SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  What happened then was that the student movement galvanized the older organizations into a new dynamism, won the support of some of the established Negro leaders who quickly sensed that a new wind was blowing, and left far behind those leaders who could not break either old habits of thinking, or old ties with the white elite.

  From the beginning, the students found strong backing in the generation just ahead of them—young Negro professionals in their thirties or early forties, who helped mobilize community support behind the young people. One thinks of Carl Holman, Dr. Clinton Warner, and Whitney Young in Atlanta; also of Dr. Anderson, Slater King and C. B. King in Albany; and of Martin Luther King himself.

  On the other hand, the self-interest of some elements in the Negro community had long become enmeshed with that of the whites who held political and economic power, and even the explosive force of the sit-ins could not break that tie. Presidents of state-supported Negro colleges, with an eye on trustees, regents, and state legislatures, lashed out at then-student rebels. Faculty members, fearful for their jobs, remained silent. At Southern University in Baton Rouge, whose 5000 students made it the largest Negro institution in the nation, eighteen sit-in leaders were suspended. At Albany State College in Albany, Georgia, the president eventually got rid of forty student demonstrators. At Alabama State and Florida A & M, punishment was swift. Even at some private, church-supported institutions, like Benedict and Allen Colleges in South Carolina, college administrators threatened expulsion for students who joined the sit-in movement and fired the few faculty members who spoke their minds.

  Between the unequivocal supporters and the conservative die-hards in the adult Negro community was a third group, whose response to the new militancy of the college generation was complex and curious. These were Negroes ranking high in the social structure of the community, who were beset by a number of conflicting pressures: that of the white side of town, where they had some useful relationships; that of the Negro community at large, which embraced the sit-ins, and on which they were dependent socially and politically; that of their own long resentment against segregation; of a conservatism fundamental to their lofty position; of an uncomfortable feeling of being left in the shadows by the immature upstarts of the student movement. In this confusion of interests, the reaction of such people was often to support the movement publicly, and try privately to keep it within respectable limits.

  Atlanta is a case in point. Here, a number of the college presidents in the Atlanta University Center, while publicly expressing their support, tried to discourage their students from direct action activities. Some ministers and businessmen reacted similarly. Jeremy Lamer, writing in the New Leader at the time of the sit-ins, reports a meeting that spring of five student leaders summoned to a conference with the Negro old guard of Atlanta.

  While the students wore slacks and sport shirts, their elders were dressed like New York bankers. Their faces were somber and the atmosphere was somewhat like that of an emergency meeting of the General Motors board of directors. From a high table in front, the meeting was presided over by a man with a pleasant face and remarkably light skin who spoke and looked like President Eisenhower. He was flanked by an Episcopalian minister, a banker, a realtor, and a lawyer. One by one they rose and delivered sober, articulate speeches. I was impressed by the absence of Southern accents, and later discovered that they sent their own children to Northern universities.

  Whether Larner’s report of what these “elders” said to the sit-in leaders is an exact quote, or a paraphrase, it catches the spirit of what so many of the students heard from well-placed adults in those hectic days:

  So you see, kids, we’ve been in this a long time. We want the same things you do, but we know by now they can’t be gotten overnight. It’s our experience that you have to work slowly to get lasting results. We’d hate to see your movement backfire and spoil the things we’ve worked so hard for. You need guidance, and we hope you’ll have the vision to accept it.

  The response of the students was brief, unpolished, to the point. “We are continuing the movement as best we know now. We hope you will join us.”

  They did continue the movement, and the important men of the Negro community, whatever qualms they had, let it be known to the public that they had joined.

  As pointed out earlier, there was no central direction to the sit-ins. The sparks from that first almost-innocent sit-in of four college freshmen in Greensboro showered the South and caught fire in a hundred localities. But hardly a month had passed before Ella Baker, in charge of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference office in Atlanta and observing the wild spread of the sit-ins, decided that something should be done to coordinate them.

  Ella Baker, middle-aged, dark-skinned, beautiful, with a deep-throated voice that seemed suited for the stage, had grown up in a little town in North Carolina. As a girl, she had listened to stories of slave revolts told by her ninety-year-old grandmother, who as a slave had been whipped for refusing to marry the man picked out for her by her master. Miss Baker was a champion debater in high school, and valedictorian of her graduating class at Shaw University in Raleigh. She wanted to go to medical school and become a medical missionary, then dreamed of teaching sociology at the University of Chicago. But family difficulties intervened. Instead, she went to New York.

  There, she found that despite her college education, jobs were closed to her because of her color; she worked as a waitress, or found a job in a factory. She lived in Harlem in the 1930’s, worked for the WPA on consumer education, started consumers’ cooperatives in Philadelphia and Chicago, and then in 1940 turned to the NAACP, spending six years with them as a field secretary. Then she worked for the Urban League and other groups.

