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, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the Unite ...

during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the seat of Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the most populous city in the state, 21st most-populous city in the U.S., and ...

, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation 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 admin ...

, 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 wa ...

. 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 ...

and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections. By the mid-1960s the measured nature of the gains made, and the violence with which they were resisted, were generating dissent from the group's principles of

nonviolence Nonviolence is the personal practice of not causing harm to others under any condition. It may come from the belief that hurting people, animals and/or the environment is unnecessary to achieve an outcome and it may refer to a general philosoph ...

, 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 civ ...

(SCLC), and others were being lost to a de-segregating Democratic Party and to federally-funded anti-poverty programs. Following an aborted merger with the

Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxism-Leninism, Marxist-Leninist and Black Power movement, black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. New ...

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 Shaw University is a private Baptist historically black university in Raleigh, North Carolina. It is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. Founded on December 1, 1865, Shaw University is the oldest HBCU to begin offering courses in ...

Raleigh, North Carolina Raleigh (; ) is the capital city of the state of North Carolina and the seat of Wake County in the United States. It is the second-most populous city in North Carolina, after Charlotte. Raleigh is the tenth-most populous city in the Sout ...

, attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, from 19 northern colleges, and from the

(SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (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 Wis ...

(NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Among those attending who were to emerge as strategists for the committee and its field projects were

Fisk University 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, Tennessee State student Marion Barry, and American Baptist Theological Seminary students James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard Lafayette, all involved in the

Nashville Student Movement 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 or ...

; 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; J. Charles Jones,

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 univers ...

, 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 U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the List of U.S. states and territories by area, 28th largest and List of states and territories of the United ...

;

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 from Howard University, Washington, D.C.. The invitation had been issued by Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of the SCLC, but the conference had been organized by then SCLC director Ella Baker. Baker was a critic of what she perceived as King's top-down leadership at the SCLC. "Strong people don't need strong leaders," she told the young activists. Speaking to the students' own experience of protest organization, it was Baker's vision that appeared to prevail. SNCC did not constitute itself as the youth wing of SCLC. It steered an independent course that sought to channel the students' program through the organizers out in the field rather than through its national office in Atlanta ("small and rather dingy," located above a beauty parlor near the city's five Black colleges). Under the constitution adopted, the SNCC comprised representatives from each of the affiliated "local protest groups," and these groups (and not the committee and its support staff) were to be recognized as "the primary expression of a protest in a given area." Under the same general principle, that "the people who do the work should make the decisions", the students committed to a " participatory democracy" which, avoiding office hierarchy, sought to reach decisions by consensus.Casey Hayden (2015), "Only Love Is Radical." ''Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today'', ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 65. Group meetings were convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone who was left was in agreement with the decision. Given the physical risks involved in many activities in which SNCC was to engage this was thought particularly important: "no one felt comfortable making a decision by majority rule that might cost somebody else's life." Initially the SNCC continued the focus on sit-ins and

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 so ...

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 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 fo ...

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 (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 Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions ''Morgan v. Virginia'' ...

(seven black, six white, led by CORE director James Farmer) 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 Cat ...

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% f ...

, and under pressure from the Kennedy Administration, CORE announced it was discontinuing the action. Undeterred, Diane Nash called for new riders. Oretha Castle Haley, Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, Stokely Carmichael, and

Joan Trumpauer Mulholland Joan Trumpauer Mulholland (born September 14, 1941) is an American civil rights activist who was active in the 1960s. She was one of the Freedom Riders who was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961, and was confined for two months in the Maxim ...

joined John Lewis and Hank Thomas, the two young SNCC members of the original Ride. They traveled on to a savage beating in

Montgomery, Alabama Montgomery is the capital city of the U.S. state of Alabama and the county seat of Montgomery County, Alabama, Montgomery County. Named for the Irish soldier Richard Montgomery, it stands beside the Alabama River, on the Gulf Coastal Plain, coas ...

, to arrest in

Jackson, Mississippi Jackson, officially the City of Jackson, is the capital of and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The city is also one of two county seats of Hinds County, along with Raymond. The city had a population of 153,701 at t ...

