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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, often pronounced ) was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the
civil rights movement The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional Racial segregation in the United States, racial segregation, Racial discrimination ...
during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led
sit-ins A sit-in or sit-down is a form of direct action that involves one or more people occupying an area for a protest, often to promote political, social, or economic change. The protestors gather conspicuously in a space or building, refusing to mo ...
at segregated lunch counters in
Greensboro, North Carolina Greensboro (; formerly Greensborough) is a city in and the county seat of Guilford County, North Carolina, United States. It is the third-most populous city in North Carolina after Charlotte and Raleigh, the 69th-most populous city in the Un ...
, and
Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the List of muni ...
, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic
segregation Segregation may refer to: Separation of people * Geographical segregation, rates of two or more populations which are not homogenous throughout a defined space * School segregation * Housing segregation * Racial segregation, separation of humans ...
and political exclusion of
African Americans African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
. From 1962, with the support of the
Voter Education Project Voter Education Project (VEP) raised and distributed foundation funds to civil rights organizations for voter education and registration work in the southern United States from 1962 to 1992. The project was federally endorsed by the Kennedy adminis ...
, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the
Deep South The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion in the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states most dependent on plantations and slavery prior to the American Civil War. Following the war ...
. Affiliates such as the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), also referred to as the Freedom Democratic Party, was an American political party created in 1964 as a branch of the populist Freedom Democratic organization in the state of Mississippi during the ...
and the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization The Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), also known as the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) or Black Panther party, was an American political party founded during 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama. The independent third party was formed ...
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 The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civi ...
(SCLC), and others were being lost to a de-segregating
Democratic Party Democratic Party most often refers to: *Democratic Party (United States) Democratic Party and similar terms may also refer to: Active parties Africa *Botswana Democratic Party *Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea *Gabonese Democratic Party *Demo ...
and to federally-funded anti-poverty programs. Following an aborted merger with the
Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, Califo ...
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 Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the List of North Carolina county seats, seat of Wake County, North Carolina, Wake County in the United States. It is the List of municipalities in North Carolina, second-most ...
, attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, from 19 northern colleges, and from the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is an African-American civil rights organization based in Atlanta, Georgia. SCLC is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., who had a large role in the American civi ...
(SCLC), the
Congress of Racial Equality The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the civil rights movement. Founded in 1942, its stated mission is "to bring about ...
(CORE), the
Fellowship of Reconciliation The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FoR or FOR) is the name used by a number of religious nonviolent organizations, particularly in English-speaking countries. They are linked by affiliation to the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). ...
(FOR), the
National Student Association The United States National Student Association (NSA) was a confederation of college and university student governments that was in operation from 1947 to 1978. Founding and early years The NSA was founded at a conference at the University of Wisc ...
(NSA), and
Students for a Democratic Society Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships ...
(SDS). Among those attending who were to emerge as strategists for the committee and its field projects were
Fisk University Fisk University is a private historically black liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1866 and its campus is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1930, Fisk was the first Africa ...
student
Diane Nash Diane Judith Nash (born May 15, 1938) is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first s ...
, Tennessee State student
Marion Barry Marion Shepilov Barry (born Marion Barry Jr.; March 6, 1936 – November 23, 2014) was an American politician who served as the second and fourth mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991 and 1995 to 1999. A Democrat, Barry had served ...
, and
American Baptist Theological Seminary American Baptist College (previously American Baptist Theological Seminary) is a private, Baptist college in Nashville, Tennessee, affiliated with the National Baptist Convention, USA. Founded in 1924, its predecessor in black Baptist education w ...
students
James Bevel James Luther Bevel (October 19, 1936 – December 19, 2008) was a minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and then as its Director of Direct ...
,
John Lewis John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
, and
Bernard Lafayette use both this parameter and , birth_date to display the person's date of birth, date of death, and age at death) --> , death_place = , death_cause = , body_discovered = , resting_place = , resting_place_coordinates = ...
, all involved in the
Nashville Student Movement The Nashville Student Movement was an organization that challenged racial segregation in Nashville, Tennessee during the Civil Rights Movement. It was created during workshops in nonviolence taught by James Lawson. The students from this org ...
; their mentor at
Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...
, James Lawson; Charles F. McDew, who led student protests at
South Carolina State University South Carolina State University (SCSU or SC State) is a public, historically black, land-grant university in Orangeburg, South Carolina, United States. It is the only public, historically black land-grant institution in South Carolina, is a memb ...
;
J. Charles Jones Joseph Charles Jones (August 23, 1937 – December 27, 2019) was an American Civil Rights Movement, civil rights leader, Attorney at law, attorney, co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and chairperson of the SNCC's ...
,
Johnson C. Smith University Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU) is a private historically black university in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA) and accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). The univer ...
, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at whites-only department stores and service counters throughout
Charlotte Charlotte ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 census, making Charlotte the 16th-most populo ...
,
North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
;
Julian Bond Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the e ...
from
Morehouse College , mottoeng = And there was light (literal translation of Latin itself translated from Hebrew: "And light was made") , type = Private historically black men's liberal arts college , academic_affiliations ...
, Atlanta; and
Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture (; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941November 15, 1998) was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the Unite ...
from
Howard University Howard University (Howard) is a private, federally chartered historically black research university in Washington, D.C. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity" and accredited by the Middle States Commissi ...
, Washington, D.C.. The invitation had been issued by
Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...
on behalf of the SCLC, but the conference had been organized by then SCLC director
Ella Baker Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and t ...
. 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 Participatory democracy, participant democracy or participative democracy is a form of government in which citizens participate individually and directly in political decisions and policies that affect their lives, rather than through elected repr ...
" 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
boycott A boycott is an act of nonviolent, voluntary abstention from a product, person, organization, or country as an expression of protest. It is usually for moral, social, political, or environmental reasons. The purpose of a boycott is to inflict som ...
s 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 Rock Hill is the largest city in York County, South Carolina and the fifth-largest city in the state. It is also the fourth-largest city of the Charlotte metropolitan area, behind Charlotte, Concord, and Gastonia (all located in North Carolina, ...
sit-in protests and followed the example of the
Friendship Nine The Friendship Nine, or Rock Hill Nine, was a group of African-American men who went to jail after staging a sit-in at a segregated McCrory's lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina in 1961. The group gained nationwide attention because they f ...
in enduring an extended jail time rather than post bail.Clayborne Carson and Heidi Hess
"Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee"
From
Darlene Clark Hine Darlene Clark Hine (born February 7, 1947) is an American author and professor in the field of African-American history. She is a recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal. Early life and education Darlene Clark was born in Morley, Missouri ...
(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 The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the civil rights movement. Founded in 1942, its stated mission is "to bring about ...
(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 James Leonard Farmer Jr. (January 12, 1920 – July 9, 1999) was an American civil rights activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement "who pushed for nonviolent protest to dismantle segregation, and served alongside Martin Luther King Jr." ...
) traveling together on interstate buses were brutally attacked by mobs of
Ku Klux Klan The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...
smen in Anniston. Local police stood by. After they were assaulted again in
Birmingham, Alabama Birmingham ( ) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama's most populous county. As of the 2021 census estimates, Birmingham had a population of 197,575, down 1% fr ...
, and under pressure from the
Kennedy Administration John F. Kennedy's tenure as the 35th president of the United States, began with his inauguration on January 20, 1961, and ended with his assassination on November 22, 1963. A Democrat from Massachusetts, he took office following the 1960 p ...
, CORE announced it was discontinuing the action. Undeterred,
Diane Nash Diane Judith Nash (born May 15, 1938) is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first s ...
called for new riders. Oretha Castle Haley, Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard,
James Bevel James Luther Bevel (October 19, 1936 – December 19, 2008) was a minister and leader of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in the United States. As a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and then as its Director of Direct ...
,
Marion Barry Marion Shepilov Barry (born Marion Barry Jr.; March 6, 1936 – November 23, 2014) was an American politician who served as the second and fourth mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991 and 1995 to 1999. A Democrat, Barry had served ...
, Angeline Butler,
Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture (; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941November 15, 1998) was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the Unite ...
, and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland joined
John Lewis John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
and
Hank Thomas Henry "Hank" James Thomas (born August 29, 1941) is an African American civil rights activist and entrepreneur. Thomas was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who traveled on Greyhound and Trailways buses through the South in 1961 to protest ra ...
, the two young SNCC members of the original Ride. They traveled on to a savage beating in
Montgomery, Alabama Montgomery is the capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama and the county seat of Montgomery County. Named for the Irish soldier Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River, on the coastal Plain of the Gulf of Mexico. In the 202 ...
, to arrest in
Jackson, Mississippi Jackson, officially the City of Jackson, is the Capital city, capital of and the List of municipalities in Mississippi, most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The city is also one of two county seats of Hinds County, 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 Monroe is a city in and the county seat of Union County, North Carolina, United States. The population increased from 32,797 in 2010 to 34,551 in 2020. It is within the rapidly growing Charlotte metropolitan area. Monroe has a council-manager f ...
, SNCC's Executive Secretary
James Forman James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutio ...
. 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 Robert Francis Kennedy (November 20, 1925June 6, 1968), also known by his initials RFK and by the nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, ...
finally prevailed on the
Interstate Commerce Commission The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was a regulatory agency in the United States created by the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The agency's original purpose was to regulate railroads (and later trucking) to ensure fair rates, to eliminat ...
(ICC) to issue rules giving force the repudiation of the "
separate but equal Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protec ...
" 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 Charles Melvin Sherrod (January 2, 1937 – October 11, 2022) was an American minister and civil rights activist. During the civil rights movement, Sherrod helped found the Albany Movement while serving as field secretary for southwest Georgia ...
and
Cordell Reagon Cordell Hull Reagon (February 22, 1943 – November 12, 1996) was an American singer and activist. He was the founding member of The Freedom Singers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a leader of the Albany Movement and a ...
led a sit-in at the bus terminal in
Albany, Georgia Albany ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Georgia. Located on the Flint River, it is the seat of Dougherty County, and is the sole incorporated city in that county. Located in southwest Georgia, it is the principal city of the Albany, Georgia ...
. By mid-December, having drawn in the
NAACP The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...
and a number of other organizations, the
Albany Movement The Albany Movement was a desegregation and voters' rights coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. This movement was founded by local black leaders and ministers, as well as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commit ...
had more than 500 protesters in jail. There they were joined briefly by
Martin Luther King Jr. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist, one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968 ...
and by
Ralph Abernathy Ralph David Abernathy Sr. (March 11, 1926 – April 17, 1990) was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he was a close friend and ...
. 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 ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' 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 Voter Education Project (VEP) raised and distributed foundation funds to civil rights organizations for voter education and registration work in the southern United States from 1962 to 1992. The project was federally endorsed by the Kennedy adminis ...
(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 Amzie Moore (September 23, 1911 – February 1, 1982) was an African-American civil rights leader and entrepreneur in the Mississippi Delta. Early life Amzie Moore is one of the lesser known Civil Rights Movement leaders, but was extremely in ...
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 Robert Moses (1888–1981) was an American city planner. Robert Moses may also refer to: * Bob Moses (activist) (1935–2021), American educator and civil rights activist * Bob Moses, American football player in the 1962 Cotton Bowl Classic * Bob M ...
) in
McComb, Mississippi McComb is a city in Pike County, Mississippi, United States. The city is approximately south of Jackson. As of the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 12,790. It is the principal city of the McComb, Mississippi Micropolitan Statist ...
, 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 The Mississippi Delta, also known as the Yazoo–Mississippi Delta, or simply the Delta, is the distinctive northwest section of the U.S. state of Mississippi (and portions of Arkansas and Louisiana) that lies between the Mississippi and Yazoo ...
around Greenwood, Southwest
Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...
around Albany, and the Alabama Black Belt around
Selma Selma may refer to: Places *Selma, Algeria *Selma, Nova Scotia, Canada *Selma, Switzerland, village in the Grisons United States: *Selma, Alabama, city in Dallas County, best known for the Selma to Montgomery marches *Selma, Arkansas *Selma, Cali ...
. 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 The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as simply the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic righ ...
. 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 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and United States labor law, labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on Race (human categorization), race, Person of color, color, religion, sex, and nationa ...
).


