How SNCC lit a spark
http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/15/how-sncc-lit-a-spark
Khury Petersen-Smith tells the story of an organization whose history
is bound up with the struggles of the civil rights movement.
April 15, 2010
THE STRUGGLE against racism in the U.S. has a centuries-long
history--and this month, that history itself has become a battlefield.
Virginia's Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell began the month by
reinstituting the state's tradition of marking April as "Confederate
History Month" after an absence of eight years.
McDonnell backpedaled slightly in response to outrage voiced by the
Virginia NAACP and the state's Legislative Black Caucus that the
proclamation remembering the Confederacy made no mention whatsoever
of slavery. He apologized for the omission, calling slavery an
"abomination" that "divided our nation."
But to Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, that was going too far--he
said in an interview on CNN that anyone who thought slavery ought to
be mentioned in connection with the Confederacy was "trying to make a
big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddley."
In the face of these efforts to whitewash the shameful history of
American slavery, it's especially important to remember one of the
proudest chapters in U.S. history. April marks the 50th anniversary
of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) in 1960--one of the central organizations in the struggles of
the civil rights movement.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SNCC EMERGED as part of a new wave of civil rights activism that came
out of the impasse experienced by Southern Blacks. The U.S. Supreme
Court had ruled Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional in law. But it
remained a reality in fact. Through its leading role in direct action
protests, civil disobedience, voter registration drives and other
activism, SNCC became a vehicle out of the impasse.
The immediate catalyst for the organization's founding came on
February 1, 1960, when four students at North Carolina A&T State
University in Greensboro decided to sit in at a segregated
Woolworth's lunch counter and demand service. They changed the course
of history.
Six years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled segregation
unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Up
to that point, apartheid-style Jim Crow laws imposed segregation on
every aspect of public life in the South--movie theaters, swimming
pools, parks, restaurants, buses, schools, government services and
everything else.
The Brown ruling established the idea that segregated facilities
couldn't be equal, and therefore segregation was unconstitutional.
But it would require struggle achieve desegregation--something that
became clear in 1957 when Black students attempted to attend Little
Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957. They faced an
opposition so violent that the Republican Eisenhower administration
was forced to send soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne Division
to protect the students.
By 1960, little actual desegregation had been accomplished, and a new
generation of Black Southerners was growing impatient.
The response to the February sit-in showed the sentiment for action.
Within a period of weeks and months, tens of thousands of students
took part in similar sit-ins across the South. By April, student
activists from a number of cities felt the need to come together to
discuss the new movement and how it could be broadened.
The founding meeting of SNCC took place in Raleigh, N.C., and was
facilitated by Ella Baker, the executive director in Martin Luther
King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Baker would
be a crucial adviser to SNCC, but she also insisted that the group
should make its own decisions and not subordinate itself to
established organizations like SCLC.
A year later, SNCC became involved in the Freedom Rides, which
involved Black and white activists sitting together on segregated
interstate buses as they traveled from city to city in the South.
The first Freedom Ride was supposed to travel from Washington, D.C.,
to New Orleans as a way of implementing, by direct action, the 1960
Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that legally desegregated
interstate transit.
The Freedom Rides were launched by another civil rights organization,
the Northern-based Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), but CORE
activists were attacked so brutally across the South that the
original Freedom Riders decided to stop their trip in Birmingham, Ala.
SNCC activists stepped in to take over. Diane Nash, a SNCC leader in
Nashville, argued that the movement would be set back if the racists
were able to stop the Freedom Riders, so she organized a contingent
of students to go to Birmingham to resume the journey.
They traveled by bus, and when they arrived, they were immediately
arrested by the Birmingham Police under the direction of notorious
chief Bull Connor. In jail, the students continued their protest,
singing freedom songs. Connor eventually drove the students to the
Tennessee state line and abandoned them in the middle of nowhere. "I
just couldn't stand their singing," he said.
The SNCC members from Tennessee, along with others, made their way
back to Birmingham and finally started the trip again--the Greyhound
bus was escorted toward its next stop by the Alabama State Highway
Patrol. But the police abandoned the bus when it reached Montgomery,
and another mob attacked the Freedom Riders, along with reporters and
photographers.
The savage violence was broadcast around the world, shining an
international spotlight on Jim Crow. Still more Freedom Riders
traveled to Montgomery to finish the trip. Eventually, the activists
prevailed. All told, 60 different Freedom Rides criss-crossed the
South, involving hundreds of arrests.
As SNCC chapters mushroomed across the South, the organization took
on new projects. For example, joining a years-long effort by African
Americans in Mississippi to register to vote, SNCC activists got
involved in that cause.
SNCC ultimately spearheaded what the organization named Mississippi
Freedom Summer, a campaign in 1964 to register Blacks to vote and
mobilize a challenge to the racist Mississippi Democratic Party.
Students from the North were recruited to work with local activists
on voter registration. The Freedom Summer volunteers endured deadly violence.
Activists also organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
(MFDP), and traveled to the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic
City, N.J. Delegates of the MFDP demanded to be seated in place of
the segregated Mississippi party. The challenge before the
convention's Credentials Committee was televised nationally.
The testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper turned activist,
galvanized the civil rights cause: "[I]f the Freedom Democratic Party
is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of
the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our
telephones off the hooks because our lives are threatened daily
because we want to live as decent human beings--in America?"
In all its various campaigns throughout the South, SNCC became a
lightning rod for young activists--Black and white, from the North
and South--who thirsted for equality.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WE NEED to recall the history of organizations like SNCC in the face
of people like Robert McDonnell and Haley Barbour--people who would
rather forget the civil rights insurgency altogether. But we also
have to reclaim the history of the movement from those who claim to
honor it, but who actually sanitize it.