, and to confinement in the Maximum Security (Death Row) Unit of the infamous

Mississippi State Penitentiary Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP), also known as Parchman Farm, is a maximum-security prison farm located in unincorporated Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. Occupying about of land,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 ...

, SNCC's Executive Secretary James Forman. It is estimated that almost 450 people, black and white in equal number, participated. With CORE, SNCC had been making plans for a mass demonstration in Washington when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy finally prevailed on the

Interstate Commerce Commission 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 elimina ...

(ICC) to issue rules giving force the repudiation of the " separate but equal" doctrine. After the new ICC rules took effect on November 1, 1961, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains; "white" and "colored" signs were to be removed from the terminals (lunch counters, drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms) serving interstate customers. To test the ICC ruling and in the hope of mobilizing the local black community in a broader campaign, in October 1961 SNCC members

Charles Sherrod 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 F ...

led a sit-in at the bus terminal in 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.&n ...

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 Comm ...

had more than 500 protesters in jail. There they were joined briefly by Martin Luther King Jr. and by Ralph Abernathy. King sought to take advantage of the national media attention his arrest had drawn: In return for the city's commitment to comply with the ICC ruling and to release those protesters willing to post bail, King agreed to leave town. The city reneged, however, so protests and subsequent arrests continued into 1962. News reports across the country portrayed the Albany debacle as "one of the most stunning defeats" in King's career. What they also reported was conflict with SNCC. The ''

New York Times ''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 ...

'' 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

(VEP) was formed in early 1962 to channel funds into voter drives in the eleven Southern states. Inducted by sit-in campaigns and hardened in the Freedom Rides, many student activists saw VEP as a government attempt to co-opt their movement. Lonnie C. King Jr., a student from Morehouse College in Atlanta, felt that "by rechanneling its energies" what the Kennedys were "trying to do was kill the Movement." But others were already convinced that obtaining the right to vote was the key to unlocking political power for Black Americans. Older Black southerners had been pressing SNCC to move in this direction for some time. Mississippi NAACP leader Amzie Moore had tabled a voter registration drive at the SNCC's second conference in October 1960. A split over the priority to be accorded voter registration was avoided by Ella Baker's intervention. She suggested that the organization create two distinct wings: one for direct action (which Diane Nash was to lead) and the other for voter registration. But the white violence visited in the summer of 1961 on the first registration efforts (under the direction of

Bob Moses 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, 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 Yaz ...

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. 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 rig ...

. 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 labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requi ...

1963 March on Washington

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

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

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

1963 Women's March

A feature of the march itself, was that men and women were directed to proceed separately and that only male speakers were scheduled to address the

Lincoln Memorial 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 ...

rally. Despite protesting behind the scenes with Anna Hedgeman (who was to go on to co-found the National Organization for Women), SNCC staffer and Ella Baker protégé

Casey Hayden 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 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 a ...

, 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 The Leesburg Stockade was an event in the civil rights movement in which a group of African-American teenage and pre-teen girls were arrested for protesting racial segregation in Americus, Georgia, and were imprisoned without charges for 45 days ...

... It took SNCC photographer Danny Lyon smuggling himself into the Stockade to publicize the case nationally.

1964 Freedom Summer

In the fall of 1963, with the assistance of 100 northern volunteers SNCC conducted the Freedom Ballot, a mock gubernatorial election in which over 80,000 black Mississippians demonstrated their willingness to exercise the constitutional right to vote that state law and violent intimidation had denied them since

Reconstruction 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

, 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 Michael Henry Schwerner (November 6, 1939 – June 21, 1964), was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) field workers killed in rural Neshoba County, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Schwerner and two co-workers, James C ...

, alongside local activist (Freedom Rider and voter educator) James Chaney, this indeed was to be the effect. Freedom Summer attracted international attention. For SNCC the focus of summer project became the organization, through the

(MFDP), of a parallel state Democratic Party

primary Primary or primaries may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music Groups and labels * Primary (band), from Australia * Primary (musician), hip hop musician and record producer from South Korea * Primary Music, Israeli record label Works ...

. The MFDP would send an integrated slate of delegates to the

1964 Democratic National Convention The 1964 Democratic National Convention of the Democratic Party, took place at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey from August 24 to 27, 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson was nominated for a full term. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnes ...

