The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ( /ˈsnɪk/) was one of the organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. SNCC grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC's work in the South, allowing full-time SNCC workers to have a $10 per week salary. Many unpaid volunteers also worked with SNCC on projects in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, and Maryland.

SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins and freedom rides, a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party over the next few years. SNCC's major contribution was in its field work, organizing voter registration drives all over the South, especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

A final SNCC legacy is the destruction of the psychological shackles which had kept black southerners in physical and mental peonage; SNCC helped break those chains forever. It demonstrated that ordinary women and men, young and old, could perform extraordinary tasks.

—Julian Bond^[1]

In the later 1960s, led by fiery leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, SNCC focused on "black power", and then protesting against the Vietnam War. As early as 1965, James Forman said he didn’t know “how much longer we can stay nonviolent” and in 1969, SNCC officially changed its name to the Student National Coordinating Committee to reflect the broadening of its strategies. It passed out of existence in the 1970s.

Founding and early years[link]

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, independent student-led groups began direct-action protests against segregation in dozens of southern communities. The most common action of these groups was organizing sit-ins at racially segregated lunch counters to protest the pervasiveness of Jim Crow and other forms of racism. In addition to sitting in at lunch counters, the groups also organized and carried out protests at segregated public libraries, public parks, and public swimming pools. At that time, all those amish facilities financed by taxes were closed to blacks. The white response was often to close the facility, rather than integrate it.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as an organization, began with an $800.00 grant from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for a conference where attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges, the SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Out of this conference the SNCC (SNCC) was formed.^[2][3]

Ella Baker, who organized the Shaw conference, had been the SCLC director before helping to form SNCC, but SNCC was not a branch of SCLC. Instead of being closely tied to SCLC or the NAACP as a "youth division", SNCC sought to stand on its own. Among important SNCC leaders attending the conference were Stokely Carmichael from Howard University; Charles F. McDew, who led student protests at South Carolina State University; J. Charles Jones, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at department stores throughout Charlotte, North Carolina; Julian Bond from Atlanta, Diane Nash; James Lawson; John Lewis; Bernard Lafayette; James Bevel; and Marion Barry from the Nashville Student Movement.

SNCC's first chairman was Marion Barry, who later became the mayor of Washington DC. Barry served as chairman for one year. The second chairman was Charles F. McDew, who served as the chairman from 1961 to 1963, when he was succeeded by John Lewis.^[4] SNCC's executive secretary, James Forman, played a major role in running the organization.

In the years that followed, SNCC members were referred to as “shock troops of the revolution."^[5] SNCC took on greater risks in 1961, after a mob of Ku Klux Klan members and other whites attacked integrated groups of bus passengers who defied local segregation laws as part of the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rather than allowing mob violence to stop them, CORE and SNCC "Freedom Riders," including Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, and John Lewis, put themselves at great personal risk by traveling in racially-integrated groups through the deep South. At least 436 people took part in these Freedom Rides during the spring and summer of 1961.^[6]

Robert Parris Moses (also known as Robert Parris or Bob Moses) played a central role in transforming SNCC from a coordinating committee of student protest groups to an organization of organizers dedicated to building community-based political organizations of the rural poor. The voter registration project he initiated in McComb, Mississippi in 1961 became the seed for most of SNCC's activities from 1962-1966.

After the Freedom Rides, SNCC worked primarily on voter registration, along with local protests about segregated public facilities. Registering to vote was extremely difficult and dangerous, as blacks who attempted to register often lost their jobs and their homes. SNCC workers lived with local families and often the homes providing such hospitality were firebombed.

The actions of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC forced the Kennedy Administration to briefly provide federal protection to temporarily abate mob violence. Local FBI offices were usually staffed by Southern whites (there were no black FBI agents at that time) who refused to intervene to protect civil rights workers or local blacks who were attempting to register to vote.

One of the ways in which SNCC was unusual among civil rights groups was the way in which decisions were made. Instead of "top down" control, as was the case with most organizations at that time, decisions in SNCC were made by consensus. Group meetings would be convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone was in agreement with the decision. Because activities were often very dangerous and could lead to prison or death, SNCC wanted all participants to support each activity.