1963 March on Washington

In the version of his speech leaked to the press
John Lewis John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
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 James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutio ...
, 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 The Lincoln Memorial is a U.S. national memorial built to honor the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is on the western end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., across from the Washington Monument, and is in the ...
rally. Despite protesting behind the scenes with Anna Hedgeman (who was to go on to co-found the
National Organization for Women The National Organization for Women (NOW) is an American feminist organization. Founded in 1966, it is legally a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. The organization consists of 550 chapters in all 50 U.S. states and in Washington, D.C. It ...
), SNCC staffer and Ella Baker protégé
Casey Hayden Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden (born October 31, 1937), was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early ...
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 Little Rock Central High School (LRCHS) is an accredited comprehensive public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States. The school was the site of forced desegregation in 1957 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation by ...
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 Americus is the county seat of Sumter County, Georgia, United States. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 16,230. It is the principal city of the Americus Micropolitan Statistical Area, a micropolitan area that covers Schley an ...
, 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 Danny Lyon (born March 16, 1942) is an American photographer and filmmaker. All of Lyon's publications work in the style of photographic New Journalism, meaning that the photographer has become immersed in with, and is a participant of, the doc ...
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 Reconstruction may refer to: Politics, history, and sociology *Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company *'' Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Unio ...
. (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 Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. ...
. This brought over 700 white Northern students to the South, where they volunteered as teachers and organizers. According to
Julian Bond Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the e ...
, their presence can be credited to freelance social activist
Allard Lowenstein Allard Kenneth Lowenstein (January 16, 1929 – March 14, 1980)Lowenstein's gravestone, Arlington National Cemeteryphoto onlineon the cemetery's official website. Accessed online 28 October 2006.Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, alongside local activist (Freedom Rider and voter educator)
James Chaney James Earl Chaney (May 30, 1943 – June 21, 1964) was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) civil rights workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. The others were Andrew Goodman an ...
, this indeed was to be the effect. Freedom Summer attracted international attention. For SNCC the focus of summer project became the organization, through the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), also referred to as the Freedom Democratic Party, was an American political party created in 1964 as a branch of the populist Freedom Democratic organization in the state of Mississippi during the ...
(MFDP), of a parallel state Democratic Party primary. The MFDP would send an integrated slate of delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City and there contest the credentials of the all-white Mississippi regulars. As part of this project SNCC's Charlie Cobb proposed summer field schools. Encouraging youth "to articulate their own desires, demands, and questions," the schools would help ensure a movement for social change in the state that would continue to be led by Mississippians. This was, he suggested, what organizing for voter registration was all about – "challenging people in various ways to take control of their own lives." Over the course of Freedom Summer, COFO set up more than 40
Freedom Schools Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative, and free schools for African Americans mostly in the South. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and ...
in African-American communities across Mississippi. More than 3,000 students attended, many of whom participated in registration efforts. With the encouragement of SNCC field secretary Frank Smith, a meeting of cotton pickers at a Freedom School in
Shaw, Mississippi Shaw is a city in Bolivar and Sunflower counties, Mississippi, United States, located in the Mississippi Delta region. The name was derived from an old Indian tribe northeast of this region. The population was 1,952 at the 2010 census. History ...
, gave birth to the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. At its peak, in the summer of 1965 the MFLU had 1,350 members and about 350 on strike. On August 4, 1964, before the state MFDP convention, the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were discovered buried in an earthen dam. Missing for weeks since disappearing after investigating a church burning in June 1964, they were subjects of a massive manhunt that involved the FBI and United States sailors from a nearby base. In the course of the search the corpses of several black Mississippians were uncovered whose disappearances had not previously attracted attention outside the Delta. Notwithstanding the national outrage generated by the murders, the Johnson Administration was determined to deflect the MDFP effort. With the presidential election approaching the priority was to protect the Democrats' "Solid South" against inroads being made by Republican
Barry Goldwater Barry Morris Goldwater (January 2, 1909 – May 29, 1998) was an American politician and United States Air Force officer who was a five-term U.S. Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party nominee for presiden ...
's campaign and to minimise support for
George Wallace George Corley Wallace Jr. (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was an American politician who served as the 45th governor of Alabama for four terms. A member of the Democratic Party, he is best remembered for his staunch segregationist and ...
's third-party challenge. The MFDP nonetheless got to the National Democratic Convention in
Atlantic City Atlantic City, often known by its initials A.C., is a coastal resort city in Atlantic County, New Jersey, United States. The city is known for its casinos, Boardwalk (entertainment district), boardwalk, and beaches. In 2020 United States censu ...
at the end of August. The proceedings of the convention's credentials committee were televised, giving a national and international audience to the testimony of SNCC field secretary
Fannie Lou Hamer Fannie Lou Hamer (; Townsend; October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977) was an American voting rights, voting and women's rights activist, Community organizing, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-foun ...
: to her portrayal of the brutalities of a sharecropper's life, and of the obstruction and violence encountered by an African American in the exercise her constitutional rights. (Hamer still bore the marks of beatings meted to her, her father and other SNCC workers by police in
Winona, Mississippi } Winona is a city in Montgomery County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 5,043 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Montgomery County. Winona is known in the local area as "The Crossroads of North Mississippi"; the interse ...
, just a year before). But with the all-white delegations of other southern states threatening to walk out, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in which the national Democratic Party offered the 68 MFDP delegates two at-large seats from where they could watch the floor proceedings but not take part. Fannie Lou Hamer led her delegates out of the convention: "We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired." Activists, Hayden suggests, were staggered to find the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner": "the core of SNCC's work, voter registration, was owopen to question." In the wake of Atlantic City, Elaine DeLott Baker recalls the desolation of project offices "that had only recently been hives of activity and energy" and the shutting down of Freedom Schools and community centers. In September 1964, at a COFO conference in New York, Bob Moses had to see off two challenges to SNCC's future role in Mississippi. First, he had to defend the SNCC's anti-"
Red-baiting Red-baiting, also known as ''reductio ad Stalinum'' () and red-tagging (in the Philippines), is an intention to discredit the validity of a political opponent and the opponent's logical argument by accusing, denouncing, attacking, or persecuting ...
" insistence on "free association": the NAACP had threatened to pull out of COFO if SNCC continued to engage the services of the
Communist Party A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A ...
associated
National Lawyers Guild The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States. The group was founded in 19 ...
. Second, he had deflect a proposal from Lowenstein and Democratic Party operative
Barney Frank Barnett Frank (born March 31, 1940) is a former American politician. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts from 1981 to 2013. A Democrat, Frank served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee ...
that in a future summer program decision-making be removed from organizers in the field to a new office in New York City responsible directly to liberal-foundation and church funders.
Dorothy Zellner Dorothy "Dottie" Miller Zellner is an American human rights activist, feminist, editor, lecturer, and writer. A veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement, she served as a recruiter for the Freedom Summer project and was co-editor of Student Voic ...
(a white radical SNCC staffer) remarked that, "What they owenstein and Frankwant is to let the Negro into the existing society, not to change it."


