SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  FEB. 8: Ivanhoe Donaldson of SNCC and the Reverend James Bevel of SCLC were prodded with electric poles and beaten when they led a group of Negroes up the steps of the county courthouse bearing a petition asking for the right to register without encumbrance. Bevel was in bad condition and was sent to the hospital. (In the hospital, he was chained to the bed.) Fifty-seven of the Negroes in the demonstration were arrested.

  FEB. 10: One hundred and seventy-five Negro high school and college students marching to the courthouse were turned around by Sheriff Clark and taken on a forced march out into the country. They were prodded and hit all the way by posse members with billy clubs and electric poles. Some were beaten when they fell to the ground exhausted.

  FEB. 16: Sheriff Clark clubbed a Negro man and woman near the county courthouse.

  FEB. 18: In the town of Marion, Alabama, thirty miles from Selma, Negroes marching out of church to protest the arrest of a civil rights worker were clubbed by state troopers. A U.P.I. dispatch described the scene:

  About 400 Negroes met in the Zion Methodist Church across the street from the courthouse and, after praying and singing, started out the door two by two for the courthouse. Local police and 50 state troopers were waiting for them in the darkness. About 100 Negroes had left the church when Police Chief T. O. Harris, using an electric loudspeaker, told them “You’re going to be arrested if you don’t disperse. Go back to the church.” Instead of moving, the Negroes began praying. Harris warned them several more times. Then the troopers moved in. At first they pushed the Negroes back, shouting “Move! Move!” Suddenly there were screams and cries and clubs flashed in the darkness.

  FEB. 26: Jimmy Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old unemployed mason who had been beaten and shot in the stomach by a state trooper the night of the Marion demonstration died in a Selma hospital.

  MAR. 7: A column of Negroes starting out on a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest discrimination in Alabama was stopped by state troopers and posse men on a bridge just outside of Selma, and when they knelt to pray they were clubbed and gassed. John Lewis of SNCC, leading the march, was hospitalized with a fractured skull.

  MAR. 9: The Reverend James Reeb of Boston, who had come to Selma to protest police brutality, was clubbed on a street in Selma by white men. He died two days later.

  Through this entire month of demonstrations and police brutality, the President and the Department of Justice, charged with enforcing the law, maintained the same attitude of verbal concern and general passivity that is described more fully in Chapter 9 of this book. It was the same reaction as to the triple murder of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman in Mississippi: the dispatch of more F.B.I. agents and Justice Department lawyers, who looked on and took notes while people were being beaten, the initiation of several prosecutions of policemen accused of brutality, and all of this accompanied by a plea that the federal government was powerless to take preventive, protective, action.

  On March 7, when news of the clubbing and gassing on the bridge reached the White House, a full month after trouble had started in Selma, and civil rights groups were clamoring for President Johnson to act, the White House responded that Johnson “was keeping fully informed about the latest developments at Selma,” that it had observers on the scene, and that there was no additional comment. Attorney General Katzenbach claimed that he could not know before the march that Alabama troopers would behave as they did; hence no preventive action had been taken. In view of the record of Sheriff Clark and Al Lingo over the past few years, and the order given by Governor Wallace to stop the march, it was an incredible statement.

  Meanwhile, the Voice of America, responding to protests all over the world about what was happening in Alabama, broadcast in thirty-eight languages to more than one hundred countries a set of statements about federal constitutional powers which can best be described as misleading. The Voice broadcast the fact that the Alabama police who clubbed demonstrators on the bridge had acted on Governor Wallace’s orders, and added: “Regardless of his motives, it is important to note that Governor Wallace had every right to make this decision” because “it is a fact that under the United States Constitution the police powers belong to the states, not to the Federal Government.” A constitutional lawyer might have asked the Voice of America: Does a governor have a legal right to issue an order to police to violate a federal right like the right of peaceable assembly? Does not the federal government have some police powers—those it needs to enforce federal law? And do not these powers explain the existence of the F.B.I., the establishment of federal prisons, and the right of arrest given by law to F.B.I. men and federal marshals?

  The Voice of America went on to state inaccurately the conditions under which the President had a right to call out troops, saying he could do this only when state or local authorities were “actively resisting federal court orders or defying federal laws”. Actually, Section 333, Title 10, of the U.S. Code gives the President the right to send troops simply when a state is “unable” to protect people’s constitutional rights.

  The death of northern minister James Reeb, coming on top of the succession of police actions in Selma, brought spontaneous cries of outrage from all over the nation, demanding that the federal government act. Within twenty-four hours after the news of Reeb’s death, thousands of people marched in New York and New Jersey to sites of federal buildings, asking that Johnson move. Two hundred students sat-in on the eleventh floor of the Federal Building in Boston, 2000 marched in Los Angeles, and meetings and rallies took place in many other cities. Reaction in Europe, Africa, and Asia was also strong.

  Several days later, Johnson responded. He delivered a remarkably eloquent and vigorous speech to a joint session of Congress on behalf of Negro rights, and asked for a strong voting bill to eliminate the subterfuges and schemes used by states to deprive Negroes of the right to register and vote. In addition, following up a federal court order in Montgomery permitting the proposed civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Johnson ordered several thousand National Guardsmen and U.S. Army troops to protect the marchers.