By 1965, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. It had organized nonviolent direct action against segregated facilities, as well as voter-registration projects, in Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi; built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural cooperatives; and given the movement for women's liberation new energy. It inspired and trained the activists who began the "New Left." It helped expand the limits of political debate within black America, and broadened the focus of the civil rights movement. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

—Julian Bond^[1]

March on Washington[link]

SNCC played a signal role in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While many speakers applauded the Kennedy Administration for the efforts it had made toward obtaining new, more effective civil rights legislation protecting the right to vote and outlawing segregation, John Lewis took the administration to task for how little it had done to protect Southern blacks and civil rights workers under attack in the Deep South. Although he was forced to tone down his speech under pressure from the representatives of other civil rights organizations on the march organization committee, his words still stung. The version of the speech leaked to the press went as follows:

"We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here — for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages...or no wages at all. In good conscience, we cannot support the administration's civil rights bill.

This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges like those in Americus, Georgia, where four young men are in jail, facing a death penalty, for engaging in peaceful protest.

I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, the black masses are on the march for jobs and for freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't be a 'cooling-off period.'"^[7]

However, under pressure from the representatives of other groups many changes were made to the speech as it was delivered that day.^[8] According to James Forman, the most important of these was the change of "we cannot support" the Kennedy Civil Rights Bill to "we support with reservations". Forman wrote of the following explanation of this:

"Somewhere along the line, the church and labor people had been told that this was a march to support the administration's Civil Rights Bill, which was passed in 1964, after Kennedy's death. Who did this and how it happened, I do not know. But people all over the country thought they were marching for jobs and freedom when in actuality the sellout leadership of the March on Washington was playing patsy with the Kennedy administration as part of the whole liberal-labor politics of Rustin, Wilkins, Randolph, Reuther, King, the Catholic and Protestant hierarchy. If people had known they had come to Washington to aid the Kennedy administration, they would not have come in the numbers they did."^[9]

Forman's and SNCC's anger came in part from the failure of the federal government, FBI and Justice Department to protect SNCC civil rights workers in the South at this time. Indeed, the federal government at that time was instrumental in indicting SNCC workers and other civil rights activists.^[10]

Voting rights[link]

In 1961 SNCC began expanding its activities from direct-action protests against segregation into other forms of organizing, most notably voter registration. Under the leadership of Bob Moses, SNCC's first voter-registration project was in McComb, Mississippi, an effort suppressed with arrests and savage^{[citation needed]} white violence, resulting in the murder of local activist Herbert Lee. With funding from the Voter Education Project, SNCC expanded its voter registration efforts into the Mississippi Delta around Greenwood, Southwest Georgia around Albany, and the Alabama Black Belt around Selma. All of these projects endured police harassment and arrests; KKK violence including shootings, bombings, and assassinations; and economic terrorism against those blacks who dared to try to register.^[11]

In the fall of 1963, SNCC conducted the Freedom Ballot, a parallel election in which black Mississippians came out to show their willingness to vote — a right they had been denied for decades, despite the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, due to a combination of state laws and constitutional provisions, economic reprisals and violence by white authorities and private citizens.

SNCC followed up on the Freedom Ballot with the Mississippi Summer Project, also known as Freedom Summer, which focused on voter registration and Freedom Schools. The Summer Project brought hundreds of white Northern students to the South where they volunteered as teachers and organizers. Their presence brought national press attention to SNCC's work in the south. SNCC organized black Mississippians to register to vote, almost always without success. White authorities either rejected their applications on any pretexts available or, failing that, simply refused to accept their applications.

Mississippi Summer got national attention when three civil rights workers involved in the project, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were lynched after having been released from police custody. Their bodies were eventually found after a reluctant J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI to search for them. In the process the FBI also found corpses of several other missing black Mississippians, whose disappearances had not attracted public attention outside the Delta.

SNCC also established Freedom Schools to teach children to read and to educate them to stand up for their rights. As in the struggle to desegregate public accommodations led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama the year before, the bolder attitudes of the children helped shake their parents out of the fear that had paralyzed many of them.