1965: Differences over "structure" and direction

At the end of 1964, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. Yet to many the movement seemed to be at a loss. In Mississippi
Casey Hayden Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden (born October 31, 1937), was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early ...
recalls everyone "reeling from the violence" (3 project workers killed; 4 people critically wounded; 80 beaten, 1,000 arrests; 35 shooting incidents, 37 churches bombed or burned; and 30 black businesses or homes burned), and also from "the new racial imbalance" following the summer influx of white student volunteers. The local black staff, "the backbone" of the projects were frustrated, even resentful, at having to deal "with a lot of young white people who were intellectual and moneyed," "ignorant" of realities on the ground, and who, with their greater visibility, brought additional risks. But most of all SNCC activists were "staggered" by the debacle in Atlantic City. Being confronted by the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner" had thrown "the core of SNCC's work", voter registration, into question. Notwithstanding passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 () is a landmark civil rights and United States labor law, labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on Race (human categorization), race, Person of color, color, religion, sex, and nationa ...
barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment and private education, and the equally broad
Voting Rights Act of 1965 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the civil rights movement ...
, faith in the Johnson Administration and its liberal allies was ebbing, and a gulf had opened between SNCC and other civil rights organizations. In Atlantic City Fannie Lou Hamer confessed she "lost hope in American society." Questions of strategic direction were also questions of "structure". What Stokely Carmichael described as "not an organization but a lot of people all doing what they think needs to be done," was for Hayden the very realization of her mentor's vision. Such was "the participatory, town-hall, consensus-forming nature" of the operation Ella Baker had helped set in motion that Hayden could feel herself to be "at the center of the organization" without having, "in any public way", to be "a leader". Yet when Elaine DeLott Baker joined Hayden in Mississippi in May 1964 she found "a hierarchy in place". Based "on considerations of race, the amount of time spent in the struggle, dangers suffered, and finally, of gender," this was not a hierarchy office, but "an unspoken understanding of who should speak up at meetings, who should propose ideas in public places, and who should remain silent." Black men were at the top, "then black women, followed by white men, and at the bottom, white women." Field staff, among them "women, black and white," still retained "an enormous amount of operational freedom, they were indeed the ones that were keeping things moving." But from those leading the debate on new directions for the movement DeLott Baker saw "little recognition of that reality," and the ground was shifting.
The violence and emotional stresses of four years had eroded the focus and spirits of many veteran field staffers who appeared to central office staff as increasingly unpredictable and unreliable. Communication between core staff and field staff was poor and getting worse. To field staff, the Atlanta office was out of touch and becoming more and more irrelevant. Meanwhile, there were no central strategies. Resources were dwindling and tensions over the allocation of resources were mounting
As an opportunity to take stock, to critique and reevaluate the movement, a retreat in
Waveland, Mississippi Waveland is a city located in Hancock County, Mississippi, United States, on the Gulf of Mexico. It is part of the Gulfport– Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area. The city of Waveland was incorporated in 1972. As of the 2010 c ...
, was organized for November 1964. Like Ella Baker, in criticizing King's "messianic" leadership of the SCLC, Executive Secretary
James Forman James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutio ...
saw himself as championing popularly accountable, grassroots organization. Believing it "would detract from, rather than intensify" the focus on ordinary people's involvement in the movement, he had not appreciated King's appearance in Albany in December 1961. When on March 9, 1965, King, seemingly on his own authority, was able to turn the second
Selma to Montgomery march The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the ...
back at the
Edmund Pettus Bridge The Edmund Pettus Bridge carries U.S. Route 80 Business (US 80 Bus.) across the Alabama River in Selma, Alabama. Built in 1940, it is named after Edmund Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and state-lev ...
where two days before ("Bloody Sunday") the first had been brutally charged and batoned, Forman was appalled. Yet within SNCC itself Forman increasingly was concerned by the lack of "internal cohesion". At Waveland Forman proposed that the staff (some twenty), who under the original constitution had had "a voice but no vote," constitute "themselves as the Coordinating Committee" and elect a new Executive. It was time to recognize that SNCC no longer had a "student base" (with the move to voter registration, the original campus protest groups had largely evaporated) and that the staff, "the people who do the most work," were the organization's real "nucleus". But the "many problems and many strains within the organization" caused by the "freedom" allowed to organizers in the field were also reason, he argued, to "change and alter" the structure of decision making. Given the "external pressures" the requirement now was for "unity". Bob Moses opposed. The role of SNCC was to stimulate social struggles, not to provide an institutionalized leadership. "Leadership," Moses believed, "will emerge from the movement that emerges."
Leadership is there in the people. You don't have to worry about where your leaders are, how are you going to get some leaders. ... If you go out and work with your people leadership will emerge. ... We don't know who they are now: and we don't need to know.
"To get us through the impasse," Casey Hayden tried to attach to Forman's proposal various sub-committees and provisos to ensure that "leadership for all our programs" would continue to be driven from the field, and not from central office "which makes many program areas responsible to one person rather than to all of us." For Forman this still suggested too loose, too confederal a structure for an organization whose challenge, without the manpower and publicity of white volunteers, was to mount and coordinate a Southwide Freedom Summer and "build a Black Belt political party." At her last Committee meeting in the fall of 1965, Hayden told both Forman and Chairman John Lewis that the "imbalance of power within SNCC" was such that, if the movement was to remain "radically democratic", they would need to step down. Forman and Lewis did step down in their own time, in the spring, but with questions of structure and direction for the organization unresolved.


