SNCC: What We Did - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Monthly Review, Oct, 2000 by Julian Bond

Concurrently with the organizing efforts of the MFDP and LCFO and the Bond campaign, SNCC was reassessing its concentration on the South. At a retreat in May 1966, Ivanhoe Donaldson argued in favor of SNCC's replicating its successful southern political organizing efforts in the North, and the staff agreed. Donaldson and Robert Moses suggested that techniques learned in southern campaigns could be employed to ease SNCC's passage into northern cities. Organizing for political power and community control could mobilize northern urban-dwellers, they contended. Michael Thelwell proposed that the organization move "to the ghetto and organize those communities to control themselves. The organization must be attempted in Northern and Southern areas as well as in the rural Black belt of the South," Thelwell said.

Projects were established in Washington, D.C., to fight for home rule; in Columbus, Ohio, where a community foundation was organized; in New York City's Harlem, where SNCC workers organized early efforts at community control of public schools; in Los Angeles, where SNCC helped monitor local police and joined an effort at creating a "Freedom City" in black neighborhoods; and in Chicago, where SNCC workers began to build an independent political party and demonstrated against segregated schools. In each of these cities, the southern experiences of SNCC organizers informed their work.

As SNCC Chair, Marion Barry had written members of Congress in 1960 to "urge immediate action to provide self-government to the vote-less residents of our nation's capitol, the District of Columbia." In February 1966, Barry, then Director of SNCC's Washington Office, announced the formation of the "Free D.C. Movement" (FDCM). He wrote, "The premise ... is that we want to organize Black people for Black power." Barry and the FDCM conducted a successful boycott of Washington merchants who did not support home rule. In New York, SNCC worker William Hall helped a Harlem group working for community control of Intermediate School 201 in Fall 1966. His efforts laid the groundwork for later successful protests for community control of schools throughout the city. In Los Angeles, SNCC worker Clifford Vaughs described his work as "a manifestation of self-help, self-determination, power for poor people." As the focus of the southern movement had changed, so would the aim of the northern organizer. Desegregation had prov en both illusive and insufficient to the problems of American blacks in the north or south. The black community's ability to have control over itself and its elected officials had become paramount in rural Mississippi as well as in urban New York.

Just as its concern for social change had never been limited to the southern states alone, SNCC's concern for human rights had long extended beyond the borders of the United States. It had linked the fight of American blacks with the struggle for African independence from its first public statements. At its founding conference, SNCC first announced its identification with the African liberation struggle. "We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind," they said. At SNCC's Fall 1960 conference in Atlanta, a featured speaker was Alphonse Okuku, an Antioch College student and brother of Kenyan labor leader Tom MBoya. The mass-meeting program said Okuku "brings to our attention the great significance of the African struggle and its relationship to our fight." SNCC Chairman John Lewis told the March on Washington in 1963, "One man, one vote is the African cry. It must be ours!"