Remarks in the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin. They realize that they must now evolve a strategy for victory. social order of justice permeated by love. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. She had a rare appreciation for the centrality of women and youth in social change efforts. foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the Although each local group in this movement must diligently work out the The accepted civil rights frame does not have a place for SNCCs distinct philosophy of leadership development, its emphasis on lived democracy, its discomfort with hierarchy, bureaucracy, and officialdom in general, to say nothing of its anti-imperialism or its critique of class dynamics in American society, or its rejection of the fetishizing of Dr. King and the Kennedys as well as the idea that America was capable of responding to a moral challenge. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founding Statement (1960) Some of the early Black Panthers understood what they were doing as an urban, northern extension of what SNCC was doing in the rural South. With them, SNCC could be irreverent, if not disdainful, flipping off attorney generals and presidents, to say nothing of lesser public officials, challenging conservative localand nationalBlack leaders to stand for something besides themselves. They studied the way the power structure manipulated poor Whites as much as it manipulated Negroes. We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) In the early 1960s, young Black college students conducted sit-ins around America to protest the segregation of restaurants. In addition to a sense that King was insufficiently militant and perhaps vainglorious, there was also some annoyance that SNCC started projects in tough towns like Albany, Georgia, or Selma, Alabama, and then SCLC came in, took over and got all the publicity. The late 1960s, however, brought a philosophical change to the SNCC. The idea that the country had a conscience to appeal to seemed more and more disconnected from reality. Some, like Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, the first two recruits in Mississippi, essentially became life-long activists. Peace dominates war; faith reconciles doubt. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step toward such a society. 1, June, 1960. They learnt that the country barely noticed when people like Lee, people that SNCC workers felt responsible to and for, were shot down like animals. Barbara Ransbys Ella Baker and the Black Freedom is the first scholarly treatment of SNCCs Grand Lady and is partly responsible for bringing Miss Baker to the attention of current youth activists. On the one hand, it is an appeal to conscience; on the other, it disrupts customary patterns. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. At a personal level, though, his relationships with SNCC members were strong and the organizations almost always managed to work together, even if each side was muttering under its breath. That was probably less true in later years, but in the early years, when the issue was most at doubt, women led at every level, perhaps especially so in Mississippi. (Give light and the people will find the way!).3 She developed a keen appreciation of the limitations of the most common leadership models, favoring group-centered leadership over charismatic, top-down leader-centered groups. Love transcends hate. 4. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced "snick") was founded in 1960. It is likely that at the time those words were written, only a minority of the students, including the influential Nashville group, who had been studying with Lawson, fully accepted this expansive view of the possibilities of nonviolence. 22. This text may be used, printed, and archived in accordance with the Fair Use provisions of U.S. If Dr. King was predisposed to be accommodating when the Federal government asked for a cooling-off period, SNCC was almost hardwired to defy. This courageous willingness to go to jail may well be the thing to awaken the dozing conscience of many of our white brothers. We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action. Hasan Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabamas Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); and Peter Levy, Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). Sit-ins were normally accompanied by demonstrations and often by boycotts. They refused, and SNCC left feeling once again betrayed by the Democratic Party and liberals in general. It forced older organizations to become more aggressive and to take on the violent rural areas the movement had been carefully avoiding. Fannie Lou Hamer gave a speech that riveted the nation. Goodman and Schwerner were White and from out of state, and the government that had been saying that it had no legal authority to protect civil rights workers now swung into action, sending 200 Navy personnel to hunt for the bodies, flooding the state with 150 FBI agents, and starting, on the order of President Johnson, the systematic infiltration of the Klan. The students have taken the struggle for justice into their own strong hands. Statement to the Press at the Beginning of the Youth Leadership Conference: This is an era of offensive on the part of oppressed people. The Reverend James Lawson, another of the important adult influences on SNCC, had been training a group of Nashville students in Gandhian nonviolence before the sit-ins began. Nonviolence, as it grows from the Judeo-Christian tradition, seeks a Notwithstanding its own issues with chauvinism, SNCC was open to leadership from women in a way that few social change organizations of the time were. Justice for all overcomes injustice. