Everything about The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee totally explained
The
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or
SNCC, pronounced "snick") was one of the principle organizations of the
American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged in April of 1960 from student meetings led by
Ella Baker held at
Shaw University in
Raleigh, North Carolina.
SNCC played a major role in the
sit-ins and
Freedom Rides, a leading role in the
1963 March on Washington, Mississippi
Freedom Summer, and the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. In the later part of the 1960s, led by fiery leaders such as
Stokely Carmichael, SNCC focused on "
black power", and then protesting against the
Vietnam War. In 1969, SNCC officially changed its name to the
Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect the broadening of its strategies. It passed out of existence in the 1970s.
History
Founding and early years
Inspired by the
Greensboro sit-ins, independent student-led groups began direct-action protests against segregation in dozens of southern communities. The most common action of these groups was
organizing sit-ins at
segregated lunch counters to protest the pervasiveness of
Jim Crow and other forms of racism.
SNCC, as an organization, began with an $800 grant from the
SCLC for a conference where student activists could share experiences and coordinate activities. Held at
Shaw University in April of
1960, the conference was attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges, SCLC,
CORE,
Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR),
National Student Association (NSA), and
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Out of this conference the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed
.
Ella Baker, who organized the Shaw conference, had been the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) director before helping form SNCC, but this didn't mean SNCC was a branch of
SCLC. Instead of being closely tied to SCLC or other groups such as the
NAACP as a "youth division," SNCC sought to stand on its own. Among important SNCC leaders attending the conference were
Stokely Carmichael from Howard University; J. Charles Jones, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at department stores throughout
Charlotte,
North Carolina;
Diane Nash;
James Lawson;
John Lewis; Bernard Lafayette;
James Bevel; and
Marion Barry from the Nashville Student Movement.
In the years that followed, SNCC members were referred to as “shock troops of the revolution." SNCC took on greater risks in
1961, after a mob of
Ku Klux Klan members and other whites attacked integrated groups of bus passengers who defied local segregation laws as part of the
Freedom Rides organized by the
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rather than allowing mob violence to stop them, SNCC volunteers, including
Diane Nash,
James Bevel,
Marion Barry,
Angeline Butler, and
John Lewis, put themselves at great personal risk by traveling into the deep South, along with numerous
CORE volunteers. Their actions forced the
Kennedy Administration to briefly provide federal protection so mob violence would be temporarily abated. 436 people took part in these Freedom Rides during the spring and summer of 1961.
March on Washington
SNCC played a signal role in the 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While many speakers applauded the
Kennedy Administration for the efforts it had made toward obtaining new, more effective civil rights legislation protecting the right to vote and outlawing segregation,
John Lewis took the administration to task for how little it had done to protect Southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the
Deep South. While he toned down his comments under pressure from others in the movement, his words still stung:
» "We march today for jobs and freedom, but we've nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here--for they've no money for their transportation, for they're receiving starvation wages…or no wages at all. In good conscience, we can't support the administration's civil rights bill.
» This bill won't protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill won't protect the citizens of
Danville, Virginia who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill won't 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.'"
Voting rights
In
1961 SNCC began expanding its activities into other forms of organizing, most notably voter registration. Under the leadership of
Bob Moses, SNCC's first voter-registration project was in
McComb, Mississippi, an effort suppressed with arrests and savage white violence, resulting in the murder of local activist Herbert Lee. With funding from the
Voter Education Project, SNCC expanded its voter registration efforts into the Mississippi Delta around Greenwood, Southwest Georgia, 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 terrorism against those blacks who dared to try to register.
In 1963 SNCC conducted the Freedom Ballot, a mock election in which black Mississippians came out to show their willingness to vote--a right they'd been denied for decades, despite the provisions of the
Fifteenth Amendment, due to a combination of state laws and constitutional provisions, economic reprisals and violence by white authorities and private citizens.
SNCC followed up on the Freedom Ballot with the
Mississippi Summer Project, also known as
Freedom Summer, which focused on voter registration. SNCC organized black Mississippians to register to vote, almost always without success. White authorities either rejected their applications on any pretexts available or, failing that, simply refused to accept their applications.