  When the 50-mile march took place, during the third week in March, with a hard core of three hundred marchers from the Selma area, and many thousands of whites and Negroes joining from other states as it neared Montgomery, it had superb federal protection. With soldiers in jeeps and on foot, helicopters and piper cubs overhead, it was certainly the best guarded civil rights activity in the nation’s history.

  Still, when the march was over, and the troops were gone, the basic demand of the civil rights movement remained unanswered: day-to-day protection by a special corps of federal agents, who would use a combination of persuasion and the power of arrest to protect constitutional rights and prevent violence. (Almost as a symbolic expression of this need, the day after the dispersal of the troops a white woman driving Negroes back to Selma was shot and killed.) What the events in Selma showed was the power of demonstrative protest in forcing the national government to take decisive action. What it also showed was the traditional reluctance of politicians to move unless pressured by a set of disastrous events and an accompanying wave of indignation.

  In the midst of all this, SNCC in the spring of 1965 was trying to decide its own future. After the Mississippi Summer, it held a number of staff meetings to discuss what SNCC’s role should be in future months and future years. One thing was clear: the SNCC organizational structure no longer fit the realities. It was based on SNCC’s original position as a coordinater of student groups, so that both the “Coordinating Committee” and the smaller Executive Committee represented such groups. However, student groups had dwindled and SNCC now consisted of a large staff of professional organizers working in deep-South communities. It was now determined that this staff of over two hundred would become the basic decision-making body in SNCC, that it would meet about four times a year to lay down basic policy, and the Executive Committee would be drawn from these staff people working in the Black Belt.

 
; A number of SNCC people, anxious to avoid the “iron law of oligarchy” that they had seen operating in other organizations, and determined to keep power near its base in the Black Belt, argued against an emphasis on the Executive Committee as a group of “leaders,” and urged that the whole staff participate continually in decision-making. Their view was only partly followed, since the Executive Committee was given strong powers between staff meetings, and a three-person Secretariat of top officials was set up: James Forman was Executive Secretary, John Lewis as Chairman, Cleveland Sellers as Program Chairman.

  But the spirit of the “anti-organization” view was shown in the kind of persons elected to the new Executive Committee in early 1965. Many of them were Negroes from Mississippi, including Mrs. Hamer of Ruleville, Jesse Harris of Jackson, Dorie Ladner of Hattiesburg, Silas McGhee of Greenwood, LaFayette Surney of Ruleville, Hollis Watkins of Summit. At a week-long staff meeting in Atlanta, again in keeping with the strong mood of “populism” in SNCC, it was decided that instead of issuing a call for thousands of northern volunteers for the summer of 1965, a series of “People’s Conferences” would be held in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia. At these Conferences, local people would decide on programs and personnel for their areas.

  All this reflected SNCC’s stubborn insistence that it would not go the way of so many other reform groups, that it would stick close to the soil of discontent from it sprang. And it declared openly SNCC’s transition from a student group based in Negro colleges to a band of organizers in Southern communities.

  SNCC still hoped to recruit students from Negro colleges in the South, and so used some staff people as “campus travellers” to organize students. Also, it maintained a cordial relationship with an energetic new organization of students at predominantly white Southern colleges that was determined to do for the white colleges and the white community what SNCC had accomplished in the Negro communities. This was SSOC, the Southern Students Organizing Committee.

  SNCC’s radicalism continued to be misunderstood and maligned by those who saw in it “sinister” and “subversive” and “Communist” elements. In fact, except for a few white and Negro students who had read a little Marx and espoused some vague form of “socialism,” SNCC people simply could not be fitted into the customary ideological categories. SNCC people did want to revolutionize society as they knew it, but they did not conceive of doing this by an armed uprising; their tactics remained nonviolent, though militantly demonstrative. They did want a system drastically different from the one they saw operating in the United States, but they saw no model for such a system in any country in the world, and when pressed couldn’t really describe what would be the features of the new society they hoped to establish. This fresh and independent radicalism baffled journalists, who kept trying to describe the SNCC mood in terms of the 1930’s, not comprehending that this was truly a new phenomenon the nation was watching.

  Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, syndicated in the Herald Tribune and other newspapers, found sinister implications in the fact that several SNCC leaders visited Africa at the invitation of Guinea’s President Sekou Toure, or that Bob Moses once accepted an invitation to speak at a dinner sponsored by the left-wing weekly The National Guardian. In SNCC outlook they saw “a startling and frightening parallel to the revolutionary movements in Africa.”

  It seems to me that there is one element of truth in the “parallel” between SNCC and revolutionary movements abroad which frightens Evans and Novak so much. That is, SNCC represents the closest thing we have in the United States to that militant mood of change which one finds in emerging nations abroad. For that, the nation should be grateful, because many of our mistakes in foreign policy might be corrected if we had a better understanding of the revolutionary spirit of Africa and Asia, and the SNCC people provide us, at home, with a sample of that spirit. In both cases, the basis is the same: a movement with hungry, harried people has a militancy hard to purchase. Also, such a movement is impatient with worries about ideology. It understands what it sees and feels—bread, land, a policeman’s club, a friend’s hand—and is impervious to sophisticated talk about doctrinal bogies.