1966: Black Power movement


Carmichael and the Vine Street Project Statement

In May 1966 Forman was replaced by
Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson (April 25, 1942 – October 7, 1967) worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from its earliest days in 1960 until her death in October 1967. She served the organization as an activist in the fiel ...
, who was determined "to keep the SNCC together." But Forman recalls male leaders fighting "her attempts as executive secretary to impose a sense of organizational responsibility and self-discipline," and "trying to justify themselves by the fact that their critic was a woman" In October 1967 Smith-Robinson died, aged just 25, "of exhaustion" according to one of her co-workers, "destroyed by the movement." Replacing John Lewis as chairman in May 1966 was the 24-year old
Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture (; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941November 15, 1998) was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the Unite ...
. When on the night of June 16, 1966, following protests at the shooting of solo freedom marcher
James Meredith James Howard Meredith (born June 25, 1933) is an American civil rights activist, writer, political adviser, and Air Force veteran who became, in 1962, the first African-American student admitted to the racially segregated University of Mississ ...
, Carmichael walked out of jail (his 27th arrest) and into Broad Street Park in
Greenwood, Mississippi Greenwood is a city in and the county seat of Leflore County, Mississippi, United States, located at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta region, approximately 96 miles north of the state capital, Jackson, and 130 miles south of the riverp ...
, he asked the waiting crowd "What do you want?." They roared back "Black Power! Black Power!" For Carmichael Black Power was a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."
We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves.
A new direction SNCC was evident in the
Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
, "Vine City" Project, SNCC's first effort at urban organizing. Co-directed by William "Bill" Ware and Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons (Robinson), it took up the challenge of the Georgia State Legislature's refusal to seat
Julian Bond Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the e ...
because of SNCC opposition to the
Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
. Ware, who had been greatly affected by his experience of newly independent
Ghana Ghana (; tw, Gaana, ee, Gana), officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country in West Africa. It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and To ...
, emphasized racial solidarity. Black people, he argued, needed to work "without the guidance and/or direction and control of non-Blacks". Without control over their affairs, he warned, "Black people will know no freedom, but only more subtle forms of slavery." A Vine Street Project position paper on Black Power, which Simmons helped write, suggested that:
Negroes in this country have never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference. As a result of this, the stereotype has been reinforced that Blacks cannot organize themselves. The white psychology that Blacks have to be watched, also reinforces this stereotype. Blacks, in fact, feel intimidated by the presence of whites, because of their knowledge of the power that whites have over their lives. One white person can come into a meeting of Black people and change the complexion of that meeting ... People would immediately start talking about "brotherhood", "love", etc.; race would not be discussed.
This was "not to say that whites have not had an important role in the Movement." If people now had "the right to picket, the right to give out leaflets, the right to vote, the right to demonstrate, the right to print," the Vine City paper allowed that it was "mainly because of the entrance of white people into Mississippi, in the summer of '64." But their "role is now over and it should be," for what would it mean "if Black people, once having the right to organize, are not allowed to organize themselves? It means that Blacks' ideas about inferiority are being reinforced." What was needed now for "people to free themselves" was an "all-Black project" and this had to "exist from the beginning." Future cooperation with whites had to be a matter of "coalition". But there could be "no talk of 'hooking up' unless Black people organize Blacks and white people organize whites." Those "white people who desire change" should go "where the problem (of racism) is most manifest," in their own communities where power has been created "for the express purpose of denying Blacks human dignity and self-determination." Even without embracing an explicitly separatist agenda, many veteran project directors accepted the case that the presence of white organizers undermined black self-confidence. (Although overridden, on that basis Oretha Castle Haley already in 1962 had suspended whites from the
CORE Core or cores may refer to: Science and technology * Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages * Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding * Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber * Core, the centra ...
chapter in
New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans
Merriam-Webster.
; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nuev ...
).
Julian Bond Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the e ...
later reflected:
the successes Freedom Summer achieved resulted from its embrace of a paradox — it tried to fight bigotry by appealing to people more concerned about whites, not blacks. Appealing to the nation's racism accepted white supremacy. By acknowledging its dependence on whites to popularize the civil rights struggle in the South, SNCC contradicted its rhetorical belief in the equal worth of all races, and undermined its insistence that indigenous blacks were best prepared to lead the struggle for their deliverance from white dominance.
Yet like Forman (now urging the study of
Marxism Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
),Christopher M. Richardson, Ralph E. Luker (2014). ''Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement''. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 181 Carmichael hesitated to accept the implication that whites should be excluded from the movement. It was in December that he led the SNCC national executive in a narrow decision (19 in favor, 18 against and 24 abstentions) to ask white co-workers and volunteers to leave. In May 1967 the Coordinating Committee formally asked its non-black staff to resign. Whites should concentrate on organizing poor white communities and leave SNCC to promote African-American self-reliance.James Forman
''The Making of Black Revolutionaries''
pp. xvi–xv (2nd edn 1997). Accessed March 17, 2007.


Lowndes County

Carmichael had been working with a voter registration project in Alabama that had taken what, at the time, may have seemed an equally momentous step. In the face of murderous Klan violence, organizers for the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization The Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), also known as the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) or Black Panther party, was an American political party founded during 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama. The independent third party was formed ...
openly carried arms."Lowndes County Freedom Organization"
Encyclopedia of Alabama.
Participating in the Selma to Montgomery march, Carmichael had stopped off in the county in March 1965. Local registration efforts were being led by
John Hulett John Hulett (November 19, 1927 – August 21, 2006) was an American civil rights activist, sheriff and judge. He was a leader in the civil rights movement in Lowndes County, Alabama, United States, and the founder of the Lowndes County Christian ...
who that month, with John C. Lawson, a preacher, became the first two black voters in Lowndes County in more than six decades. Carmichael gained the confidence of local residents when, handing out voter registration material at a local school, he refused to be intimidated by local police: they were either to arrest him or leave. With SNCC workers then "swarmed" by young people, Carmichael took the initiative to help form the LCFO with Hulett, its first chair. The organization would not only register voters but, as a party, run candidates for office—its symbol, a rampant black panther, representing black "strength and dignity". Hulett warned the state of Alabama that it had a last chance to peacefully grant African Americans their rights: "We're out to take power legally, but if we're stopped by the government from doing it legally, we're going to take it the way everyone else took it, including the way the Americans took it in the
American Revolution The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revolut ...
." Certain the federal government was not going to protect him and his fellow LCFO members, Hulett told a federal registrar, "if one of our candidates gets touched, we're going to take care of the murderer ourselves."


