SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  The reluctance of the national government to protect constitutional rights in the Deep South has created a crisis for SNCC’s faith in nonviolence. Nonviolence was successful in the sit-ins of 1960 and continued to be effective in places such as Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta, Richmond, Memphis, and areas of the border and upper South where Negroes could exercise some political influence by voting, and where fundamental rights of free expression existed. But—and this was first revealed clearly when the Freedom Rides to Montgomery and Jackson exploded in sharp violence—there are areas in the Deep South which are, as Leslie Dunbar has said, “outlaw communities.” In Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Southwest Georgia, and Southern Virginia, the basic rights to vote, to assemble freely, to petition the government, to distribute leaflets, or to picket peacefully do not exist. They constitute what Professor James Silver has called his state of Mississippi: “a closed society.”

  The use of ordinary methods of nonviolent direct action in these outlaw communities is met in the same way a totalitarian state crushes opposition—by open brutality, overwhelming force. That the city of Jackson, Mississippi can create the “Thompson Tank,” an armored car with machine guns to carry a dozen armed policemen for the purpose of halting civil rights demonstrations, is evidence of the problem. In situations like this, there is increased talk among Negroes of “self-defense”; Malcolm X’s exhortation to Negroes to arm themselves and shoot back when attacked is hard to counter in the light of the murder of Medgar Evers, the bombing in Birmingham, the endless instances of brutality by police. As Dick Gregory has said, any other group of people in the world who would take arms and rise up against the tyranny of their government would be hailed as “Freedom Fighters.” But Negroes are expected to adhere to nonviolence.

  There is one powerful justification for asking Negroes in the Deep South to stick to nonviolence in the face of the terrible measures used against them by private and official forces in the Black Belt; that is, that they live in a nation where the power of the federal government can disarm and neutralize those who would take away their constitutional liberties. But thus far the federal government has not done this. Hence there is a renewed debate among Negroes and in civil rights groups about nonviolence.

  Despite all this, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee sticks officially, as its members do individually, to the belief that direct action, without violence, is both morally right and practically effective. But the inaction of the Federal Government, and the pressure of those Negroes who believe in armed resistance, make it increasingly difficult to sustain the argument for nonviolence. One effect, perhaps, of the growing frustration is that demonstrative activity, while trying to remain nonviolent, may become more extensive and more bold. Another effect is that individual members of SNCC, despite their professions, may become tempted to forsake their principles in the face of extreme provocation.

  In a crucial sense, therefore, the future of nonviolent direct action as a technique for effective yet peaceful social change rests with the President of the United States. If he continues to maintain the Compromise of 1877 and leave the police states of the Deep South to violate constitutional rights with impunity, the nonviolent approach may fall. By vigorous and imaginative action, he can save it.

  There are two ways in which the President of the United States may come finally to repudiate the Compromise and establish the rule of law throughout the land. One is for him to become persuaded that this is a great contribution he can make to American democracy. The other way is awful to contemplate: it is that stepped-up activity by civil rights workers in the hard-core areas of the South and growing demonstrations by Southern Negroes who are finally bursting their bonds will be met by brutal suppression in Alabama and Mississippi, perhaps in Louisiana and Arkansas, and there will be major outbreaks requiring strong federal intervention.

  In the summer of 1964 this set of alternatives seemed to be drawing near: a thousand students from all over the country were planning, in a program directed by Bob Moses and the Council of Federated Organizations, to spend the summer in Mississippi, establishing schools, setting up community centers, registering voters. They would join a reinforced group of staff members of SNCC, SCLC, CORE and the NAACP. And meanwhile, the state of Mississippi was mobilizing its police forces to act as it had before, on an even larger scale.

  No President in our recent history is in a better position to make the big break with the past than is Lyndon Johnson, who can talk to the South as a Southerner, who has declared fervently many times his belief that racism should disappear from American life.

  When John Lewis spoke in Washington, his altered speech omitted this sentence: “I want to know: which side is the Federal Government on?” The question is put at the head of this chapter because it is an honest question, and because it has not yet been answered forthrightly by the actions of the government of the United States. Perhaps President Lyndon Johnson, finally, in a historic decision, will answer that question once and for all.

  11. The Revolution Beyond Race

  There are many things to criticize in SNCC. Though it has fashioned a formidable apparatus since that day when Jim Forman walked into a deserted, windowless cubby and found a month’s mail strewn on the floor, it is still not scrupulously well-organized; letters may go unanswered, phone calls go unreturned, meetings start late or never or without agendas. It is so quick to act that it often does not stop and plan actions carefully to get the most value from them. It does not take enough time to work out long-range strategy. It is not groomed in the niceties of public relations, and visitors to the Atlanta office sometimes complain of an indifferent reception. It exasperates its friends almost as often as it harasses its enemies.