  The same parallel can be found in the attitude toward Communists and Communism. No country in the world has less cause to worry about communism, or more paranoic fear of it, than the United States. The talk about “Communist” influences in SNCC comes mostly from people who simply don’t know the organization or the people in it. SNCC is fundamentally a group of Black Belt and Northern Negroes who are angry at American society and determined to change it, but who have had little or no contact with formal radical ideologies or movements. Here and there there may be one or two people at intermediate levels on the SNCC staff who’ve read a little Marx and are consciously sympathetic with one or another communist or socialist governments in the world. Those journalists who see “conspiracies” or “infiltration” are working from second- or third-hand information.

  Most middle-class white Americans simply have not had those experiences which make many Negroes hostile to a society which preaches equality and practices murder, which produces huge wealth, and leaves millions without the simple necessities of life. And so (forgetting that this country, long before Marx, had a tradition, however unpopular, of radical protest) these white Americans attribute this native-born hostility to “communism.”

  Perhaps, too, they suspect—and rightly—that even if the SNCC people could be shown a “Communist,” they would not be upset. For one thing, SNCC workers are young, and they have grown up in a world where there is no longer any single meaning of “Communism” or “Communist,” where varieties of communism develop in different parts of the world; the term, therefore, has lost both specific meaning, and the capacity to alarm.

  The accusers (both liberals and conservatives), it turns out on closer inspection, cannot point to genuine “Communists” in SNCC, but to people who belong to organizations which are connected with other organizations which include people who might possibly be Communists! It is the McCarthy approach all over again, where five suspicions strung together become a certainty.

  There was talk, for instance, about SNCC’s “connection” with the Southern Conference Education Fund, a long-time militant civil rights organization in the South that had on occasion contributed a tiny amount of money to SNCC. And SCEF was to be looked on with suspicion because one of its leading figures was Carl Braden, who had refused to answer questions about Communist affiliations put to him by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It has been curious to see liberals on one day denounce that Committee and the next day accept its assumptions.

  Another of these rickety “connections” was made in the newspapers between SNCC and the National Lawyers Guild. When the Atlantic City Convention was over, the Freedom Democratic Party planned its next move not with liberal attorney Joseph Rauh, but with liberal-radical attorneys William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy. These were two brilliant and seasoned lawyers. However, Kinoy’s membership in the National Lawyers Guild became an object of deep concern among some newspapermen. (The Guild’s chief sin, it turned out, was to include lawyers who had defended Communists in trials.) But the legal aid from Kunstler and Kinoy no more meant an FDP tie with the Guild than the FDFs earlier use of Rauh meant an FDP tie with the Americans for Democratic Action. It has been hard for journalists, still quivery with the suspicions and the timidity engendered by the McCarthy era, to understand the honest, pragmatic approach of SNCC and the FDP to working with other people, an approach which asks no questions except: will you work your head off for our cause?

  One story might illustrate SNCC’s way.

  In the spring of 1964, as plans for the Mississippi Summer were being made, a representative from the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP came to a SNCC Executive Committee meeting with a warning: if COPO was going to use National Lawyers Guild attorneys in Mississippi, then the Legal Defense Fund, Inc., (known in the movement as the “Inc. Fund”) w
ould withdraw its offer of ample financial resources and large staff to help the Summer Project.

  The SNCC Executive Committee, as the dominant group in COFO, discussed this. It had no special loyalty to the National Lawyers Guild as an organization; in fact, it knew little about the Guild. But Guild lawyers had helped in time of need; Bob Moses pointed to some imaginative work done by Attorney Ben Smith of New Orleans, a Guild member, when they were in a tight spot in Mississippi. Besides, there was an instinctive SNCC reaction against anything that sounded like bullying, or bribery. There would be enough legal work in Mississippi to require all the help that could be secured. SNCC decided overwhelmingly to reject the suggestion that Guild lawyers be turned away.

  This decision posed two dangers which “sensible” and “practical” people would have worried about. One was that the movement would lose the services of the NAACP Legal Defense Staff when this was badly needed. The other was that the continued association, slim as it was, with the National Lawyers’ Guild would hurt SNCC’s reputation nationally.

  What happened, of course, was that neither of the dangers eventuated. The Guild’s lawyers worked in the Summer Project. The “Inc. Fund’s” lawyers also worked in the Summer Project. Both groups were inestimably helpful. And SNCC came out of the Mississippi Project with an enhanced reputation for its accomplishments.

  SNCC read lessons in this: that ultimately allies must come to your side on the basis of a joining of their needs and yours, and not because of some subsidiary issue, as magnified as it might be, verbally; that in the end, the strength of an organization comes from what it accomplishes, and not from its associations, real or imagined; that the best way to deal with name-calling is to drown it in a crescendo of constructive activity. For SNCC there was a special source of confidence: its power depended, finally, not on what the political higher-ups or the liberal Establishment or the press thought of it, but on its ability to organize ordinary people into a striking force for social change. If it could do that effectively, the “important” groups and individuals would give way.