Mississippi Summer got national attention when three civil rights workers involved in the project,
James Chaney,
Andrew Goodman and
Michael Schwerner, disappeared after having been released from police custody. Their bodies were eventually found after a reluctant
J. Edgar Hoover directed the
FBI to search for them. In the process the FBI also found corpses of several other missing black Mississippians, whose disappearances hadn't attracted public attention outside the Delta.
SNCC also established
Freedom Schools to teach children to read and to educate them to stand up for their rights. As in the struggle to desegregate public accommodations led by
Martin Luther King, Jr. in
Birmingham, Alabama the year before, the bolder attitudes of the children helped shake their parents out of the fear that had paralyzed many of them.
The goal of the Mississippi Summer Project was to organize the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an integrated party, to win seats at the
1964 Democratic National Convention for a slate of delegates elected by disfranchised black Mississippians and white sympathizers. The MFDP was, however, tremendously inconvenient for the
Johnson Administration. It had wanted to minimize the inroads that
Barry Goldwater’s campaign was making into what had previously been the Democratic stronghold of the “Solid South” and the support that
George Wallace received during the Democratic primaries in the North.
When the MFDP started to organize a fight over credentials, Johnson originally wouldn't budge. When
Fannie Lou Hamer, the leader of the MFDP, was in the midst of testifying about the beatings the police had given to her and others for attempting to exercise their right to vote, Johnson preempted television coverage of the credentials fight. Even so, her testimony had created enough uproar that Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise": they'd receive two non-voting seats, while the delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would take its seats.
Johnson used all of his resources, mobilizing
Walter Reuther, one of his key supporters within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and his Vice-Presidential nominee
Hubert Humphrey, to put pressure on King and other mainstream
civil rights leaders to bring the MFDP around, while directing Hoover to put the delegation under surveillance. The MFDP rejected both the compromise and the pressure on them to accept it and walked out.
That experience destroyed what little faith SNCC activists had in the good faith of the federal government, even though Johnson had obtained a broad
Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment and private education in 1964 and would go on to obtain an equally broad
Voting Rights Act in 1965. It also estranged SNCC leaders from many of the mainstream leaders of the civil rights movement.
Those differences carried over into the voting rights struggle that centered on
Selma, Alabama in 1965. SNCC had begun organizing black citizens to register to vote in Selma in 1963, but made little headway against the adamant resistance of Sheriff
Jim Clark and the
White Citizens' Council. In early
1965, local Selma activists asked the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference for aid and the two organizations formed an uneasy alliance in the struggle for voting rights. SNCC disagreed with SCLC over tactical and strategic issues, including the decision not to attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge a second time after county sheriffs and state troopers attacked them on "
Bloody Sunday" on
March 7, 1965.
The civil rights activists crossed the bridge on the third attempt, with the aid of a federal court order barring authorities from interfering with the march. It was part of a five-day march to
Montgomery, Alabama that helped dramatize the need for a
Voting Rights Act. During this period, SNCC activists became more and more disenchanted with nonviolence, integration as a strategic goal, and cooperation with white liberals or the Federal government.
Change in strategy and dissolution
Many within the organization had grown skeptical about the tactics of nonviolence. After the Democratic convention of 1964, the group began to split into two factions -- one favoring a continuation of nonviolent, integration-oriented, redress of grievances within the existing political system, and the other moving towards Black Power and revolutionary ideologies. These differences continued to grow during the
Selma Voting Rights campaign.
After the
Watts riots in
Los Angeles in 1965, some SNCC members sought to break their ties with the mainstream civil rights movement and the liberal organizations that supported it. They argued instead that blacks needed to build power of their own rather than seek accommodations from the power structure in place. Eventually, the leader of the militant branch,
Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Toure), replaced
John Lewis as head of SNCC in May 1966.
Carmichael first argued that blacks should be free to use violence in self-defense, then later he advocated revolutionary violence to overthrow oppression. Carmichael rejected the civil rights legislation that the movement had fought so hard to achieve as mere palliatives. The Department of Defense stated in 1967:
SNCC can no longer be considered a civil rights group. It has become a racist organization with black supremacy ideals and an expressed hatred for whites. It employs violent and militant measures which may be defined as extreme when compared with those of more moderate groups.
