The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ), was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
By the mid-1960s the measured nature of the gains made, and the violence with which they were resisted, were generating dissent from the group's principles of nonviolence, of white participation in the movement, and of field-driven, as opposed to national-office, leadership and direction. By this time many of SNCC's original organizers were working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and others were being lost to a de-segregating Democratic Party and to federally-funded anti-poverty programs. At the same time, the Committee took positions on international affairs that alienated establishment supporters: opposition to the Vietnam War and, in the wake of the Six-Day War, criticism of Israel. Following an aborted merger with the Black Panther Party in 1968, SNCC effectively dissolved.
Because of the successes of its early years, SNCC is credited with breaking down barriers, both institutional and psychological, to the empowerment of African-American communities.
1960: Emergence from the sit-in movement The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in April 1960 at a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, from 19 northern colleges, and from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), the National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founded ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive. Among those attending who were to emerge as strategists for the committee and its field projects were Fisk University student Diane Nash, Tennessee State student Marion Barry, and American Baptist Theological Seminary students James Bevel, John Lewis, and Bernard Lafayette, all involved in the Nashville Student Movement; their mentor at Vanderbilt University, James Lawson; Charles F. McDew, who led student protests at South Carolina State University; J. Charles Jones, Johnson C. Smith University, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at whites-only department stores and service counters throughout Charlotte, North Carolina; Julian Bond from Morehouse College, Atlanta; and Stokely Carmichael from Howard University, Washington, D.C.
The invitation had been issued by Martin Luther King Jr. on behalf of the SCLC, but the conference had been conceived and organized by the then SCLC director Ella Baker. Baker was a critic of what she perceived as King's top-down leadership at the SCLC. "Strong people don't need strong leaders",Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, p. 104 she told the young activists. Speaking to the students' own experience of protest organization, it was Baker's vision that appeared to prevail.
SNCC did not constitute itself as the youth wing of SCLC. It steered an independent course that sought to channel the students' program through the organizers out in the field rather than through its national office in Atlanta ("small and rather dingy", located above a beauty parlor near the city's five Black colleges). Under the constitution adopted, the SNCC comprised representatives from each of the affiliated "local protest groups", and these groups (and not the committee and its support staff) were to be recognized as "the primary expression of a protest in a given area."The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Constitution (as revised in Conference, April 29~ 1962).
Under the same general principle, that "the people who do the work should make the decisions", the students committed to a "participatory democracy" which, avoiding office hierarchy, sought to reach decisions by consensus.Casey Hayden (2015), "Only Love Is Radical." Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today, ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 65. Group meetings were convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone who was left was in agreement with the decision. Given the physical risks involved in many activities in which SNCC was to engage this was thought particularly important: "no one felt comfortable making a decision by majority rule that might cost somebody else's life."Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic (2008). Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History. PM Press. p. 113.
Initially the SNCC continued the focus on sit-ins and boycotts targeting establishments (restaurants, retail stores, theaters) and public amenities maintaining whites-only or segregated facilities. But it was to adopt a new tactic that helped galvanize the movement nationally. In February 1961, Diane Nash, Ruby Doris Smith, Charles Sherrod, and J. Charles Jones joined the Rock Hill, South Carolina sit-in protests and followed the example of the Friendship Nine in enduring an extended jail time rather than post bail.Clayborne Carson and Heidi Hess, "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee". From Darlene Clark Hine (ed.), Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993. The "Jail-no-Bail" stand was seen as a moral refusal to accept, and to effectively subsidize, a corrupted constitution-defiant police and judicial system—while at the same time saving the movement money it did not have."The 'Jail, No Bail' strategy became a new tactic in the fight for civil rights. Documentary produced by South Carolina ETV documenting the key moment in civil rights history." (Video and Audio)
As way to "dramatize that the church, the house of all people, fosters segregation more than any other institution", SNCC students also participated in "kneel-ins"—kneeling in prayer outside of Whites-only churches. Presbyterians churches, targeted because their "ministers lacked the protection and support of a church hierarchy", were not long indifferent. In August 1960, the 172nd General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church wrote to SNCC: "Laws and customs requiring racial discrimination are, in our judgement, such serious violations of the law of God as to justify peaceful and orderly disobedience or disregard of these laws."
1961 Freedom Rides Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to dramatize the southern states' disregard of the Supreme Court rulings (Morgan v. Virginia, 1946 and Boynton v. Virginia, 1960) outlawing segregation in interstate transportation, in May 1961, the first Freedom Riders (seven black, six white, led by CORE director James Farmer) travelled together on interstate buses. In Anniston, Alabama, they were brutally attacked by mobs of Ku Klux Klansmen. Local police stood by. After they were assaulted again in Birmingham, Alabama, and under pressure from the Kennedy Administration, CORE announced it was discontinuing the action. Undeterred, Diane Nash called for new riders. Oretha Castle Haley, Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, Stokely Carmichael, and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland joined John Lewis and Hank Thomas, the two young SNCC members of the original Ride. They traveled on to a savage beating in Montgomery, Alabama, to arrest in Jackson, Mississippi, and to confinement in the Maximum Security (Death Row) Unit of the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary--"Parchman Farm".
Recognizing SNCC's determination, CORE and the SCLC rejected the Administration's call for a "cooling off" period and joined with the students in a Freedom Riders Coordinating Committee to keep the Rides rolling through June and into September. During those months, more than 60 different Freedom Rides criss-crossed the South,Freedom Ride Map . Retrieved February 1, 2010. most of them converging on Jackson, where every Rider was arrested, more than 300 in total. An unknown number were arrested in other Southern towns, and many were beaten including, in Monroe, North Carolina, SNCC's Executive Secretary James Forman. It is estimated that almost 450 people, black and white in equal number, participated.Freedom Rides ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.
With CORE, SNCC had been making plans for a mass demonstration in Washington when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy finally prevailed on the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue rules giving force to the repudiation of the "separate but equal" doctrine. After the new ICC rules took effect on November 1, 1961, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains; "white" and "colored" signs were to be removed from the terminals (lunch counters, drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms) serving interstate customers.
To test the ICC ruling and in the hope of mobilizing the local black community in a broader campaign, in October 1961 SNCC members Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon led a sit-in at the bus terminal in Albany, Georgia. By mid-December, having drawn in the NAACP and a number of other organizations, the Albany Movement had more than 500 protesters in jail. There they were joined briefly by Martin Luther King Jr. and by Ralph Abernathy. King sought advantage in the national media attention his arrest had drawn. In return for the city's commitment to comply with the ICC ruling and to release those protesters willing to post bail, he agreed to leave town. The city reneged, however, so protests and subsequent arrests continued into 1962.
News reports across the country portrayed the Albany debacle as "one of the most stunning defeats" in King's career.Miller, David. "A Loss for Dr. King—New Negro Roundup: They Yield", New York Herald Tribune, December 19, 1961. What they also reported was conflict with SNCC. The New York Times noted that King's SCLC had taken steps "that seemed to indicate they were assuming control" of the movement in Albany, and that the student group had "moved immediately to recapture its dominant position on the scene". If the differences between the organizations were not resolved, the paper predicted "tragic consequences".Sitton, Claude. "Rivalries Beset Integration Campaigns", The New York Times, December 24, 1961.
1962 voter registration campaigns