SNCC: What We Did - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Monthly Review, Oct, 2000 by Julian Bond

2000 marks the fortieth anniversary of the southern sit-in movement, the emergence of the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and the founding of its most dynamic component, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We believe it is important to look back at the achievements of those courageous men and women, both to celebrate their struggle and to learn from their experience. The following article is adapted from a talk originally given last summer at a seminar far college and university teachers, on the history of the civil rights movement at Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Studies--Eds.

"Strong people don't need strong leaders," Ella Baker told us. We were strong people; we did strong things. These are some of the things we did.

It began for me as it did for many others in early 1960. On February 4, I was sitting in a cafe near my college campus in Atlanta, Georgia. It was our hangout, a place where students went between--or instead of--classes. A fellow student named Lonnie King approached me with a copy of that day's Atlanta Daily World, the local black newspaper. The headline read: GREENSBORO STUDENTS SIT-IN FOR THIRD DAY!

In exact detail, the story told how black college students from North Carolina A & T University in Greensboro had, for the third consecutive day, entered a Woolworth's Five and Ten Cents Store and asked for service at the whites-only lunch counter. It described their demeanor, their dress, and their determination to return the following day--and for as many days as it took to gain the service they were denied.

"Have you seen this?" Lonnie demanded.

"Yes, I have," I replied.

"I think it's great!"

"What do you think about it?" he inquired.

"Don't you think it ought to happen here?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm sure it will happen here," I responded. "Surely someone here will do it."

Then it came to me, as it did to many others in those early days in 1960--a query, an invitation, and a command: "Why don't we make it happen here?"

The two of us and our friend, Joe Pierce, canvassed the cafe, talked to students, invited them to discuss the Greensboro events and to duplicate them in Atlanta. The Atlanta student movement had begun. We recruited schoolmates and with them formed an organization, reconnoitered downtown lunch counters, and within a few weeks, seventy-seven of us had been arrested.

In an early 1960 Freedom Song, "Ballad of the Student Sit-ins," written by Guy Carawan, Eve Merriam, and Norma Curtis, the young students who joined together to create the southern student movement were described this way: [*]

The time was 1960, the place the USA,

That February 1st became a history-making day.

From Greensboro across the land, the news spread far and wide,

As quietly and bravely, youth took a giant stride.

(Chorus) Heed the call, Americans all, side by equal side.

Sisters, sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride.

From Mobile, Alabama to Nashville, Tennessee.

From Denver, Colorado to Washington, D. C.

There rose a cry for freedom, for human liberty.

The time has come to prove our faith in all men's dignity.

We serve the cause of justice, of all humanity.

We're soldiers in the army, with Martin Luther King,

Peace and love our weapons, nonviolence is our creed.

(Chorus)

This is a land we cherish, a land of liberty.

How can Americans deny all men equality?

Our Constitution says we can't and Christians, you should know

Jesus died that morning, so all mankind could know.

(Chorus)

No mobs of violence and hate shall turn us from our goal,

No Jim Crow laws nor police state shall stop my free bound soul,

Three thousand students bound in jail still lift their heads and sing,

We'll travel on to freedom, like songbirds on the wing.

(Chorus)

As former President Jimmy Carter told former SNCC worker and author Mary King, "if you wanted to scare white people in Southwest Georgia, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wouldn't do it. You only had to say one word--SNCC." SNCC was founded in 1960 by southern student protesters engaged in sit-in demonstrations against lunch-counter segregation. Within a year, it evolved from a coordinating agency to a hands-on organization, helping local leadership in rural and small-town communities across the South participate in a variety of protests, as well as in political and economic organizing campaigns. This set SNCC apart from the civil rights mainstream of the 1960s. Its members, its youth, and its organizational independence enabled SNCC to remain close to grassroots currents that rapidly escalated the southern movement from sit-ins to freedom rides, and then from voter drives to political organizing.

By 1965, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. It had organized nonviolent direct action against segregated facilities, as well as voter-registration projects, in Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi; built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural cooperatives; and given the movement for women's liberation new energy. It inspired and trained the activists who began the "New Left." It helped expand the limits of political debate within black America, and broadened the focus of the civil rights movement. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.