Interracial coalition

While other white SNCC activists in the Broad Street Park, Greenwood, crowd that affirmed Carmichael's call for Black Power were bewildered, Peggy Terry recalls "there was never any rift in my mind or my heart. I just felt Black people were doing what they should be doing. We reached a period in the civil rights movement when Black people felt they weren't being given the respect they should have, and I agreed. White liberals ran everything." The message to white activists, "organize your own", was one that Terry took home with her to uptown, "Hillbilly Harlem", Chicago. This was the neighborhood in which, having taken the prompt the year before,
Casey Hayden Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden (born October 31, 1937), was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early ...
had already been working, organizing welfare mothers into a union. She was "on loan" from SNCC to
Students for a Democratic Society Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a national student activist organization in the United States during the 1960s, and was one of the principal representations of the New Left. Disdaining permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships ...
(SDS). Like other new left groups, SDS did not view a self-consciously black SNCC as separatist. Rather it was seen as the vanguard of a prospective "interracial movement of the poor". Accepting the Vine Street challenge, the goal was no longer integration but what Chicago
Black Panther A black panther is the melanistic colour variant of the leopard (''Panthera pardus'') and the jaguar (''Panthera onca''). Black panthers of both species have excess black pigments, but their typical rosettes are also present. They have been d ...
leader
Fred Hampton Fredrick Allen Hampton Sr. (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist. He came to prominence in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African Ame ...
was to project as the "rainbow coalition". In the South, as SNCC began turning them away white volunteers moved over to the New Orleans-based
Southern Conference Education Fund The Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) (1942-1981) was an organization that sought to promote social justice, civil rights, and electoral reform in the American South, particularly for African Americans. The organization began as the Educa ...
with which Ella Baker had been working since the 1950s. There, in effort to advance a coalition agenda, they joined
Bob Zellner John Robert Zellner (born April 5, 1939) is an American civil rights activist. He graduated from Huntingdon College in 1961 and that year became a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as its first white field secretary. ...
, the SNCC's first white field organizer and son of a former Klansman, in working with
Carl Carl may refer to: *Carl, Georgia, city in USA *Carl, West Virginia, an unincorporated community * Carl (name), includes info about the name, variations of the name, and a list of people with the name *Carl², a TV series * "Carl", an episode of te ...
and
Anne Braden Anne McCarty Braden (July 28, 1924 – March 6, 2006) was an American civil rights activist, journalist, and educator dedicated to the cause of racial equality. She and her husband bought a suburban house for an African American couple during J ...
to organize white students and poor whites.


Opposition to the Vietnam War

The Meredith shooting in June 1966 had been preceded in January by the killing of Sammy Younge Jr., the first black college student to be killed as a result of his involvement in the civil rights movement, and by the acquittal of his killer. SNCC took the occasion to denounce the
Vietnam War The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
, the first statement of its kind by a major civil rights organization. "The murder of Samuel Young in
Tuskegee, Alabama Tuskegee () is a city in Macon County, Alabama, United States. It was founded and laid out in 1833 by General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Andrew Jackson, and made the county seat that year. It was incorporated in 1843. ...
," SNCC proposed, "is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths." In the face of a government that "has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders," where," it asked, "is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States." It could longer countenance the "hypocrisy" of a call upon "negroes ... to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a 'democracy' which does not exist for them at home." At an SDS-organized conference at
UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...
in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in the August 1965 Watts Uprising and in the ghetto rebellions that followed had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC had first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power ndemboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appear to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"


1967–1968: Northern strategy and the split with Carmichael and the Panthers

By early 1967, SNCC was approaching
bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor ...
. The call for Black Power and the departure of white activists did not go down well with the liberal foundations and churches in the North. This was at a time when SNCC organizers were themselves heading North to the "ghettoes" where, as the urban riots of the mid-1960s had demonstrated, victories at lunch counters and ballot boxes in the South counted for little. Julian Bond recounts projects being:Julian Bond (2000)
: What we did
established in Washington, D.C., to fight for home rule; in Columbus, Ohio, where a community foundation was organized; in New York City's
Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan), ...
, where SNCC workers organized early efforts at community control of public schools; in Los Angeles, where SNCC helped monitor local police and joined an effort at creating a 'Freedom City' in black neighborhoods; and in Chicago, where SNCC workers began to build an independent political party and demonstrated against segregated schools.
As part of this northern community-organizing strategy, SNCC seriously considered an alliance with
Saul Alinsky Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords ...
's mainstream-church supported
Industrial Areas Foundation The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a national community organizing network established in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and businessman and founder of the ''Chicago Sun-Times'' Marshall Field III. The IAF p ...
. But Alinsky had little patience or understanding for SNCC's new rhetoric. On stage with Carmichael in Detroit, Alinsky was scathing when, pressed for an example of "Black Power", the SNCC leader cited the IAF's-mentored FIGHT community organization in
Rochester, New York Rochester () is a City (New York), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, the county seat, seat of Monroe County, New York, Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, New York, Buffalo, ...
. The example was proof that Carmichael and his friends needed to stop "going round yelling 'Black Power!'" and "really go down and organize." It is simple, according to Alinsky: it's "called...community power, and if the community is black, it's black power." In May 1967, Carmichael relinquished the SNCC chairmanship and speaking out against U.S. policy traveled to
Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...
,
China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...
,
North Vietnam North Vietnam, officially the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV; vi, Việt Nam Dân chủ Cộng hòa), was a socialist state supported by the Soviet Union (USSR) and the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Southeast Asia that existed f ...
, and finally to
Ahmed Sékou Touré Ahmed Sékou Touré (var. Sheku Turay or Ture; N'Ko: ; January 9, 1922 – March 26, 1984) was a Guinean political leader and African statesman who became the first president of Guinea, serving from 1958 until his death in 1984. Touré was am ...
's
Guinea Guinea ( ),, fuf, 𞤘𞤭𞤲𞤫, italic=no, Gine, wo, Gine, nqo, ߖߌ߬ߣߍ߫, bm, Gine officially the Republic of Guinea (french: République de Guinée), is a coastal country in West Africa. It borders the Atlantic Ocean to the we ...
. Returning to the United States in January 1968 he accepted an invitation to become honorary Prime Minister of the
Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, Califo ...
for Self Defense. Inspired by John Hulet's stand and borrowing the LCFO's black panther moniker, the party had been formed by
Bobby Seale Robert George Seale (born October 22, 1936) is an American political activist and author. Seale is widely known for co-founding the Black Panther Party with fellow activist Huey P. Newton. Founded as the "Black Panther Party for Self-Defense", ...
and
Huey Newton Huey Percy Newton (February 17, 1942 – August 22, 1989) was an African-American revolutionary, notable as founder of the Black Panther Party. Newton crafted the Party's ten-point manifesto with Bobby Seale in 1966. Under Newton's leadership ...
in
Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...
, in October 1966. For Carmichael the goal was a nation-wide Black United Front. Carmichael's replacement,
H. Rap Brown Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (born Hubert Gerold Brown; October 4, 1943), formerly known as H. Rap Brown, is a civil rights activist, black separatist, and convicted murderer who was the fifth chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ...
(later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) tried to hold what he now called the Student ''National'' Coordinating Committee to an alliance with the Panthers. Like Carmichael, Rap Brown had come to view nonviolence as a tactic rather than as a foundational principle. Violence, he famously quipped, was "as American as cherry pie". In June 1968 the SNCC national executive emphatically rejected the association with the Black Panthers. This was followed in July by a "violent confrontation" in New York City with
James Forman James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutio ...
, who had resigned as the Panther's Minister of Foreign Affairs and was then heading up the city's SNCC operation. In the course of a "heated discussion" Panthers accompanying Carmichael and
Eldridge Cleaver Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, Cleaver wrote '' Soul on Ice'', a collection of essays that, at the time of i ...
, the Panthers' Minister of Information, reportedly thrust a pistol was into Forman's mouth. For Forman and SNCC this was "the last straw". Carmichael was expelled ("engaging in a power struggle" that "threatened the existence of the organization")—and "Forman wound up first in hospital, and later in Puerto Rico, suffering from a nervous breakdown". The ''New York Times'' reported that it was the "opinion of most people in the movement" that the SNCC Carmichael had left was "pre-Watts", while the Panthers were "post-Watts". The 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, they believed, had marked "the end of the middle-class-oriented civil right movement". Rap Brown himself resigned as SNCC chairman after being indicted for inciting to riot in
Cambridge, Maryland Cambridge is a city in Dorchester County, Maryland, United States. The population was 13,096 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat of Dorchester County and the county's largest municipality. Cambridge is the fourth most populous city in Maryl ...
, in 1967. On March 9, 1970, two SNCC workers, Ralph Featherstone and William ("Che") Payne, died on a road approaching
Bel Air, Maryland The town of Bel Air is the county seat of Harford County, Maryland. According to the 2020 United States census, the population of the town was 10,661. History Bel Air's identity has gone through several incarnations since 1780. Aquilla Scott, w ...
, when a bomb on the front floorboard of their car exploded. The bomb's origin is disputed: some say the bomb was planted in an assassination attempt, and others say Payne was intentionally carrying it to the courthouse where Brown was to be tried.


