Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, often pronounced ) was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.

By the mid-1960s the measured nature of the gains made, and the violence with which they were resisted, were generating dissent from the group's principles of nonviolence, of white participation in the movement, and of field-driven, as opposed to national-office, leadership and direction. At the same time some original organizers were now working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others were being lost to a de-segregating Democratic Party and to federally-funded anti-poverty programs. Following an aborted merger with the Black Panther Party in 1968, SNCC effectively dissolved.

Because of the successes of its early years, SNCC is credited with breaking down barriers, both institutional and psychological, to the empowerment of African-American communities.

1960: Emergence from the sit-in movement

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in April 1960 at a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, from 19 northern colleges, and from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Among those attending who were to emerge as strategists for the committee and its field projects were Fisk University student Diane Nash, Tennessee State student Marion Barry, and American Baptist Theological Seminary students James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard Lafayette, all involved in the Nashville Student Movement; their mentor at Vanderbilt University, James Lawson; Charles F. McDew, who led student protests at South Carolina State University; J. Charles Jones, Johnson C. Smith University, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at whites-only department stores and service counters throughout Charlotte, North Carolina; Julian Bond from Morehouse College, Atlanta; and Stokely Carmichael from Howard University, Washington, D.C..

The invitation had been issued by Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of the SCLC, but the conference had been organized by then SCLC director Ella Baker. Baker was a critic of what she perceived as King's top-down leadership at the SCLC. "Strong people don't need strong leaders," she told the young activists. Speaking to the students' own experience of protest organization, it was Baker's vision that appeared to prevail.

SNCC did not constitute itself as the youth wing of SCLC. It steered an independent course that sought to channel the students' program through the organizers out in the field rather than through its national office in Atlanta ("small and rather dingy," located above a beauty parlor near the city's five Black colleges). Under the constitution adopted, the SNCC comprised representatives from each of the affiliated "local protest groups," and these groups (and not the committee and its support staff) were to be recognized as "the primary expression of a protest in a given area."

Under the same general principle, that "the people who do the work should make the decisions", the students committed to a " participatory democracy" which, avoiding office hierarchy, sought to reach decisions by consensus.Casey Hayden (2015), "Only Love Is Radical." ''Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today'', ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 65. Group meetings were convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone who was left was in agreement with the decision. Given the physical risks involved in many activities in which SNCC was to engage this was thought particularly important: "no one felt comfortable making a decision by majority rule that might cost somebody else's life."

Initially the SNCC continued the focus on sit-ins and boycotts targeting establishments (restaurants, retail stores, theaters) and public amenities maintaining whites-only or segregated facilities. But it was to adopt a new tactic that helped galvanize the movement nationally. In February 1961, Diane Nash, Ruby Doris Smith, Charles Sherrod, and J. Charles Jones joined the Rock Hill, South Carolina sit-in protests and followed the example of the Friendship Nine in enduring an extended jail time rather than post bail.Clayborne Carson and Heidi Hess
"Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee"
From Darlene Clark Hine (ed.), ''Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia'', New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993. The "Jail-no-Bail" stand was seen as a moral refusal to accept, and to effectively subsidize, a corrupted constitution-defiant police and judicial system—while at the same time saving the movement money it did not have.

As way to "dramatize that the church, the house of all people, fosters segregation more than any other institution," SNCC students also participated in "kneel-ins"—kneeling in prayer outside of Whites-only churches. Presbyterians churches, targeted because their "ministers lacked the protection and support of a church hierarchy," were not long indifferent. In August 1960, the 172nd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church wrote to SNCC: "Laws and customs requiring racial discrimination are, in our judgement, such serious violations of the law of God as to justify peaceful and orderly disobedience or disregard of these laws."

1961 Freedom Rides

Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to dramatize the southern states' disregard of the Supreme Court rulings ( ''Morgan v. Virginia'', 1946 and ''Boynton v. Virginia'', 1960) outlawing segregation in interstate transportation, in May 1961, the first Freedom Riders (seven black, six white, led by CORE director James Farmer) traveling together on interstate buses were brutally attacked by mobs of Ku Klux Klansmen in Anniston. Local police stood by. After they were assaulted again in Birmingham, Alabama, and under pressure from the Kennedy Administration, CORE announced it was discontinuing the action. Undeterred, Diane Nash called for new riders. Oretha Castle Haley, Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, Stokely Carmichael, and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland joined John Lewis and Hank Thomas, the two young SNCC members of the original Ride. They traveled on to a savage beating in Montgomery, Alabama, to arrest in Jackson, Mississippi, and to confinement in the Maximum Security (Death Row) Unit of the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary--"Parchman Farm".

Recognizing SNCC's determination, CORE and the SCLC rejected the Administration's call for a "cooling off" period and joined with the students in a Freedom Riders Coordinating Committee to keep the Rides rolling through June and into September. During those months, more than 60 different Freedom Rides criss-crossed the South, most of them converging on Jackson, where every Rider was arrested, more than 300 in total. An unknown number were arrested in other Southern towns, and many were beaten including, in Monroe, North Carolina, SNCC's Executive Secretary James Forman. It is estimated that almost 450 people, black and white in equal number, participated.

With CORE, SNCC had been making plans for a mass demonstration in Washington when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy finally prevailed on the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue rules giving force the repudiation of the " separate but equal" doctrine. After the new ICC rules took effect on November 1, 1961, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains; "white" and "colored" signs were to be removed from the terminals (lunch counters, drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms) serving interstate customers.

