham, North Carolina civil rights rally
less than a month after sit-ins erupted in Greensboro, “What is new in
your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by
students.” An often ignored effect of this student action was their
making legitimate going to jail for a principle. And this changed the
students, laying the foundation for everything they would do as SNCC
organizers. Charles Sherrod from Petersburg, Virginia was the first of
the sit-in students to postpone his education to work full-time with
SNCC. He pioneered grassroots organizing in Southwest Georgia. But a few
months before going there to begin that work, on the first anniversary
of the Greensboro sit-in, he sat-in and was arrested in Rock Hill, South
Carolina. He refused bail and served a 30-day sentence of hard labor on
a road gang. Upon his release, Sherrod offered a vivid articulation of
how students like himself were changing: “You get ideas in jail. You
talk with other young people you have never seen. Right away we
recognize each other. People like yourself, getting out of the past.
We’re up all night, sharing creativity, planning action. You learn the
truth in prison, you learn wholeness. You find out the difference
between being dead and alive.”
And in a 1962 field report, 22-year-old Sam Block, who was the
first SNCC organizer to begin working in the Mississippi Delta,
demonstrates a courage and commitment that can perhaps only belong to
youth: “We went up to register and it was the first time visiting the
courthouse in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the sheriff came up to me and
he asked me, he said, ‘Nigger where you from?’ I told him, Well I’m a
native Mississippian. He said, ‘Yeh, yeh, I know that, but where you
from? I don’t know where you from.’ I said, Well, around some counties.
He said, ‘Well I know that, [but] I know you ain’t from here ‘cause I
know every nigger and his mammy.’ I said, You know all the niggers, do
you know any colored people? He got angry. He spat in my face and he
walked away. So he came back and turned around and told me, ‘I don’t
want to see you in town any more. The best thing you better do is pack
your clothes and get out and don’t never come back no more.’ I said,
Well, sheriff, if you don’t want to see me here, I think the best thing
for you to do is pack your clothes and leave, get out of town, ‘cause
I’m here to stay; I came here to do a job and this is my intention. I’m
going to do this job.…”
SNCC Organizing Projects
The organizing work was both dull and dangerous, mostly involving
door-to-door canvassing in an effort to persuade legitimately fearful
potential Black registrants to brave the risks of going to county
courthouses to register to vote knowing that the chances of actually
getting registered were virtually nil. Courthouse clerks could ask
anyone attempting to register questions like how many bubbles were in a
bar of soap; or to interpret a complex section of the state constitution
to their satisfaction as a requirement for registration. And almost
always, economic or violent reprisal followed attempts by Blacks to
register to vote. At a deeper level than the immediate political concern
with voter registration, SNCC’s work was also about cultivating new
local leadership and reinforcing existing local leadership. SNCC field
secretaries did not see themselves as community leaders but as community
organizers, a distinction that empowered local participants by
reinforcing the idea at the heart of SNCC’s work in every project that
“local people” could and should take control of their own lives.
Much of
what SNCC organizers did was demonstrate they were willing to stay in
these communities despite the violence; that they could not be run out
by the violence. Conversations on front porches, in dirt yards, amidst
crops in cotton, tobacco and sugar cane fields, in small church meetings
and in plantation sharecropper shacks, explored citizenship and the
idea of gaining control of the decision-making affecting daily life.
Being able to do this on a large scale was uncertain because fear kept
many doors closed, but even attempting to do this sort of work in the
rural black belt south could be counted as a breakthrough, a modest but
important victory of commitment over terror. And though large numbers
did not publically and politically surface in response to SNCC
organizing efforts, a small number of the very brave did, teaching the
SNCC “organizers” how to listen as well as how to talk; how to
understand the communities they were in; and to know when they were in
danger and when they were not. “We were the community’s children,” wrote
SNCC’s legendary Mississippi project director Bob Moses in his book
Radical Equations. “And that closeness rendered moot the label of
‘outside agitator.’”
There is not enough space here to detail every single one of SNCC
organizing projects, but during the eight years of its existence SNCC
had projects in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina,
Virginia, Maryland, and Texas. There were more SNCC field secretaries
working full time in southern communities than any civil rights
organization before or since. And there were two notable organizing
projects that need mentioning here and are important to SNCC’s legacy:
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party: In Mississippi and
throughout the black belt, the savage never-ending oppressive cycle that
kept black people politically disenfranchised had two connected halves.