1969–1970: Dissolution

Ella Baker said that "SNCC came North at a time when the North was in a ferment that led to various interpretations on what was needed to be done. With its own frustrations, it could not take the pace-setter role it took in the South." These "frustrations" may in part have been fed by undercover agents. Like other potentially "subversive" groups, SNCC had become a target of the Counterintelligence Program (
COINTELPRO COINTELPRO ( syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program; 1956–1971) was a series of covert and illegal projects actively conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrati ...
) of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...
(FBI)."Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee"
''King Encyclopedia'', Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.
FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator who served as the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation  ...
's general COINTELPRO directive was for agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities and leadership of the movements they infiltrated. By the beginning of 1970, surveillance had everywhere effectively ceased for lack of SNCC activity—save in New York City from where the last FBI report was filed in December 1973. Experienced organizers and staff had moved on. For many the years of "hard work at irregular, subsistence-level pay, in an atmosphere of constant tension" had been as much as they could bear. Some went over to the Black Panthers. Others were to follow Forman into the Black Economic Development Council (whose key demand was
reparations Reparation(s) may refer to: Christianity * Restitution (theology), the Christian doctrine calling for reparation * Acts of reparation, prayers for repairing the damages of sin History *War reparations **World War I reparations, made from G ...
for the nation's history of racial exploitation). A greater loss had been to the Democrats (it was after merging with the Alabama Democratic Party in 1970 that LCFO candidates began winning public offices, Hulett becoming county Sheriff) and to
Lyndon Johnson Lyndon Baines Johnson (; August 27, 1908January 22, 1973), often referred to by his initials LBJ, was an American politician who served as the 36th president of the United States from 1963 to 1969. He had previously served as the 37th vice ...
's
War on Poverty The war on poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national ...
. Charlie Cobb recalls:
After we got the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965, a lot of groups that we had cultivated were absorbed into the Democratic Party ... a lot more money came into the states we were working in. A lot of the people we were working with became a part of Head Start and various kinds of poverty programs. We were too young to really know how to respond effectively. How could we tell poor
sharecropper Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...
s or maids making a few dollars a day to walk away from poverty program salaries or stipends?
As their numbers diminished, SNCC veteran
Clayborne Carson Clayborne Carson (born June 15, 1944) is an American academic who is a professor of history at Stanford University and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985, he has directed the Martin Luther King ...
found staff cultivating the skills for "organizational infighting" rather than "those that had enabled SNCC to inspire thousands of people outside the group during its years of greatest influence." Attempting to gain the trust of beleaguered communities, "develop indigenous leadership, and build strong local institutions," was no longer regarded as sufficiently "revolutionary." The judgement of Charles McDew, SNCC's second chairman (1961–1963), is that the organization was not designed to last beyond its mission of winning civil rights for blacks, and that at the founding meetings most participants expected it to last no more than five years:
First, we felt if we go more than five years without the understanding that the organization would be disbanded, we run the risk of becoming institutionalized or being more concerned with trying to perpetuate the organization and in doing so, giving up the freedom to act and to do. ... The other thing is that by the end of that time you'd either be dead or crazy …
By the time of its dissolution, many of the controversial ideas that once had defined SNCC's radicalism had become widely accepted among African Americans.


Women in the SNCC

In impressing upon the young student activists the principle "those who do the work, make the decisions,"
Ella Baker Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and t ...
had hoped the SNCC would avoid the SCLC's reproduction of the organization and experience of the church: women form the working body and men assume the headship. Abu-Jamal, Mumia. ''We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party''.
South End Press South End Press was a non-profit book publisher run on a model of participatory economics. It was founded in 1977 by Michael Albert, Lydia Sargent, Juliet Schor, among others, in Boston's South End. It published books written by political activi ...
: Cambridge, 2004. p. 159
In SNCC black women did emerge as among the movement's most dynamic and courageous organizers and thinkers. In addition to
Diane Nash Diane Judith Nash (born May 15, 1938) is an American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first s ...
, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson,
Fannie Lou Hamer Fannie Lou Hamer (; Townsend; October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977) was an American voting rights, voting and women's rights activist, Community organizing, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-foun ...
, Oretha Castle Haley, and others already mentioned, these women included Tuskegee student-body president, Gwen Patton; Mississippi Delta field secretary, Cynthia Washington; Sammy Younge's teacher, Jean Wiley; head of COFO's Mississippi operations,
Muriel Tillinghast Muriel Tillinghast is an American civil rights activist and former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary. Her efforts include volunteering for the Freedom Summer Project in Miss ...
;
Natchez, Mississippi Natchez ( ) is the county seat of and only city in Adams County, Mississippi, United States. Natchez has a total population of 14,520 (as of the 2020 census). Located on the Mississippi River across from Vidalia in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, N ...
, project director Dorie Ladner, and her sister Joyce who, in the violence of Mississippi (and having worked with
Medgar Evers Medgar Wiley Evers (; July 2, 1925June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist and the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, who was murdered by Byron De La Beckwith. Evers, a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran who had served i ...
), regarded their own arrests as "about the least harmful thing" that could occur; Annie Pearl Avery, who when organizing in Natchez carried a gun; MDFP state-senate candidate Victoria Gray; MFDP delegate
Unita Blackwell Unita Zelma Blackwell (March 18, 1933 – May 13, 2019) was an American civil rights activist who was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the U.S. state of Mississippi.Blackwell 2006, p. 10. Blackwell was a project dir ...
; leader of the Cambridge Movement
Gloria Richardson Gloria Richardson Dandridge (born Gloria St. Clair Hayes; May 6, 1922 – July 15, 2021) was an American civil rights activist best known as the leader of the Cambridge movement, a civil rights action in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, ...
; Bernice Reagon of the
Albany Movement The Albany Movement was a desegregation and voters' rights coalition formed in Albany, Georgia, in November 1961. This movement was founded by local black leaders and ministers, as well as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commit ...
's
Freedom Singers The Freedom Singers originated as a quartet formed in 1962 at Albany State College in Albany, Georgia. After folk singer Pete Seeger witnessed the power of their congregational-style of singing, which fused black Baptist ''a cappella'' church singin ...
; womanist theologian
Prathia Hall Prathia Laura Ann Hall Wynn (January 1, 1940 – August 12, 2002) was an American leader and activist in the Civil Rights Movement, a womanist theologian, and ethicist. She was the key inspiration for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" sp ...
; LCFO veteran and ''
Eyes on the Prize ''Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Movement'' is an American television series and 14-part documentary about the 20th-century civil rights movement in the United States. The documentary originally aired on the PBS network, and it also ...
'' associate producer Judy Richardson;
Ruby Sales Ruby Nell Sales (born July 8, 1948 in Jemison, Alabama) is an African-American social justice activist, scholar, and public theologian. She has been described as a "legendary civil rights activist" by the PBS program ''Religion and Ethics Weekly' ...
, for whom
Jonathan Daniels Jonathan Myrick Daniels (March 20, 1939 – August 20, 1965) was an Episcopal seminarian and civil rights activist. In 1965, he was killed by a special county deputy, Tom Coleman, who was a construction worker, in Hayneville, Alabama, while i ...
took a fatal shot-gun blast in Hayneville, Alabama;
Fay Bellamy Fay D. Bellamy Powell (May 1, 1938 – January 5, 2013) was an African-American civil rights activist. Known for her involvement in many organizations tracing the movements of the civil rights movement, Bellamy Powell began her career in the Uni ...
, who ran the Selma, Alabama office; the singer
Bettie Mae Fikes Bettie Mae Fikes (born 1948), also known as The Voice of Selma, is an American singer and civil rights activist. Life Born in Selma, Alabama in 1948, she began singing at the age of four. Fikes was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordina ...
("the Voice of Selma"); playwright Endesha Ida Mae Holland;
Eleanor Holmes Norton Eleanor Holmes Norton (born June 13, 1937) is an American lawyer and politician serving as a delegate to the United States House of Representatives, representing the District of Columbia since 1991. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Earl ...
, first chair of the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a federal agency that was established via the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to administer and enforce civil rights laws against workplace discrimination. The EEOC investigates discrimination ...
; and
sharecropper Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range ...
s' daughter and author ('' Coming of Age in Mississippi'')
Anne Moody Anne Moody (September 15, 1940 – February 5, 2015) was an American author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE and SNCC. Moody ...
. Anne Moody recalls it was the women did the work: young black women college students and teachers were the mainstay of voter registration and of the summer
Freedom Schools Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative, and free schools for African Americans mostly in the South. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and ...
. Women were also the expectation when looking for local leadership. "There was always a 'mama'," one SNCC activist recalled,"usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding and willing to catch hell." From the outset white students, veterans of college-town sit-ins, had been active in the movement. Among them were Ella Baker's
YWCA The Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) is a nonprofit organization with a focus on empowerment, leadership, and rights of women, young women, and girls in more than 100 countries. The World office is currently based in Geneva, Swi ...
proteges
Casey Hayden Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden (born October 31, 1937), was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early ...
and Mary King. As a Southerner, Hayden regarded the "Freedom Movement Against Segregation" as much hers as "any one else's"—"It was my freedom." But when working full-time in the black community, she was nonetheless conscious of being "a guest." (For this reason it was important to Hayden that an opportunity in 1963 to work alongside
Doris Derby Doris Adelaide Derby (November 11, 1939 – March 28, 2022) was an American activist, documentary photographer, and director of Georgia State University's Office of African-American Student Services and Programs and adjunct associate professor ...
in starting a literacy project at
Tougaloo College Tougaloo College is a private historically black college in the Tougaloo area of Jackson, Mississippi. It is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). It was originally established in 1869 by New Yor ...
, Mississippi, had come to her "specifically" because she had the educational qualifications). Having dropped out of
Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
, Freedom Rider Joan Trumpauer Mulholland graduated from Tougaloo, the first white student to do so. The majority of white women drawn to the movement, however, would have been those from the north who responded to the call for volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Among the few that might have had obvious qualifications was
Susan Brownmiller Susan Brownmiller (born Susan Warhaftig; February 15, 1935) is an American journalist, author and feminist activist best known for her 1975 book '' Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape'', which was selected by The New York Public Library as o ...
, then a journalist. She had worked on a voter registration drive in
East Harlem East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or and historically known as Italian Harlem, is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City, roughly encompassing the area north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, F ...
and organized with
CORE Core or cores may refer to: Science and technology * Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages * Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding * Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber * Core, the centra ...
.