  But the young people in SNCC have two crucial qualities which override everything else. First, they are as compassionate and as brave as human beings with human failings can be, and they form a ragged, incorruptible front line in the struggle to abolish racism in the United States. And second, they nurture a vision of a revolution beyond race, against other forms of injustice, challenging the entire value-system of the nation and of smug middle-class society everywhere.

  This vision beyond race is dimly and unevenly perceived by the people in SNCC, and there is much uncertainty about the specifics. Perhaps I am speaking of an emotional force more than anything else, born in that terrible and special anguish with which youth discovers evil in the world. But the emotion is informed by a rough intelligence that comes somewhat from reading, more from thinking, and most from living inside the marrow of the nation’s shame. SNCC’s radicalism has the advantage of being free from dogma and tradition, uncluttered by clichés, seeing the world afresh with the eyes of a new generation.

  Because of this, perhaps, there has been a nervousness in high places ever since the Negro revolt began—an anxiety over how far it would go and sporadic moves to contain it before it becomes dangerous. This does not come out of a conspiratorial plot by hobgoblins of reaction; it springs with more or less spontaneity out of the historic American tendency towards moderation whenever there is a forward thrust of social change. And it comes from liberals as often as from conservatives. The compass needle of the civil rights movement flutters, and every once in a while it settles in a direction which awakens tremors in the pilots themselves.

  The anxiety in those who read John Lewis’ original speech the day of the Washington March is an example of this. Omitted in the altered version of Lewis’ speech was the following passage:

  We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses must bring them about. In the struggle we must seek more than mere civil rights; we must work for the community of love, peace, and true brotherhood. Our minds, souls, and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all the people.

  Lewis was not speaking only of sandwiches in a lunch counter or even of the right of black men and women to vote and hold office
in Mississippi. He was speaking of something more than sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and the problem of black and white. For the current crisis in race has exposed all sorts of fundamental issues in American society, almost as the search for a solitary tumor may lay open to examination all of a patient’s vital organs.

  I want to take note of some of these issues, because it seems to me that, in the end, whether SNCC will continue as a vital force in American life will depend on whether it thrusts and points beyond race, probing the entire fabric of society to point to injustice of all kinds, constituting itself as a permanent, restless prod to the conscience of the nation.

  There is, for instance, the problem of politics and power in the United States, with implications for political systems everywhere. We have learned something, these past few years, about the inadequacy of our regular political structure to bring about desirable social change in a situation of urgency. Political scientists have worried for some time about the sluggishness of our political system, but the outburst of Negro demonstrations dramatized this problem as nothing else has been able to do. When people turn in desperation to marches and parades, picketing, sit-ins, mass meetings, and Freedom Rides, this suggests that the normal channels of government are inadequate for the expression of their grievances, and that the mechanism for solution is rusty.

  If there are any doubts about this rustiness, one has only to look at Congress today. Its ineffectualness goes beyond civil rights to poverty and waste in the American economy, to antiquated approaches in the field of foreign policy. It seems the hardest thing in the world to get the supreme legislative body of the world’s most powerful nation to move. Congress spends huge amounts of time on petty subjects; rushes past matters of life-and-death importance; filibusters and delays on the most clear-cut matters of human rights. Each day it appears more obviously as a swamp in which vital legislation is dutifully set down, only to be drowned in parliamentary mud or lost in a verbal mist.

  There are many structural defects in Congress: the duplication of work by both houses, the seniority system in committees, the filibuster in the Senate, the dictatorship of the House Rules Committee, the under-representation of urban areas, of the poor, of Negroes, of radicals. We are a complex and heterogeneous nation, but our “representatives” fall mostly inside a narrow band of middle-class business and professional men who balk at bold social reform.

  Yet the real problem is greater. For an even more accurate representation of the population would still leave a basic flaw, one that is unavoidably part of representative government everywhere, all the time. This is the permanent paradox of politics: that delegates—whether Congressmen supposed to represent a district, or trade union officials speaking for laboring men, or Communist Party members purporting to represent the working class—develop interests of their own the moment they step out of their constituency into office. The environment of a man changes the moment he becomes a representative; the forces acting upon him become different; now, competing with the far-off calls of his constituents, which become weaker as they draw less response, is the more urgent call from within of ambition and power.