To test the ICC ruling and in the hope of mobilizing the local black community in a broader campaign, in October 1961 SNCC members Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon led a sit-in at the bus terminal in Albany, Georgia. By mid-December, having drawn in the NAACP and a number of other organizations, the Albany Movement had more than 500 protesters in jail. There they were joined briefly by Martin Luther King Jr. and by Ralph Abernathy. King sought to take advantage of the national media attention his arrest had drawn: In return for the city's commitment to comply with the ICC ruling and to release those protesters willing to post bail, King agreed to leave town. The city reneged, however, so protests and subsequent arrests continued into 1962.

News reports across the country portrayed the Albany debacle as "one of the most stunning defeats" in King's career. What they also reported was conflict with SNCC. The ''New York Times'' noted that King's SCLC had taken steps "that seemed to indicate they were assuming control" of the movement in Albany, and that the student group had "moved immediately to recapture its dominant position on the scene." If the differences between the organizations were not resolved, the paper predicted "tragic consequences".

1962 voter registration campaigns

As a result of meetings brokered by the Kennedy Administration with large liberal foundations, the Voter Education Project (VEP) was formed in early 1962 to channel funds into voter drives in the eleven Southern states. Inducted by sit-in campaigns and hardened in the Freedom Rides, many student activists saw VEP as a government attempt to co-opt their movement. Lonnie C. King Jr., a student from Morehouse College in Atlanta, felt that "by rechanneling its energies" what the Kennedys were "trying to do was kill the Movement." But others were already convinced that obtaining the right to vote was the key to unlocking political power for Black Americans. Older Black southerners had been pressing SNCC to move in this direction for some time. Mississippi NAACP leader Amzie Moore had tabled a voter registration drive at the SNCC's second conference in October 1960.

A split over the priority to be accorded voter registration was avoided by Ella Baker's intervention. She suggested that the organization create two distinct wings: one for direct action (which Diane Nash was to lead) and the other for voter registration. But the white violence visited in the summer of 1961 on the first registration efforts (under the direction of Bob Moses) in McComb, Mississippi, including the murder of activist Herbert Lee, persuaded many that in the Deep South voter registration was as direct a challenge to white supremacy as anything they had been doing before. "If you went into Mississippi and talked about voter registration they're going to hit you on the side of the head and that," Reggie Robinson, one of the SNCC's first field secretaries, quipped is "as direct as you can get."

In 1962, Bob Moses garnered further support for SNCC's efforts by forging a coalition, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), with, among other groups, the NAACP and the National Council of Churches. With VEP and COFO funding SNCC was able to expand its voter registration efforts into the Mississippi Delta around Greenwood, Southwest Georgia around Albany, and the Alabama Black Belt around Selma. All of these projects endured police harassment and arrests; KKK violence including shootings, bombings, and assassinations; and economic sanctions against those blacks who dared to try to register.

1963

Although it is an event largely remembered for King's delivery of his "I Have a Dream" speech, SNCC had a significant role in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But it was at odds with the other sponsoring civil rights, labor, and religious organizations, all of whom were prepared to applaud the Kennedy Administration for its Civil Rights Bill (the Civil Rights Act of 1964).

1963 March on Washington

In the version of his speech leaked to the press John Lewis remarked that those marching for jobs and freedom "have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages...or no wages at all." He went on to announce:

In good conscience, we cannot support the administration's civil rights bill. This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges like those in Americus, Georgia, where four young men are in jail, facing a death penalty, for engaging in peaceful protest. I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, the black masses are on the march for jobs and for freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't be a "cooling-off period."

Under pressure from the other groups, changes were made. "We cannot support" the 1963 Kennedy Civil Rights Bill was re-scripted as "we support with reservations". In the view of the then SNCC executive secretary, James Forman, those who had pushed the change were selling out to the cautious liberal politics of labor-movement leadership and the Catholic and Protestant church hierarchy. "If people had known they had come to Washington to aid the Kennedy administration, they would not have come in the numbers they did."

1963 Women's March

A feature of the march itself, was that men and women were directed to proceed separately and that only male speakers were scheduled to address the Lincoln Memorial rally. Despite protesting behind the scenes with Anna Hedgeman (who was to go on to co-found the National Organization for Women), SNCC staffer and Ella Baker protégé Casey Hayden found herself walking with other women unnoticed up Independence Avenue while the media recorded the men marching down Constitution Avenue. In the event, a few women were allowed to sit on the Lincoln Memorial platform and Daisy Bates, who had been instrumental in the integration of Little Rock Central High School was permitted to speak briefly.

Leesburg Stockade

The previous month, July 1963, SNCC was involved in another march that eventually made headlines. With the NAACP in Americus, Georgia, SNCC organized a protest march on a segregated movie theater that concluded with the arrest of upwards of 33 high-school girls. The "Stolen Girls" were imprisoned 45 days without charge in brutal conditions in the Lee County Public Works building, the Leesburg Stockade... It took SNCC photographer Danny Lyon smuggling himself into the Stockade to publicize the case nationally.

1964 Freedom Summer

In the fall of 1963, with the assistance of 100 northern volunteers SNCC conducted the Freedom Ballot, a mock gubernatorial election in which over 80,000 black Mississippians demonstrated their willingness to exercise the constitutional right to vote that state law and violent intimidation had denied them since Reconstruction. (Only 6.7 per cent of the black voting age population of Mississippi was registered, compared to 70.2 per cent of the white voting age population). In coordination with CORE, the SNCC followed up on the ballot with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, also known as Freedom Summer. This brought over 700 white Northern students to the South, where they volunteered as teachers and organizers.

According to Julian Bond, their presence can be credited to freelance social activist Allard Lowenstein