"Sex and Caste"

Among the Position Papers circulated at Waveland conference in 1964, number 24 ("name withheld by request") opened with the observation that the "large committee" formed to present "crucial constitutional revisions" to the staff "was all men." After cataloguing a number of other instances in which women appear to have been sidelined, it went on to suggest that "assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro." This paper was not the first time women had raised questions about their roles in SNCC. In the spring of 1964, a group of black and white SNCC staffers had sat-in at James Forman's office in Atlanta to protest at being burdened, and stymied in their contributions, by the assumption that it was they, the women, who would see to minute taking and other mundane office, and housekeeping, tasks: "No More Minutes Until Freedom Comes to the Atlanta Office" was
Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson (April 25, 1942 – October 7, 1967) worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from its earliest days in 1960 until her death in October 1967. She served the organization as an activist in the fiel ...
's placard. Like Mary King, Judy Richardson recalls the protest as being "half playful (Forman actually appearing supportive), although "the other thing was, we're not going to do this anymore."Michelle Moravec (11 November 2015). Sex and Caste at 50: 1964 SNCC Position Paper on Women in the Movement. https://scalar.usc.edu/works/sex-and-caste-at-50/1964-sncc-position-paper-on-women-in-the-movement The same might be said of the Waveland paper itself. With so many women themselves "insensitive" to the "day-to-day discriminations" (who is asked to take minutes, who gets to clean Freedom House), the paper concluded that, "amidst the laughter," further discussion might be the best that could be hoped for. At the time, and in "the Waveland setting,"
Casey Hayden Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden (born October 31, 1937), was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early ...
, who with Mary King was soon outed as one of the authors, regarded the paper as "definitely an aside." But in the course of 1965, while working on leave for the SDS organizing women in Chicago, Hayden was to reconsider. Seeking to further "dialogue within the movement," Hayden circulated an extended version of the "memo" among 29 SNCC women veterans and, with King, had it published in the
War Resisters League The War Resisters League (WRL) is the oldest secular pacifist organization in the United States. History Founded in 1923 by men and women who had opposed World War I, it is a section of the London-based War Resisters' International. It continues ...
magazine ''Liberation'' under the title "Sex and Caste". Employing the movement's own rhetoric of race relations, the article suggested that, like African Americans, women can find themselves "caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power." Viewed as a bridge between civil rights and women's liberation, "Sex and Caste" has since been regarded as a "key text of
second-wave feminism Second-wave feminism was a period of feminist activity that began in the early 1960s and lasted roughly two decades. It took place throughout the Western world, and aimed to increase equality for women by building on previous feminist gains. Wh ...
."


Black Women's Liberation

The two other women subsequently identified as having direct authorship of the original position paper on women (which has sometimes been mistakenly attributed to Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson), Elaine Delott Baker and Emmie Schrader Adams, were also white. This, it has been suggested, was the reflection of a movement culture that gave Black women greater opportunity "to protest directly". That white women chose an anonymous paper was testimony, in effect, to the "unspoken understanding of who should speak up at meetings" that Delott Baker had identified when she joined Hayden in Mississippi in 1964. But many black women were to dispute the degree and significance of male-domination within the SNCC, denying that it had excluded them from leadership roles. Joyce Ladner's recollection of organizing
Freedom Summer Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. ...
is of "women's full participation," and Jean Wheeler Smith's of doing in SNCC "anything I was big enough to do." Historian
Barbara Ransby Barbara Ransby (born May 12, 1957) is a writer, historian, professor, and activist. She is an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, and holds the John D. MacArthur Chair at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ransby attended C ...
dismisses, in particular, the suggestion that in its concluding Black Power period SNCC diminished the profile of women within the movement. She points out that
Stokely Carmichael Kwame Ture (; born Stokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael; June 29, 1941November 15, 1998) was a prominent organizer in the civil rights movement in the United States and the global pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the Unite ...
appointed several women to posts as project directors during his tenure as chairman, and that in the latter half of the 1960s, more women were in charge of SNCC projects than during the early years. On the other hand, Hayden, in the position paper she presented under her own name at Waveland, "On Structure", had seen herself defending
Ella Baker Ella Josephine Baker (December 13, 1903 – December 13, 1986) was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and t ...
's original participatory vision in which women's voices are heard precisely because decision making is not dependent on formal rank position but rather on actual work and commitment, and a movement culture that she recalls as "womanist, nurturing, and familial." Frances M. Beal (who worked with SNCC's International Affairs Commission and its
National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union The National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union (NBAWADU) was founded in February 1968 by Gwen Patton to protest the Vietnam War and the draft. In order to do this, they allied themselves with two other prominent predominantly Black social movement orga ...
) is in no doubt that as the SNCC moved away from "sustained community organizing toward Black Power propagandizing that was accompanied by increasing male dominance." (Beal and others objected to the
James Forman James Forman (October 4, 1928 – January 10, 2005) was a prominent African-American leader in the civil rights movement. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party, and the League of Revolutio ...
's initial enthusiasm for the
Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, Califo ...
, judging
Eldridge Cleaver Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, Cleaver wrote '' Soul on Ice'', a collection of essays that, at the time of i ...
's ''Soul on Ice'', which he brought back to the office, to be the work of a "thug" and a rapist). "You're talking about liberation and freedom half the night on the racial side," she recalls of her time in the SNCC, "and then all of a sudden men are going to turn around and start talking about putting you in your place. So in 1968 we founded the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee to take up some of these issues." With the SNCC's breakup, the Black Women's Liberation Committee became first the Black Women's Alliance and then, following an approach by revolutionary Puerto-Rican women activists, the
Third World Women's Alliance The Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) was a revolutionary socialist women of color organization active in the United States from 1968 to 1980 that aimed at ending capitalism, racism, imperialism, and sexism. As one of the earliest groups advocat ...
in 1970. Active for another decade, the TWWA was one of the earliest groups advocating an
intersectional Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person's social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of adv ...
approach to women's oppression—"the triple oppression of race, class and gender." Gwendolyn Delores Robinson/Zoharah Simmons, who co-authored the Vine Street Project paper on Black Power, was struck by the contrast between the SNCC and her subsequent experience of the
Nation of Islam The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious and political organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A black nationalist organization, the NOI focuses its attention on the African diaspora, especially on African ...
: "there was really no place for a woman to exercise what I considered real leadership as it had been in SNCC." Breaking with the NOI's strict gendered hierarchy, she went on to identify, teach and write as an "Islamic feminist." On top of seeking to increase African-American access to land through a pioneer
Freedom Farm Cooperative Freedom Farm Cooperative was an agricultural cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi, founded by American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1969 as a rural economic development and political organizing project. With a farm and a pi ...
, in 1971
Fannie Lou Hamer Fannie Lou Hamer (; Townsend; October 6, 1917 – March 14, 1977) was an American voting rights, voting and women's rights activist, Community organizing, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-foun ...
co-founded the
National Women's Political Caucus The National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), or the Caucus, describes itself as a multi-partisan grassroots organization in the United States dedicated to recruiting, training, and supporting women who seek elected and appointed offices at all ...
. She emphasized the power women might have acting as a voting majority in the country regardless of race or ethnicity: "A white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is they haven't had as many problems. But we cry the same tears." The NWPC continues to recruit, train and support "women candidates for elected and appointed offices at all levels of government" who are "
pro-choice Abortion-rights movements, also referred to as pro-choice movements, advocate for the right to have legal access to induced abortion services including elective abortion. They seek to represent and support women who wish to terminate their pre ...
" and who support a federal
Equal Rights Amendment The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex. Proponents assert it would end legal distinctions between men and ...
(ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.National Women's Political Action Caucus
Retrieved January 1, 2020.