  When James Madison was trying to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution, in Federalist Paper # 10, he praised the representative system of government as a way of filtering out the grievances and moderating the demands of the masses. Rousseau also saw this, disliked it, and so wanted to establish some form of direct democracy, where the “general will” of the people might rule, without intermediaries. Beyond the level of the town meeting, however, in the complex nations of today, such continuous direct rule becomes impossible. Yet we have recently been shown an approximate solution: this is for people to retain always, and to use constantly, the power of demonstration—or what SNCC calls “direct action”—to bring the demands of aggrieved people before the leaders of government, with a minimum of turmoil and a maximum of insistence.

  Representative government dilutes demand. This becomes especially onerous in a time that requires drastic reappraisals in economic policy, civil rights, and foreign relations. At such a time, the system set up by our forefathers and sweetened mildly over the years becomes a drag on national progress. Problems today have the kind of urgency that cannot be handled by writing a letter to one’s Congressman. In a time when world destruction can proceed with the push of a button, one cannot wait to communicate with government by voting in the next election.

  What the civil rights movement has revealed is that it is necessary for a people concerned with liberty, even if they live in an approximately democratic state, to create a political power which resides outside the regular political establishment. While outside, removed from the enticements of office and close to those sources of human distress which created it, this power can use a thousand different devices to persuade and pressure the official structure into recognizing its needs.

  Direct action, we are beginning to suspect, will need to be kept as a perpetual form of popular expression, because any political system breeds ambition, any political leadership develops a primary aim of self-perpetuation. Today, in the presence of the giant state everywhere in the world, nonviolent direct action may be the only alternative to both the bloody futility of civil war, and the ineptitude of parliamentary procedure. It may, in fact, be the last true resort of democracy, which in this way would constantly renew itself with transfusions of indignation.

  But how nonviolent is “nonviolent direct action”? When SNCC was formed at the Raleigh Conference in April, 1960, it adopted a credo which still stands as the official expression of its views:

  We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action…. Love is the central motif of nonviolence.… Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love.

  By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.

  Today, SNCC’s view of nonviolence is more complicated than that simple statement of faith in the power of love. Although there are some in the organization who would hold to that original credo without qualification, most SNCC people, in different degree and with a great individuality of response, would probably deny that love, conscience, and morality alone could end segregation.

  The actions of SNCC in the last four years have in themselves fashioned a more complex attitude towards nonviolence than is shown in the Raleigh resolution. Not that SNCC has adopted violence, or has even considered adopting violent tactics. But between the use of violence and complete reliance on moral suasion, there is a vast range of possibilities within which the thoughts and actions of SNCC people fluctuate.

  For one thing, demonstrations inescapably take the risk of violence. This violence is almost always directed at the demonstrators, either by police with clubs and cattle prods, or by white fanatics using guns, bombs, and a variety of other weapons of assault. (The only exception to this one-way violence has been the occasional rock or bottle throwing by Negroes not in SNCC during high-tension situations of the past few years.) While the SNCC people are never perpetrators of this violence, but the victims of it, there is no getting away from the fact that if demonstrative activity is undertaken, violence is always a possible result.

  Newspapermen have on one or two occasions claimed that SNCC people were turning to violence, but the most evidence that could be put together was that John Lewis was once seen to twist his body vigorously in the grip of policemen, and on another occasion a SNCC girl, in the midst of rough handling by police, lost her temper and kicked a policeman.

  Despite the purism of the Raleigh resolution, it has become quite clear that the desegregation of restaurants and other public accommodations usually comes from touc
hing the proprietor’s pocketbook, not his conscience. An argument could be made that sit-ins, boycotts, etc., appeal to the conscience of the public, and that this has an effect on the situation. Still, it seems in most cases to be pressure, rather than love, that opens a public facility to Negroes. True, this is not violence, but we seem here to be operating in that large middle ground between pure force and pure moral appeal, and this is the real meaning of nonviolent direct action for the civil rights movement.

  The recent calls by Malcolm X and others for Negroes to use self-defense, and even retaliation, against acts of violence by whites, have not found approval by the SNCC organization. Yet individual SNCC members have sometimes expressed sympathy for this position. A more moderate attitude was expressed with near-unanimity in an informal discussion among SNCC leaders early in 1964: that they would not stop a Negro farmer in Mississippi from arming himself to defend his home against attack.

  It should be recalled that the Raleigh statement of SNCC was made on the basis of experience in Nashville, Atlanta, and other border and upper-South areas. The plunge into Alabama, Mississippi, and Southwest Georgia, first in the Freedom Rides and then in the prolonged voter registration campaign, disclosed a different kind of situation, where the usual techniques of nonviolent direct action were simply crushed by police power. The devices that had proved effective elsewhere met with a variety of reprisals from brutal beatings to murder. These experiences have led SNCC to ask the national government to intervene in the Deep South, using not love but the power of arrest and imprisonment to stop brutality and violence against civil rights workers by police and private persons.