  When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was organized by Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and Stanley Levinson in 1957, Ella Baker came South to organize a series of mass meetings for them. In early 1958 she set up the SCLC office in Atlanta and was its first full-time executive-secretary. Deciding, in late February of 1960, that the sit-in leaders should be brought together, she asked the SCLC to underwrite it financially. With $800 of SCLC money, the prestige of Martin Luther King, the organizing wisdom of Ella Baker, and the enthusiasm of the rare young people who were leading the new student movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was born.

  Ella Baker went to Raleigh and got her Alma Mater, Shaw University, to provide facilities for a meeting of about a hundred students. But by the time of the conference on Easter weekend, April 15–17, 1960, demonstrations had spread so fast that there were sixty centers of sit-in activity. Also, nineteen northern colleges were interested enough to send delegates. The result was that over two hundred people came to the conference, one hundred twenty-six of them student delegates from fifty-eight different Southern communities in twelve states.

  Jane Stembridge, from Virginia, later described her feelings that first night in Raleigh:

  The most inspiring moment for me was the first time I heard the students sing “We Shall Overcome” … It was hot that night upstairs in the auditorium. Students had just come in from all over the South, meeting for the first time. February 1 was not long past. There was no SNCC, no ad hoc committees, no funds, just people who did not know what to expect but who came and released the common vision in that song. I had just driven down from Union Seminary in New York—out of it, except that I cared, and that I was a Southerner…. It was inspiring because it was the beginning, and because, in a sense, it was the purest moment. I am a romantic. But I call this moment the one.…

  James Lawson, the divinity school student just expelled from Vanderbilt University, gave the keynote address. At the organizing sessions, there was some tension over whether to have an official connection with SCLC. It was finally decided to maintain a friendly relationship with SCLC and other organizations but to remain independent. This urge for freedom from adult fetters and formal ties had marked the student movement from the beginning, so
the decision was important, reflecting a mood which has continued in SNCC to this day. The conference set up a temporary committee, which would meet monthly through the spring and summer, and would coordinate the various student movements around the South. Ed King, who had been a leader in the Frankfort, Kentucky sit-ins, was asked to serve, at least temporarily, as administrative secretary.

  The first meeting after the Raleigh Conference was held in May, 1960, on the campus of Atlanta University. About fifteen of the student leaders were there, as were Martin Luther King, Jr., James Lawson, Ella Baker, Len Holt (a CORE lawyer from Norfolk, Virginia), and observers from the National Student Association, the YWCA, the American Friends Service Committee, and other groups. They now called themselves the Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and elected Marion Barry, at this time doing graduate work at Fisk, as chairman. A statement of purpose was adopted, of which the first paragraph states the theme:

  We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the pre-supposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the first step towards such a society….

  It was decided to set up an office, hire a secretary to man it over the summer months, begin to raise money, plan nonviolent institutes for the summer, print a newsletter, and try to coordinate the various student activities throughout the South. Marion Barry told reporters that the sit-in movement “demonstrates the rapidity with which mass action can bring about social change. This is only the beginning.”

  They called Jane Stembridge at Union Theological Seminary in New York and asked her if she would serve as SNCC’s first office secretary. In early June, 1960, she arrived in Atlanta. Bob Moses, recalling his first trip South that summer of 1960, described later how “SNCC and Jane Stembridge were squeezed in one corner of the SCLC office. … I was licking envelopes, one at a time, and talking—Niebuhr, Tillich and Theos—with Jane, who was fresh from a year at Union.… Miss Ella Baker was in another corner of the office.”

  In June, the first issue of The Student Voice appeared. Three years later it would be beautifully printed and designed (though still small, direct, terse) and illustrated by remarkable photos of SNCC in action. At this time it was crudely mimeographed, carrying news of the Raleigh Conference and the May meeting. It was not so intensely organizational that it could not find room for a poem, written by one of the founders of SNCC, later to be its chief writer of press releases and editor of The Student Voice, Julian Bond:

  I too, hear America singing

  But from where I stand

  I can only hear Little Richard

  And Fats Domino.

  But sometimes,

  I hear Ray Charles

  Drowning in his own tears

  or Bird

  Relaxing at Camarillo

  or Horace Silver doodling,

  Then I don’t mind standing

  a little longer.

  The new SNCC organization, that summer and early fall of 1960, found that “coordinating” was not easy. Jane Stembridge later recalled:

  A great deal of time was spent trying to find out exactly what was going on in the protest centers…. Response was next to nil.… This was because the students were too busy protesting and because they did not understand the weight of the press release (thank God some still don’t). … No one really needed “organization” because we then had a movement…. Members of the first SNCC were vague simply because they were right damn in the middle of directing sit-ins, being in jail, etc., and they did not know what was going on anywhere outside of their immediate downtown.… We had no one “in the field” either. SNCC called for demonstrations once or twice. The response was extremely spotty and then the news was not sent in. We could not afford phone calls and so it went. SNCC was not coordinating the movement…. I would say the main thing done then was to let people know we existed…. We were not sure, and still aren’t, “what SNCC is”…

  In July, in Los Angeles, where the National Democratic Convention was about to nominate John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Marion Barry appeared for SNCC before the Platform Committee of the Convention, recommending strong federal action: to speed school desegregation, to enact a fair employment law, to assure the right to vote against Southern economic reprisal and violence, to protect demonstrators against false arrest and police repression by invoking that clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which says: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.”

