Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (or SNCC, pronounced "snick") was one of the principal 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 experience 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 did not 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 even 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 a large number of CORE volunteers, forcing 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 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. 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.'"

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 MS, an effort that was suppressed with arrests and savage white violence including 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 assasinations, 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 had been denied, despite the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment, due to a combination of state laws, 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, as 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 find them; in the process it also found corpses of several other missing black Mississippians, whose disappearances had not attracted any public attention.

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 children brought into the movement 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 disenfranchised black Mississippians and white sympathizers. The MFDP was, however, tremendously inconvenient for the Johnson Administration, which 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 had received during the Democratic primaries in the North.

When the MFDP started to organize a fight over credentials, Johnson originally would not 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 by arranging for a hastily scheduled speech of his own. Even so, her testimony had created enough uproar that Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise": they would 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 them 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 movement finally crossed the bridge on the third attempt, with the aid of a federal court order barring authorities from interfering with the march, as 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 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, arguing instead that blacks needed to seize power rather than seek accommodations from the white power structure.

After the Democratic convention of 1966 at which the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party tried to gain more political rights for blacks and was rebuffed by liberal wing of the Democratic Party, 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. 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 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 its 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, to become Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party.

SNCC was by that point no longer an effective organization. It largely disappeared in the early 1970s, although chapters in communities such as San Antonio, Texas continued in existence for several more years.

SNCC has begun again at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.

References

External links

SNCC 1960 - 1966: Six years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Retrieved 2 May 2005.

Chicago Area Friends of SNCC

Civil Rights Movement Veterans