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. And the most effective way to achieve that is through investing in The Bill of Rights Institute. Even when formal boycotts were not called for, many people, including White people, avoided downtown because of the turmoil, the latter increased in many cities by the gangs of young White toughs, who came downtown to pull protesters off stools, beat them, pour coffee or ketchup over them, or press lighted cigarettes against their skin, usually with little interference from the police. RES 1145 (Gulf Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That seemed tame to many in SNCC, accustomed as they had become to the relatively quick victories they were getting by directly confronting evil. Death threats had swirled around SNCCs work since its inception. Whether Whites were in fact kicked out of SNCC remains an emotional flashpoint and the subject of some debate. 1. Mutual regards cancel enmity. Speech on the Constitutionality of Korean War, President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, The Justices' View on Brown v. Board of Education. designed an organizational statement of purpose that reflected the strong commitment to Gandhian nonviolence that characterized SNCC's early years: "We affirm the philistine or reality . Today the leaders of the sit-in movement are assembled here from ten states and some forty communities to evaluate these recent sit-ins and to chart future goals. Copyright law. A potent force for social change, the SNCC organized or participated in numerous nonviolent segregation protests, voter registration drives, and Freedom Rides throughout much of the turbulent 1960s. She arranged to use her alma mater, Shaw University, Easter weekend, 1960. To that, we can add that this small, determined band pushed the entire civil rights movement left. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love. James Forman was probably the longest-serving member of SNCCs central staff and certainly among the most important, credited with doing the work it took to make SNCC an organization. At one end of the political spectrum, Black Power could be stretched into Burn, Baby, Burn! At the other, it could be reduced to Black capitalism. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love. It was during these meetings that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born. In the mid-1990s, three books appeared almost simultaneously, all of them much more bottom-up in perspective than prevailing scholarship, two of them specifically on SNCC: Adam Faircloughs Race and Democracy in Louisiana, 19151972, John Dittmers Local People: The Struggle for Civil rights in Mississippi, and Charles Paynes Ive Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee statement of purpose tells us their part in the Civil Rights Movement. Charlie Cobb, This Nonviolent Stuffll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil rights Movement Possible (Durham: Duke Press, 2015); and Akinyele Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Some of the anger at a society that had betrayed them turned inward, and what had been a band of brothers and sisters became a much more quarrelsome, suspicious group in which any disagreement might flare into internecine warfare. webmaster@crmvet.org Eugene Walker, Interview with Ella Baker, 9/4/74, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, p. 71. SNCC Founding Statement This text, made available by the Sixties Project, is copyright (c) 1993 by the Author or by Viet Nam Generation, Inc., all rights reserved. One could find instances when nonviolence seemed to work by touching the better values of the opponent, but far more often silent cash registers or political calculation convinced elites that some concessions were necessary, a point not lost on the students. Robert Moses, David Dennis and Charles E. Cobb, Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil rights (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001). Nonviolence, as it grows from the Judeo-Christian tradition, seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society. It is risky to generalize about an organization as decentralized and fast-changing as SNCC, but it is safe to say that in its early years, the internal culture of the organization was profoundly affected by nonviolence, which they understand as something more than refraining from physical violence. Soon after the sit-ins started, Ella Baker began pulling together a meeting to create some organization out of the energy. If they managed to harvest a crop anyway, no one would buy it. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. William Chafe, Civilities and Civil rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 19151972 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Charles M. Payne, Ive Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California, 1995); Doug McAdam, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Emilye Crosby, A Little Taste of Freedom: The Black Freedom Struggle in Claiborne County, Mississippi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Todd Moye, Let the People Decide: Black Freedom and White Resistance Movements in Sunflower County, Mississippi, 19451986 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Franoise Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Rural Organizing and Cultural Center, Minds Stayed On Freedom: The Civil rights Struggle in the Rural South: An Oral History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991); and Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 19401980(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 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