1) Blacks were deliberately and systematically kept illiterate (and the
public school system was part of this) while at the same time literacy
was the primary requirement for voter registration. 2) Violence and
reprisal was the response to any Black effort aimed at gaining the
political franchise; but because few blacks were willing to brave the
virtually certain terroristic response to seeking the franchise, they
were said to be “apathetic.”
To attack this cycle in Mississippi, SNCC and other civil rights
organizations in the state established in churches, small shops and
other places within Black communities, voter registration facilities;
safe places for voter registration. More than 80,000 people “registered
to vote” under these simpler and more comfortable conditions, thus
arming organizers with concrete evidence that apathy was not the
problem. This “freedom registration” was followed-up with the organizing
of a “freedom party”—the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).
Unlike the all-white so-called “regular” state Democratic Party, the
MFDP was open to all without regard to race. Carefully following all of
the delegate selection rules for the 1964 Democratic Party national
convention, the MFDP challenged the legitimacy of seating Mississippi’s
official all-white delegation. Although the MFDP lost the challenge in a
still bitterly remembered political fight which brought the weight of
the White House down on them, their challenge forced changes that
dramatically reshaped both the state and national Democratic Party.
The Lowndes County Freedom Organization: When a small group of SNCC
organizers, led by Stokely Carmichael, entered notorious Lowndes County
Alabama shortly after the Selma-to-Montgomery march, not a single black
person in this county, whose population was 80 percent Black, was
registered to vote. In fact, no Black person in this county nicknamed
“Bloody Lowndes” was known to have been registered to vote in the entire
20th century. Remarkably, in less than a year, despite violence that
included the murder and the attempted murders of civil rights
organizers, Blacks were a majority of the registered voters in Lowndes
County. This success in voter registration was assisted by the August
1965 signing into law of the Voting Rights Act. But SNCC’s organizing
here took root around the idea of an independent Black political party.
That party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) pioneered the
development of written and visual materials clearly illustrating
through words and pictures the importance of the vote, or as one
organizer put it years later, “regime change.”
The symbol of the LCFO was a black panther, making it the first
black panther party in the nation. In 1966, the LCFO fielded candidates
for county offices and the party’s instructions were simple: “Pull the
Black Panther lever and go home.” (The symbol of Alabama’s Democratic
Party was a white rooster with the words “white supremacy for the right”
written above it.) Fraud by the county’s white powers denied the LCFO
victory and the election was followed by the expulsion of Black
sharecroppers and tenant farmers supporting the LCFO. Nonetheless, in
1970 the first Black Sherriff was elected in Lowndes County. Meanwhile,
the black panther symbol had leapt across country to Oakland, California
where the now much better known Black Panther Party was formed by Huey
P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Here, too, in Lowndes County are the roots of
Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 call for Black Power as chairman of SNCC.
Greenwood MS, June 1966, on the Meredith March. SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) calls for "Black Power."
LEGACY
In the broadest sense, SNCC’s legacy is the legacy of grassroots
organizing. Within this frame, SNCC and the field organizers of CORE,
SCLC and the NAACP are really an interconnected force that in just one
intense decade successfully challenged and changed America for the
better. But there are specific aspects of this broad legacy that belong
to SNCC and justify a formal effort to both collect and create material
that will help future generations understand, draw lessons from, and
perhaps use the SNCC experience in continuing efforts to fashion “a more
perfect union” here in the United States.
First, by putting their lives continuously at risk through
committed grassroots organizing, this relatively small group of young
people broke the back of a racist and restrictive exclusionary order
that was tolerated at the highest levels of government. Much of what
kept white supremacy and segregation in place was the absence of direct
and continuous challenge to it and the undramatic grassroots work on the
back roads and in the towns and villages of the deep south for voting
rights also made it impossible to ignore the will to freedom. And it
needs to be said here that this work liberated Whites as well as Blacks.
Indeed, the MFDP and that party’s 1964 challenge not only led to a
two-party system in Mississippi and the south, but also forced via the
1972 “McGovern Rules” changes in political practices that have
permanently expanded the participation of women and minorities. There is
a straight line connecting the MFDP with the election of Barak Obama to
the U.S. presidency.