References


Further reading


Archives



Collection Number: M323. Dates: 1963 – 1988. Volume: 1.7 ft³ (48 L)
The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections
Retrieved May 2, 2005.
SNCC History and Geography
from the Mapping American Social Movements Project at the University of Washington.
FBI COINTELPRO Black Extremist Records
a series of archival documents from the FBI that explicitly target SNCC and Stokely Carmichael for suppression.


Books

*Carmichael, Stokely, and
Michael Thelwell Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (born Michael Miles Thelwell; 25 July 1939) is a Jamaican novelist, essayist, professor and civil rights activist. He was in 1970 founding chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massach ...
. ''Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)''. Scribner, 2005. 848 pages. *Carson, Claybourne. ''In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s''. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981. *Forman, James. ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries'', 1985 and 1997, Open Hand Publishing, Washington D.C. and *Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. ''A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC''. Rutgers University Press, 1998. 274 pages. *Halberstam, David. ''The Children'', Ballantine Books, 1999. * Hamer, Fannie Lou
''The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell it Like it is''
University Press of Mississippi, 2011. . *''Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement'', University of Georgia Press, 2002. * Holsaert, Faith;
Martha Prescod Norman Noonan Martha Prescod Norman Noonan was a civil rights activist who is known for her work within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and co-editing a 2012 book ''Hands on the'' ''Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC''. Ea ...
, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner
''Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC''
University of Illinois Press, 2010. . *Hogan, Wesley C. ''How Democracy travels: SNCC, Swarthmore students, and the growth of the student movement in the North, 1961–1964''. *Hogan, Wesley C. ''Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America,'' University of North Carolina Press. 2007. *King, Mary. "Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement". 1987. * Lewis, John. ''Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement''. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1998. * Martínez, Elizabeth. ''Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer''. Zephyr Press. *Pardun, Robert. ''Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties''. California: Shire Press. 2001. 376 pages. *Ransby, Barbara.
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
'' University of North Carolina Press. 2003. *Salas, Mario Marcel. Masters Thesis: "Patterns of Persistence: Paternal Colonialist Structures and the Radical Opposition in the African American Community in San Antonio, Texas, 1937–2001", University of Texas at San Antonio, John Peace Library 6900 Loop 1604, San Antonio, Texas, 2002. Other SNCC material located in historical records at the Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio as part of the Mario Marcel Salas historical record. * Sellers, Cleveland, and Robert Terrell. ''The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC''. University Press of Mississippi; 1990 reprint. 289 pages. *
Zinn, Howard Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922January 27, 2010) was an American historian, playwright, philosopher, socialist thinker and World War II veteran. He was chair of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College, and a political scien ...
. '' SNCC: The New Abolitionists''. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. * Payne, Charles M. '' I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle'', 2nd edition.


Video


SNCC 50th Anniversary Conference
38 DVD collection documenting the formal addresses, panel discussions and programs that took place at the 50th anniversary conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Eighth Annual Forum on Women in Leadership Then and Now: Women in the Civil Rights Leadership
Joyce Ladner is one of the panelists and shares many stories about SNCC


Interviews



SNCC member and Freedom Summer participant
The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections
Retrieved May 2, 2005. *''Interviews with civil rights workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)''. Stanford University Project South oral history collection. Microfilming Corp. of America. 1975. .
''Who Speaks for the Negro'' Vanderbilt documentary website


Publications and documents





Oxford, Ohio: General Materials (c. June 1964). Retrieved May 2, 2005.


Gallery

File:Sncc one man one vote.png,
One man, one vote "One man, one vote", or "one person, one vote", expresses the principle that individuals should have equal representation in voting. This slogan is used by advocates of political equality to refer to such electoral reforms as universal suffrage, ...
button which was probably worn at an SNCC event File:1000 students wanted for the SNCC Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (26276560142).jpg File:Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons.jpg, Photograph of Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, taken during 2011 oral history interview. File:March-on-washington-jobs-freedom-program.jpg File:Students March Montgomery, 3-17-65.jpg File:Timothy Lionel Jenkins.jpg File:Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (Leaders of the march) - NARA - 542056.jpg,
John Lewis John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville ...
representing SNCC at the
Civil Rights March on Washington The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as simply the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic righ ...
in 1963


H. Rap Brown

File:D011778h.gif H. Rap Brown, SNCC (i.e., Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), news conf(erence) (LOC) (15356484161).jpg


Unita Blackwell

Mrs. Unita Blackwell (26343047306).jpg Unita Blackwell.jpg


External links


Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Collected Records
Swarthmore College Swarthmore College ( , ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeduca ...
Peace Collection
The SNCC Digital GatewayThe SNCC Project: A Year by Year History 1960–1970SNCC Actions 1960–1970
(map)

Retrieved May 2, 2005.
crmvet.org
- the official website for the
Civil Rights Movement Archive The Civil Rights Movement Archive (CRMA) refers to both an online collection of materials about the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (also known as the "Freedom Movement"), as well as the organization that created and maintai ...

SNCC Documents
Online collection of original SNCC documents ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.
Americus Movement
Civil Rights Digital Library.
The Story of SNCC
''One Person, One Vote'' Project
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library
Emory University
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee collection 1964–1989
{{Authority control African Americans' rights organizations Anti–Vietnam War groups Civil rights movement Black Power Civil rights organizations in the United States COINTELPRO targets History of African-American civil rights Nonviolence organizations based in the United States Nonviolent resistance movements Post–civil rights era in African-American history Student political organizations in the United States Youth empowerment organizations Social movement organizations Selma to Montgomery marches