The standard story of the civil rights movement that we get in
school--if we're lucky enough to hear about the movement in school at
all--goes like this: the South was segregated, Dr. King gave his "I
Have a Dream Speech," the nation was moved, and segregation ended.
The truth was very different. The late historian Howard Zinn captured
the effect of events like the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides in his
brilliant book SNCC: The New Abolitionists, written from the front
lines of the struggle. "What had been an orderly, inch-by-inch
advance via legal process," Zinn wrote, "now became a revolution, in
which unarmed regiments marched from one objective to another with
bewildering speed."
By organizing at the grassroots, SNCC was able to unleash the
determination of much larger numbers of people than ever before to
fight for their rights, and this catapulted the struggle for Black
freedom into the national spotlight in an entirely different way.
The response from the Southern power structure, presided over by the
Democratic Party, was savage violence. Being a SNCC activist involved
a tremendous personal risk, but their commitment to the cause was greater.
Marion Barry, who was the first chairman of SNCC, described his
conviction in the face of his first arrest at a sit-in: "I took a
chance on losing a scholarship or not receiving my master's degree.
But to me, if I had received my scholarship and master's degree, and
still was not a free man, I was not a man at all."
When the sit-in movement reached Nashville, prestigious Vanderbilt
University expelled James Lawson, a divinity student who led civil
disobedience workshops attended by the young activists. When a dean
at Vanderbilt resigned in protest of Lawson's expulsion, one
newspaper editorialized, "good riddance...Vanderbilt University will
be better off."
A prominent Black attorney in Nashville named Z. Alexander Looby took
up the activists' cases in court--his home was bombed at 5 a.m. one
morning. Half of the house was destroyed, and a school across the
street was damaged as well.
Meanwhile, from northern Democrats, like the Kennedy administration,
the SNCC activists discovered they would be faced with indifference
at best. John Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, pressured the activists to confine themselves to moderate
activity--sometimes using leaders of mainstream civil rights
organizations to send the message.
But SNCC only grew in energy and dynamism, drawing strength from its
ability to mobilize masses of people to confront Jim Crow. As Zinn
wrote, "While they have no famous leaders, very little money, no
inner access to the seats of national authority, they are clearly on
the front line of the Negro assault on the moral comfort of white America."
The scale of the resistance was so great that the tide turned--slowly
but surely--against Jim Crow. Five years after the lunch counter
sit-ins swept across the South, the Johnson administration and a
Democratic Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SNCC WAS at the heart of the political radicalization of a generation
of Black activists.
While some radicals were present in the organization from its
founding, the dominant sentiment among the student activists at first
was that conviction in the face of injustice would be enough to
defeat Jim Crow.
Jane Stembridge, one of many courageous, white activists who
dedicated themselves to SNCC, described the movement in 1960 as one
that would win through interpersonal experience. "The student
movement is not a cause," she said. "It is a collision between this
one person and that one person...Love alone is radical. Political
statements are not, programs are not, even going to jail is not."
But the experience of endless arrests, beatings, bombings and even
murders of SNCC and other activists changed those involved.
Organizers became convinced that love alone was not enough to
challenge Jim Crow--political vision mattered, too.
Like others in the civil rights movement, such as Martin Luther King,
SNCC activists hoped that the liberal federal government would come
to their aid in the face of racist brutality. But they were betrayed
again and again.
At the height of the violence against the Freedom Rides, for example,
the Kennedy administration struck deals with the governors of Alabama
and Mississippi: The governors would quell the ugly mob attacks, and
in exchange, the administration wouldn't interfere with the arrest of
activists by local police--even though this violated the Boynton ruling.
It was through reflection on experiences like these that activists
drew new conclusions. Responding to those who accused SNCC activists
of being manipulated into falling for radical ideas, Zinn wrote in
1964, "SNCC's new radicalism comes from nowhere in the world but
cotton fields, prison cells and the minds of young people reflecting
on what they see and feel."
Thus, the crimes committed against SNCC, like the murder of civil
rights workers during Freedom Summer, led many activists to question
the principle of nonviolent civil disobedience in all circumstances.
Many SNCC members concluded that armed self-defense in the face of
racist violence was a right for Black people--an idea that was
gaining ground in the South and elsewhere throughout the country.
The radicalization in SNCC gave a name to the next phase of the
struggle for Black freedom--during a march in 1966 after the shooting
of James Meredith in Mississippi, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael (later
known as Kwame Ture) began using the term "Black Power" in his
speeches. It immediately got a strong response.
"Black Power" spoke to the desire for self-determination. According
to Carmichael, "It is a call for Black people to define their own
goals, to lead their own organizations."
In general, SNCC activists were drawing radical conclusions about the
fundamental inequalities that they saw in the U.S. As Charles Sherrod
said in 1964:
[O]ur country is sitting on a powder keg...It makes me mad that some
of us have to sweep and wait tables and work all night and go to
school, and they got thousands, yea, millions, yea, billions of
dollars...We may have to demonstrate for jobs. You know, we may have
to bring some bones up from the South and say: Johnson, feel my
bones. You know--I'm hungry, Johnson, feel my bones!
Today, America is still sitting on a powder keg. We face inequality
that deserves a struggle as unrelenting as the one that SNCC focused
on Jim Crow segregation. As a new generation grapples with injustice,
we can look to the history of SNCC for lessons and inspiration.
.
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