  The sit-ins, Barry told the Platform Committee, “in truth were peaceful petitions to the conscience of our fellow citizens for redress of the old grievances that stem from racial segregation and discrimination.” Characteristically, the statement was not coldly organizational, but carried some of the poetic freshness of the new student movement:

  … The ache of every man to touch his potential is the throb that beats out the truth of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America was founded because men were seeking room to become…. We are again seeking that room.… We want to walk into the sun and through the front door. For three hundred and fifty years, the American Negro has been sent to the back door…. We grew weary….

  Barry spoke directly to the charge made by ex-President Harry Truman during the sit-ins, that the student movement was somehow connected with communism. He said:

  To label our goals, methods, and presuppositions “communistic” is to credit Communism with an attempt to remove tyranny and to create an atmosphere where genuine communication can occur. Communism seeks power, ignores people, and thrives on social conflict. We seek a community in which man can realize the full meaning of the self which demands open relationship with others.

  In October of 1960, at a conference of several hundred delegates in Atlanta, SNCC was put on a permanent basis. It was not (and never has become) a membership organization. This left the adhesion of individuals to the group fluid and functional, based simply on who was carrying on activity. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee consisted of a delegate from each of sixteen Southern states and the District of Columbia, plus a few voting members and many observers from various national student and race relations organizations, such as CORE, SCLC, the YWCA, the National Student Association, the NAACP, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund.

  Again, the purpose was to coordinate the student movement. But the movement, still with a quality of abandon, still spontaneous and unstructured, refused to be put into a bureaucratic box. The twig was bent, and the tree grew that way. For SNCC, even after it had a large staff, its own office, and money for long-distance phone calls, managed to maintain an autonomy in the field, an unpredictability of action, a lack of overall planning which brought exasperation to some of its most ardent supporters, bewilderment to outside observers, and bemusement to the students themselves.

  Throughout the winter of 1960–1961, sit-ins continued, linked only vaguely by SNCC, but creating a warmth of commitment, a solidarity of purpose which spurred awareness of SNCC by students all over the South. They also sustained a vision—or perhaps, knowing SNCC, a set of various visions, which kept Marion Barry, Jane Stembridge, Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Charles Sherrod, Charles Jones, and others, going.

  When ten students were arrested in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in February, 1961, the SNCC steering committee, meeting in Atlanta, made its boldest organizational decision up to that date. Four people, it was agreed, would go to Rock Hill to sit in, would be arrested, and would refuse bail, as the first ten students had done, in order to dramatize the injustice to the nation. The Rock Hill action was the start of the jail-no bail policy.

  Sit-in veterans Charles Sherrod (Petersburg, Virginia), Charles Jones (Charlotte, North Carolina) and Diane Nash were to go. The fourth person was a relative novice in the moveme
nt, Spelman College student Ruby Doris Smith, who talked her older sister out of the trip so she could go instead. “I went home that night to explain to my mother. She couldn’t understand why I had to go away—why I had to go to Rock Hill.”

  Ruby Doris and the others spent thirty days in prison, the first time anyone had served full sentences in the sit-in movement. “I read a lot there: The Ugly American, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Exodus, The Wall Between.… Every day at noon we sang ‘We Shall Overcome’….” The fellows had been put on a road gang: Tom Gaither of CORE, Charles Sherrod and Charles Jones of SNCC, and nine others. The captain of the guards took their textbooks away, saying: “This is a prison—not a damned school.” He turned out to be wrong.

  “Jail-no bail” spread. In Atlanta, in February, 1961, eighty students from the Negro colleges went to jail and refused to come out. I knew some, but not all, of the participants from Spelman, where I taught history and political science. That fall, when a very bright student named Lana Taylor, fair-skinned, rather delicate looking, joined my course on Chinese Civilization, I learned she had been in jail. In early 1964 I came across a reminiscence of Jane Stembridge:

  … the most honest moment—the one in which I saw the guts-type truth—stripped of anything but total fear and total courage… was one day during 1961 in Atlanta…. Hundreds went out that day and filled every lunch counter.… There was much humor—like A. D. King coordinating the whole damn tiling with a walkie-talkie… The moment: Lana Taylor from Spelman was sitting next to me. The manager walked up behind her, said something obscene, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Get the hell out of here, nigger.” Lana was not going. I do not know whether she should have collapsed in nonviolent manner. She probably did not know. She put her hands under the counter and held. He was rough and strong. She just held and I looked down at that moment at her hands … brown, strained … every muscle holding. … All of a sudden he let go and left. I thought he knew he could not move that girl—ever….”