SNCC: What We Did - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Monthly Review, Oct, 2000 by Julian Bond

To demonstrate that disenfranchised Mississippi blacks did want to vote, SNCC mounted a "Freedom Vote" campaign in November 1963. Over eighty thousand blacks cast votes in a mock election for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. One hundred white northern students worked in this campaign (including Yale student Joseph Lieberman), attracting attention from the Department of Justice and the national media as black registration workers had never done, and paving the way for the "Freedom Summer" campaign in 1964.

"Freedom Summer" brought one thousand, mostly white, volunteers to Mississippi for the summer of 1964. They helped build the new political party SNCC had organized, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); registered voters; and staffed twenty-eight "Freedom Schools" intended by their designer, Charles Cobb, "to provide an education which will make it possible for them to challenge the myths of our society, to perceive more clearly its realities, and to find alternatives, and ultimately new directions for action."

Over the next several years, SNCC-backed candidates for Congress ran in Albany, Georgia; Selma, Alabama; Danville, Virginia; and Enfield, North Carolina. SNCC helped candidates for Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service Boards in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi; aided school board candidates in Arkansas in 1965; and worked toward "solving the economic problems of the Southern Negro" by organizing the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and Poor People's Corporation and mounting economic boycotts against discriminatory merchants.

Among SNCC's contributions to electoral politics were the formation of two political parties--the aforementioned MFDP and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO)--and the conception and implementation of my successful campaigns for the Georgia State Legislature. The MFDP challenged the seating of the regular, all-white delegation from Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic Convention and, in 1965, challenged the seating of Mississippi's congressional delegation in Washington. The convention challenge ended in failure when pressures from President Lyndon Johnson erased promised support from party liberals. An offer was made--and rejected--of two convention seats to be filled by the national party, not the Freedom Democrats, to which Fannie Lou Hamer declared, "We didn't come for no two seats when all of us is tired!"

Each challenge served as an object lesson for strengthening black political independence, and the organizing and lobbying efforts for each laid the groundwork for congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The MFDP served as a prototype for the model of Black Power advocated and popularized by Stokely Carmichael. In 1965, the McComb MFDP Branch became the first black political organization to express opposition to the war in Vietnam. State MFDP officials not only refused to repudiate the McComb statement, they reprinted it in the state MFDP newsletter, giving it wider circulation and laying the groundwork for future black opponents of the war.