The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a central part in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.
SNCC was organized in April 1960 by black students who had taken part in sit-ins earlier that year in Greensboro, North Carolina. Instrumental in the group’s formation was Ella Baker, a black woman working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conlerence (SCLC) set up by Martin Luther King, Jr., after the Montgomery bus boycott.
Headed by chairman John Lewis, SNCC’s main goal, as explained in a 1960 statement of purpose, was integration, attained through nonviolent protests. The tactic of nonviolence inspired by Judeo-Christian ideals and the teachings of India’s Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi was politically shrewd. By inviting southern police brutalities in front of national television cameras, organizers of nonviolent protests gave moral superiority to SNCC.
In May 1961, after the initial integration efforts triggered by the 1960 Greensboro sit-in, SNCC cosponsored LREEDom rides to desegregate bus terminals throughout the South. It then attempted to desegregate public facilities in Albany, Georgia, through nonviolent demonstrations. As it continued direct actions and sit-ins, SNCC encouraged disenfranchised southern blacks to register to vote. In the summer and fall of 1963, SNCC organized the Freedom Ballot in Mississippi. Eighty thousand blacks voted in a mock election pitting black National Association lor the Advancement ol Colored People (NAACP) member Aaron Henry against white civil rights activist Reverend Edwin King, proving that blacks would vote if they were given the opportunity. The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project saw 800 volunteers help thousands of blacks register to vote, while the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the right of the all-white Democratic delegation to represent Mississippi at the national convention.
In 1965, after Jimmy Lee Jackson was killed by a state trooper in Marion, Alabama, Martin Luther King, Jr., and SNCC organized a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. When Governor George C. Wallace banned the march, 525 people, including SNCC Chairman John Lewis, decided to proceed anyway and walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday, March 7, 1965, where they were immediately dispersed and beaten by Alabama state troopers.
SNCC’s struggle on behalf of integration and enfranchisement bore fruit when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act Of 1964, banning discrimination in public facilities and schools, and the Voting Rights Act Of 1965, which forbade state laws aimed at disenfranchising black voters. Despite these successes, SNCC grew increasingly disappointed with the nonviolent strategy. Violence took its toll on even the most patient protesters and, as police brutality moved behind closed doors, the propaganda effect seemed limited. Impatient to see dramatic results, SNCC pursued a more aggressive stance.
The growing frustration was first evident during the August 28, 1963, March on Washington, where Lewis delivered a militant speech that contrasted with King’s famous “I Have a Dream” address. Lewis declared, “We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually, we want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
On June 7, 1966, James Meredith, the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot as he made the “Walk against Fear,” a march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael, SNCC’s chairman since May, organized a protest march in which he adopted the slogan “Black Power.” The movement, a direct repudiation of SNCC’s nonviolent and integrationist ethos, advocated self-defense and black economic and political independence. Carmichael traveled abroad, denouncing the Vietnam War and political and economic repression. H. Rap Brown replaced Carmichael as chairman in May 1967. The creator of the slogan “Burn, baby, burn,” Brown joined the Black Panthers and was imprisoned in 1970 for armed robbery. SNCC meanwhile changed its name in 1969 to Student National Coordinating Committee and became a small, divided organization. It faded away as the Civil Rights movement splintered.
Further reading: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1995); Emily Stoper, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The Growth of Radicalism in a Civil Rights Organization (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishers, 1989).
—Philippe R. Girard
World History
