Founding and early years
Information provided by Wikipedia
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, often pronounced /snɪk/ SNIK) was one of the major American Civil Rights Movement organizations of the 1960s. emerged from the first wave of student sit-ins and formed at a May 1960 meeting organized by Ella Baker at Shaw University. After its involvement in the Voter Education Project, SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support its work in the South, allowing full-time organizers to have a small salary. Many unpaid grassroots organizers and activists also worked with SNCC on projects in the Deep South, often becoming targets of racial violence and police brutality. SNCC played a seminal role in the freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Selma campaigns, the March Against Fear and other historic events. SNCC may be best known for its community organizing, including voter registration, freedom schools, and localized direct action all over the country, but especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
In the later 1960s, inspired by fiery leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, SNCC focused on black power, and draft resistance to the Vietnam War. As early as 1965, executive secretary James Forman said he "did not know how much longer we can stay nonviolent" and in 1969, SNCC officially changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect the broadening of its strategy. It passed out of existence in the 1970s following heavy infiltration and suppression by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), spearheaded as part of COINTELPRO operations during the 1960s and 70s led by J. Edgar Hoover.Founded in 1960 and inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins and Nashville sit-ins, independent student-led groups began direct-action protests against segregation in dozens of southern communities. SNCC focused on mobilizing local communities, a policy in which African American communities would push for change, impelling the federal government to act once the injustice had become apparent.The most common action of these groups was organizing sit-ins at racially segregated lunch counters to protest the pervasiveness of Jim Crow and other forms of racism. While in the Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S. 3 [1883]), the Court ruled that the equal protection clause "did not cover private individuals, organizations, or establishments," the trials of arrested sit-in protesters created an opening for the Court to reevaluate its earlier ruling and expand the clause to cover acts of private discrimination. The sit-in movement was a turning point in using the courts and jail to exert moral and economic pressure on southern communities. In addition to sitting in at lunch counters, the groups also organized and carried out protests at segregated White public libraries, public parks, public swimming pools, and movie theaters. At that time, all those facilities financed by taxes were closed to blacks. The white response was often to close the facility, rather than integrate it.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as an organization, began with an $800.00 grant from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for a conference attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges, the SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality(CORE), Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Out of this conference the SNCC was formed.
Ella Baker, who organized the Shaw conference, was the SCLC director at the time she helped form SNCC. But SNCC was not a branch of SCLC. Instead of being closely tied to SCLC or the NAACP as a "youth division", SNCC sought to stand on its own. Ms. Baker later lost her job with SCLC, which she had helped found.
Among important SNCC leaders attending the conference were Stokely Carmichael from Howard University; Charles F. McDew, who led student protests at South Carolina State University; J. Charles Jones, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at department stores throughout Charlotte, North Carolina; Julian Bond from Atlanta, Diane Nash from Fisk University; James Lawson; and John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, and Marion Barry from the Nashville Student Movement.
SNCC's first chairman was Marion Barry, who later became the mayor of Washington DC. Barry served as chairman for one year. The second chairman was Charles F. McDew, who served as the chairman from 1961 to 1963, when he was succeeded by John Lewis. Stokely Carmichael and H. "Rap" Brown were chairmen in the late 1960s. SNCC's executive secretary, James Forman, played a major role in running the organization.
Freedom Riders
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, New Orleans CORE and Nashville SNCC Freedom Riders, including Dave Dennis, Oretha Castle Haley, Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, and John Lewis, put themselves at great personal risk by traveling in racially integrated groups into Mississippi as they continued the Ride. Other bus riders followed, traveling through the deep South to test Southern compliance with Federal Law. At least 436 people took part in these Freedom Rides during the spring and summer of 1961.
Stokely Carmichael
Voter registration
Bob Moses played a central role in transforming SNCC from a coordinating committee of student protest groups to an organization of activists dedicated to building community-based political organizations of the rural poor. The voter registration project he initiated in McComb, Mississippi in 1961 became the seed for much of SNCC's activities from 1962 to 1966.
After the Freedom Rides, SNCC worked primarily on voter registration, and with local protests over segregated public facilities. Registering Black voters was extremely difficult and dangerous. People of Color who attempted to register often lost their jobs and their homes, and sometimes their lives. SNCC workers lived with local families: often the homes providing such hospitality were firebombed.
The actions of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC forced the Kennedy Administration to briefly provide federal protection to temporarily abate mob violence. Local FBI offices were usually staffed by Southern whites (there were no Black FBI agents at that time) who refused to intervene to protect civil rights workers or local Blacks who were attempting to register to vote.
Participatory democracy (group centered leadership)
SNCC was unusual among civil rights groups in the way in which decisions were made. Instead of "top down" control, as was the case with most organizations at that time, decisions in SNCC were made by consensus, called participatory democracy. Ms. Ella Baker was extremely influential in establishing that model, as was Rev. James Lawson. Group meetings would be 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. Because activities were often very dangerous and could lead to prison or death, SNCC wanted all participants to support each activity.
March on Washington
SNCC played a significant 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. Although he was forced to tone down his speech under pressure from the representatives of other civil rights organizations on the march organization committee, his words still stung. The version of the speech leaked to the press went as follows:
However, under pressure from the representatives of other groups many changes were made to the speech as it was delivered that day. According to James Forman, the most important of these was the change of "we cannot support" the Kennedy Civil Rights Bill to "we support with reservations". Forman wrote of the following explanation of this:
Forman's and SNCC's anger came in part from the failure of the federal government, FBI, and Justice Department to protect SNCC civil rights workers in the South at this time. Indeed, the federal government at that time was instrumental in indicting SNCC workers and other civil rights activists.
Robert Moses
Voting rights
In 1961 SNCC began expanding its activities from direct-action protests against segregation 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 around Albany, and the Alabama Black Beltaround 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 1962 Bob Moses worked to forge a coalition of national and regional organizations, including the NAACP and the National Council of Churches, that would fund and promote SNCC's voter registration work in Mississippi. This coalition was known as the Council of Federated Organizations. In the fall of 1963, SNCC conducted the Freedom Ballot, a parallel election in which black Mississippians came out to show their willingness to vote — a right they had been denied for decades, despite the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, 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 and Freedom Schools. The Summer Project brought hundreds of white Northern students to the South, where they volunteered as teachers and organizers. Their presence brought national press attention to SNCC's work in the south. 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.Tensions grew gradually and SNCC refused to recruit white people because they thought that they brought attention of the media only on white people.
Mississippi Summer received national attention when three civil rights workers involved in the project - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner - were murdered 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. Johnson only sent the FBI after series of pressure and demonstrations. He favored at first to be the leader outside of his country with the Vietnam War whereas there were many conflicts inside of it. In the process, the FBI also found corpses of several other missing black Mississippians, whose disappearances had not 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. and James Bevel 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 would not budge. When Fannie Lou Hamer, the leader of the MFDP, was in the midst of testifying about the police beatings of her and others for attempting to exercise their right to vote, Johnson preempted television coverage of the credentials fight. Even so, her testimony 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 pressure 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 to accept it, and walked out.
That experience destroyed what little faith SNCC activists had in 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 help, and the two organizations formed an uneasy alliance. They disagreed over tactical and strategic issues, including the SCLC's 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
No comments
Post a Comment