Carmichael raised the banner of
Black Power in a speech in
Greenwood, Mississippi in June 1966. As the mainstream civil rights movement distanced itself from SNCC, SNCC expelled white staff and volunteers, and denounced the whites who had supported it in the past. By early 1967 SNCC was approaching bankruptcy and close to disappearing.
Carmichael left SNCC in June 1967 to join the
Black Panther Party.
H. Rap Brown, later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, replaced him as the head of SNCC. Brown renamed the group the Student National Coordinating Committee and supported violence, which he described "as American as cherry pie." He resigned from SNCC in 1968, after being indicted for inciting to riot in
Cambridge, Maryland in 1967. Brown then became Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party.
By that point, SNCC was no longer an effective organization. It largely disappeared in the early 1970s, although chapters in communities such as
San Antonio, Texas continued for several more years. SNCC has begun again at the
University of Louisville in
Louisville,
Kentucky.
SNCC and Feminism
The Civil Rights movement is considered to be one of the most important periods for American
feminism. SNCC consisted of mostly college-age volunteers, and therefore provided open opportunities for young women particularly. The level of political participation by young women was unprecedented in the male-dominated history of the U.S. Participation in organizations such as SNCC essentially marked the beginning of
second-wave feminism in the U.S., which focused on changing social inequalities as opposed to the previous focus on legal issues in first-wave feminism. The influence of the Civil Rights movement also introduced mass protests and awareness campaign as the main methods to obtain sexual equality.
Many prominent black women rose to recognition by their participation in SNCC. Some of these women include
Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Donna Richards, Fay Bellamy, Gwen Patton, Cynthia Washington, Jean Wiley, Muriel Tillinghast,
Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Pearl Avery,
Diane Nash,
Ella Baker,
Victoria Gray,
Unita Blackwell, Bettie Mae Fikes,
Joyce Ladner, Dorie Ladner,
Gloria Richardson,
Bernice Reagon, Prathia Hall, Connie Curry, Judy Richardson,
Ruby Sales, Endesha Ida Mae Holland,
Eleanor Holmes Norton and
Anne Moody.
Anne Moody published her autobiography,
Coming of Age in Mississippi, in 1970, detailing her decision to participate in SNCC and later
CORE, and her experience as a woman in the movement. She described the widespread trend of black women to become involved with SNCC at their educational institutions. As young college students or teachers, these black women were often heavily involved in grassroots campaign by teaching
Freedom Schools and promoting voter registration.
On the other hand, white women became very involved with SNCC particularly after the Freedom Summer of 1964. Many northern white women were inspired by the ideology of racial equality. Most of the direct-action resolutions, including peaceful protests and voter registration, took place in Mississippi, challenging the
Jim Crow laws of the South. Some white women, such as
Mary King, Casey Hayden, and Mary Varela were able to obtain status and leadership within SNCC.
Through organizations like SNCC, women of both races were becoming more politically active than they did at any time in American history. However, their positions and treatment in SNCC only demonstrated the patriarchic bias that existed in the society. A group of women in SNCC who were later identified as Mary King and Casey Hayden openly challenged the way women were treated when they issued the “SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement)”. Notably, the paper was published anonymously, helping King and Hayden avoid unwanted attention. The paper specifically listed 11 events in which women were treated as subordinate to men. According to the paper, women in SNCC didn't have a chance to become the face of the organization, the top leaders, because they were assigned to clerical and housekeeping duties whereas men were involved in decision-making.
When Stokely Carmichael took over the the leadership of SNCC from John Lewis, he essentially reoriented the path of SNCC towards
Black Power. He famously said in a speech, “it is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.” White women thus lost their influence and power in SNCC; Mary King and Casey Hayden left SNCC to become active in pursuing equality for women. They co-authored
Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo, which later became an influential piece in feminism. As SNCC turned its focus to Black Power, black women also lost their voice and became subject to the already-existing patriarchic structure of the organization. The limited opportunities for women from the original community-building ideology were erased by the usurping Black Power movement, in which power was more centralized in the hands of the male-dominated top leadership.
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