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 president ...

'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 a ...

'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, and beaches. In 2020, the city had a population of 38,497.

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: 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, 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" 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 Engel ...

associated National Lawyers Guild. Second, he had deflect a proposal from Lowenstein and Democratic Party operative Barney Frank 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 (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

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

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 m ...

, 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 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 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-level ...

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. 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 Missi ...

, Carmichael walked out of jail (his 27th arrest) and into Broad Street Park in Greenwood, Mississippi, 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 city, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georgia, Fulton County, the mos ...

, "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

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 Tog ...

, 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 chapter in

New Orleans New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans

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 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 Christia ...

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 Revoluti ...

." 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,

had already been working, organizing welfare mothers into a union. She was "on loan" from SNCC to Students for a Democratic Society (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 ...

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 with which Ella Baker had been working since the 1950s. There, in effort to advance a coalition agenda, they joined Bob Zellner, 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 ...

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 Ji ...

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. Samuel Leamon Younge Jr. (November 17, 1944 – January 3, 1966) was a civil rights and voting rights activist who was murdered for trying to desegregate a "whites only" restroom. Younge was an enlisted service member in the United States Nav ...

, 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

, 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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

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 debto ...

. 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 on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and Central Park North on the south. The greater Ha ...
, 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's mainstream-church supported Industrial Areas Foundation. 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 Caribb ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

, North Vietnam, 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 ...

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

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 in

Oakland, California Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the ...

, in October 1966. For Carmichael the goal was a nation-wide Black United Front. Carmichael's replacement, H. Rap Brown (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, 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, 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, in 1967. On March 9, 1970, two SNCC workers, Ralph Featherstone and William ("Che") Payne, died on a road approaching Bel Air, Maryland, 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 ...

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 ...

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 nationa ...

. 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 Charles "Chuck" McDew (June 23, 1938 – April 3, 2018)

, 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 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 a ...

: 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, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Fannie Lou Hamer, 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 (SNCC) field secretary. Her efforts include volunteering for the Freedom Summer Project in Mississippi where she helped start the famed 1 ...

;

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, ...

, project director Dorie Ladner, and her sister Joyce who, in the violence of Mississippi (and having worked with Medgar Evers), 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; leader of the Cambridge Movement Gloria Richardson; Bernice Reagon of the

's Freedom Singers; womanist theologian Prathia Hall; 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 als ...

'' associate producer

Judy Richardson Judy Richardson is an American documentary filmmaker and civil rights activist. She was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Africana Studies at Brown University. Early life Richardson was born in Tarrytown, New York. She attended Washington Irvin ...

;

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 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 ("the Voice of Selma"); playwright

Endesha Ida Mae Holland Endesha Ida Mae Holland (August 29, 1944 – January 25, 2006) was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist. Early life Born in Greenwood, Mississippi, Holland never knew her father and was raped at the age of 11. Later she was ...

; Eleanor Holmes Norton, first chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; 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 ''Coming of Age in Mississippi'' is a 1968 memoir by Anne Moody about growing up in rural Mississippi in the mid-20th century as an African-American woman. The book covers Moody's life from childhood through her mid twenties, including her invo ...

'')

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

. 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, Sw ...

proteges

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 o ...

in starting a literacy project at Tougaloo College, 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 Jam ...

, Freedom Rider

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, 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, ...

and organized with CORE.

"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

's placard. Like Mary King,

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,"

, 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 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. ...

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

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 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 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'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 Frances M. Beal, also known as Fran Beal, (born January 13, 1940, in Binghamton, New York) is a Black feminist and a peace and justice political activist. Her focus has predominantly been regarding women's rights, racial justice, anti-war and pea ...

(who worked with SNCC's International Affairs Commission and its National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union) 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's initial enthusiasm for the

, judging Eldridge Cleaver'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 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 adva ...

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, in 1971 Fannie Lou Hamer 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" 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

Gallery

File:Sncc one man one vote.png, One man, one vote 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 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 liberal arts college in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1864, with its first classes held in 1869, Swarthmore is one of the earliest coeducational colleges in the United States. It was established as ...

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
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