SNCC: What We Did - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Monthly Review, Oct, 2000 by Julian Bond

In December 1963, SNCC workers in Atlanta conferred with Kenyan leader Oginga Odinga and, in September 1964, an eleven-member SNCC delegation went to Guinea as guests of that country's President, Sekou Toure. Two members of the group toured Africa for a month following the Guinea trip. In October 1965, two SNCC workers represented SNCC at the annual meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Ghana.

SNCC's January 1966 antiwar statement charged the United States with being "deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa and the United States itself." Singer Harry Belafonte organized a supportive reception at the United Nations with fifteen African diplomats and myself in early 1966, and on March 22, 1966, seven SNCC workers--John Lewis, James Bond, James Forman, Cleveland Sellers, Willie Ricks, Judy Richardson, and William Hall--were arrested at the South African Consulate in New York, preceding by twenty years the "Free South Africa Movement" that later saw hundreds arrested at the South African embassy in Washington.

At a June 1967 staff meeting, SNCC declared itself a human rights organization, dedicated to the "liberation not only of Black people in the United States but of all oppressed people, especially those in Africa, Asia and Latin America." At that meeting, Forman became director of SNCC's International Affairs Commission; in this capacity, he visited Tanzania and Zambia. SNCC Chair Stokely Carmichael visited Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Guinea, and Tanzania in mid-1967. In November 1967, Forman testified for SNCC before the United Nation's Fourth Committee against U.S. investments in South Africa.

There are many reasons for SNCC's demise despite its clear historic consequence. The current of nationalism, ever-present in black America, widened at the end of the 1960s to become a rushing torrent that swept away the hopeful notion of "black and white together" that the decade's beginning had promised. SNCC's white staff members were asked to leave the organization and devote their energies to organizing in white communities; some agreed, but most believed this action repudiated the movement's hopeful call to "Americans all, side by equal side." For many on the staff, both white and black, nearly a decade's worth of hard work at irregular, subsistence-level pay, in an atmosphere of constant tension, interrupted by jailings, beatings, and official and private terror, proved too much to bear.

Nonetheless, when measured by the legislative accomplishments of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts, SNCC's efforts were successful. But the failure of the MFDP to gain recognition at Atlantic City presaged the coming collapse of support from liberals. The murders in 1963 of four schoolgirls in Birmingham and of Medgar Evers in Jackson, of civil rights workers and others in Mississippi in 1964, and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 indicated that nonviolence was no antidote to a violent society. The outbreak of urban violence at the decade's end further produced a sense of frustration and alienation in many SNCC veterans.