Nationwide, student struggle was also inspired by the southern movement and these movements expanded and accelerated in the decade of the 1960s. SDS’s grassroots Educational and Research Action Projects (ERAP) in the North grew out of discussions with SNCC and observation of its work. The Northern Student Movement (NSM), initially formed in 1961 to aid SNCC, became an activist organization with nearly 50 campus chapters taking on welfare reform, dysfunctional schools and other community organizing projects.
The Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 which brought nearly 1,000
students from around the nation to Mississippi for a “freedom summer”
conveyed the ideas and ideals of the southern freedom movement into a
whole generation from which the future leadership of the country would
be drawn. Most immediately, the free speech movement that erupted on the
University of California campus at Berkeley during the 1964-65 school
year, was initiated by Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteer Mario Savio.
SNCC’s articulation of “Black Power” fostered a new black
consciousness. The Black and Africana studies departments on college
campuses today have roots in the Mississippi “freedom schools” of 1964,
the earlier Nonviolent High School created in 1961 by SNCC in McComb,
Mississippi when students were expelled for protesting, and the general
idea of education for liberation that is taking the form today in the
growing struggle over quality public education as a civil right.
Other movements gained strength from the pool of ideas found in
SNCC: Chicano farm workers, who were facing sheriffs and going to jail
in the late 1950s, invited SNCC workers to help with their efforts in
the late 1960s. Discussion of sexism and women’s rights within SNCC, as
well as SNCC’s real life examples of empowered, respected women who led
local movements and held key positions in the organization, encouraged
and reinforced a burgeoning feminist movement.
But more than anything else, the SNCC legacy is found in the
veterans, many of who have continued to work for “a more perfect union.”
Five SNCC veterans have been recipients of MacArthur Foundation Genius
awards. Former SNCC communications director Julian Bond became board
chair of the NAACP. Former SNCC chair John Lewis is now serving his 15th
term as congressman from Atlanta’s 5th congressional district. Across
the country, and especially in the south, SNCC veterans are influential
leaders and activists. Once young and mentored by “elders” who had long
labored in the fields of social change, SNCC veterans now continue that
tradition and are now, who “they” were. Ella Baker’s words best define
this legacy: “We who believe in freedom cannot rest.”
RECOMMENDED READING FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
On The Road To Freedom, A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail, by Charles E. Cobb Jr.
Hands on the Freedom Plow, Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, edited by Faith Holsaert, et. al.
Deep in Our Hearts, Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, by Joan Browning, et al.
Many Minds, One Heart, SNCC’s Dream for a New America, by Wesley Hogan
SNCC, the New Abolitionists, by Howard Zinn
In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson
Ready For Revolution, the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael, by Stokely Carmichael with Ekueme Michael Thelwell
The Making of Black Revolutionaries, by James Forman
The River of No Return, by Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell
Walking With the Wind, by John Lewis with Michael D’orso
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, by Barbara Ransby
Ella Baker, Freedom Bound, by Joanne Grant
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, by Bob Zellner with Constance Curry
Freedom Song, by Mary King
Letters From Mississippi, edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez
Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Radical Equations, Civil Rights From Mississippi to the Algebra Project, by Robert P. Moses and Charles Cobb
Hands on the Freedom Plow, Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, edited by Faith Holsaert, et. al.
Deep in Our Hearts, Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, by Joan Browning, et al.
Many Minds, One Heart, SNCC’s Dream for a New America, by Wesley Hogan
SNCC, the New Abolitionists, by Howard Zinn
In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson
Ready For Revolution, the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael, by Stokely Carmichael with Ekueme Michael Thelwell
The Making of Black Revolutionaries, by James Forman
The River of No Return, by Cleveland Sellers with Robert Terrell
Walking With the Wind, by John Lewis with Michael D’orso
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, by Barbara Ransby
Ella Baker, Freedom Bound, by Joanne Grant
The Wrong Side of Murder Creek, by Bob Zellner with Constance Curry
Freedom Song, by Mary King
Letters From Mississippi, edited by Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez
Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Radical Equations, Civil Rights From Mississippi to the Algebra Project, by Robert P. Moses and Charles Cobb
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