Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE. Formed in the spring of 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC—pronounced “snick”—was the creation of black college students who were involved in the lunch-counter sit-ins then sweeping the South. They met in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the initiative of Ella Baker, a middle-aged black woman, a veteran of civil rights struggles since the 1930s, who from this time would give intellectual guidance and spiritual inspiration to the young people in SNCC.

Advocating nonviolent direct action, SNCC quickly became the militant thrusting point of the civil rights movement. Using a tiny office in Atlanta as headquarters and paid ten dollars a week, several dozen SNCC “field secretaries” moved out into the Deep South, embedded themselves in the black communities, lived in ramshackle “Freedom Houses,” gained the confidence of local blacks, enlisted the aid of local youngsters, and began the dangerous work of challenging racial segregation in every form.

They reorganized the “Freedom Rides” in the spring of 1961, after the Congress of Racial Equality encountered bus-burnings and brutal beatings, and ended up beaten themselves, and jailed. They organized local people to demonstrate against segregation in Albany, Georgia, to register voters in Selma, Alabama, and Hattiesburg, Missisippi, and all over the Deep South. In the summer of 1964, they invited more than a thousand northern students to come to Mississippi to help with voter registration, teach in “Freedom Schools,” and bring Tacism to national attention. That summer, three SNCC people (two white, one black) were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and that August, black Mississippians were rebuffed by the Democratic Party at its national convention, which agreed to recognize only the white voting delegation.

SNCC, based on its own bitter experience with federal inaction in the face of white violence, was certainly the most angry and the most independent of civil rights groups in the South. Speaking to the huge biracial March on Washington in the summer of 1963, SNCC leader John Lewis, in the face of censorship by other black leaders, insisted on criticizing the Kennedy administration for its failure to defend black rights.

It would be wrong, in considering SNCC, to ignore the heritage of older American radical movements. A few of its field secretaries, educated in the North, had some contact with radical ideas. Ella Baker came out of the Left struggles of the thirties and forties, and was also influenced by the socialist, anti-imperialist thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois. There was also some impact from the southern radical tradition: the Southern Conference Educational Fund and the Highlander Folk School. But SNCC was not consciously ideological; its militancy, its spontaneous radicalism, was shaped mostly by its immediate experience in the southern struggle, its closeness to the black poor, its perception that the government, national as well as local, was tied to powerful political and economic interests, and could not be trusted.

When the southern movement had achieved its immediate aims—the right to vote, the end of legal segregation, a new black consciousness, and a new white perception of blacks as refusing to accept the old order—it lost direction and momentum. It was up against the stone wall of the American system. The recognition that racism, while legally eliminated, was deeply embedded in the institutions of the country, especially in those economic arrangements that created a class of poor, and that this class would be largely black, led to more bitterness, more militancy. The cry of “Black Power,” arising in 1965–1966, meant different things to different people but signaled the frustration of a movement that was at once victorious and unfulfilled.

In this climate, SNCC quickly disintegrated, its people scattered and uncertain, some joining new groups, others still battling, though isolated. But it had affected the thinking of countless people, black and white, and played a pioneering role in creating the climate of the sixties. Its hostility to government (SNCC people were among the first draft resisters), its early raising of the issue (by young SNCC women in the Atlanta office) of sexual equality, its suspicion of centralized authority, and its closeness to grass-roots feelings, all prefigured the great movements of the sixties, against the Vietnam War, for gender equality, and the independent radicalism that came to be called the New Left.

Branch, Taylor. Parting of the Waters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Holsaert, Faith and Martha Prescod, Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

Hogan, Wesley C. Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007

Zinn, Howard. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

SNCC Digital Gateway. https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/the-story-of-sncc/