The goal of the Mississippi Summer Project was to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an integrated party, to win seats at the 1964 Democratic National Convention for a slate of delegates elected by disfranchised black Mississippians and white sympathizers. The MFDP was, however, tremendously inconvenient for the Johnson Administration. It had wanted to minimize the inroads that Barry Goldwater’s campaign was making into what had previously been the Democratic stronghold of the “Solid South” and the support that George Wallace received during the Democratic primaries in the North.

When the MFDP started to organize a fight over credentials, Johnson originally would not budge. When Fannie Lou Hamer, the leader of the MFDP, was in the midst of testifying about the police beatings of her and others for attempting to exercise their right to vote, Johnson preempted television coverage of the credentials fight. Even so, her testimony created enough uproar that Johnson offered the MFDP a "compromise": they would receive two non-voting seats, while the delegation sent by the official Democratic Party would take its seats.

Johnson used all of his resources, mobilizing Walter Reuther, one of his key supporters within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and his Vice-Presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, to pressure King and other mainstream civil rights leaders to bring the MFDP around, while directing Hoover to put the delegation under surveillance. The MFDP rejected both the compromise and the pressure to accept it, and walked out.

That experience destroyed what little faith SNCC activists had in the federal government, even though Johnson had obtained a broad Civil Rights Act barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment and private education in 1964 and would go on to obtain an equally broad Voting Rights Act in 1965. It also estranged SNCC leaders from many of the mainstream leaders of the civil rights movement.

Those differences carried over into the voting rights struggle that centered on Selma, Alabama in 1965. SNCC had begun organizing black citizens to register to vote in Selma in 1963,^[12] but made little headway against the adamant resistance of Sheriff Jim Clark and the White Citizens' Council. In early 1965, local Selma activists asked the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for help, and the two organizations formed an uneasy alliance. They disagreed over tactical and strategic issues, including the SCLC's decision not to attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge a second time after county sheriffs and state troopers attacked them on "Bloody Sunday" on March 7, 1965.

The civil rights activists crossed the bridge on the third attempt, with the aid of a federal court order barring authorities from interfering with the march. It was part of a five-day march to Montgomery, Alabama that helped dramatize the need for a Voting Rights Act. During this period, SNCC activists became more and more disenchanted with nonviolence, integration as a strategic goal, and cooperation with white liberals or the Federal government.

Change in strategy and dissolution[link]

Many within the organization had grown skeptical about the tactics of nonviolence. After the Democratic convention of 1964, the group began to split into two factions – one favoring a continuation of nonviolent, integration-oriented redress of grievances within the existing political system, and the other moving towards Black Power and revolutionary ideologies. In 1965 the white members were expelled. These differences continued to grow during the Selma Voting Rights campaign.

After the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, some SNCC members sought to break their ties with the mainstream civil rights movement and the liberal organizations that supported it. They argued instead that blacks needed to build power of their own rather than seek accommodations from the power structure in place. Eventually, the leader of the militant branch, Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), replaced John Lewis as head of SNCC in May 1966.

Carmichael first argued that blacks should be free to use violence in self-defense; later he advocated revolutionary violence to overthrow oppression. Carmichael rejected the civil-rights legislation (that the movement had fought so hard to achieve) as mere palliatives. The Department of Defense stated in 1967:

SNCC can no longer be considered a civil rights group. It has become a racist organization with black supremacy ideals and an expressed hatred for whites. It employs violent and militant measures which may be defined as extreme when compared with those of more moderate groups.^[13]

Carmichael raised the banner of Black Power in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi in June 1966. As the mainstream civil-rights movement distanced itself from SNCC, SNCC expelled white staff and volunteers, and denounced the whites who had supported it in the past. By early 1967, SNCC was approaching bankruptcy and close to disappearing.

Carmichael left SNCC in June 1967 to join the Black Panther Party. H. Rap Brown, later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, replaced him as the head of SNCC. Brown renamed the group the Student National Coordinating Committee and supported violence, which he described "as American as cherry pie". He resigned from SNCC in 1968, after being indicted for inciting to riot in Cambridge, Maryland in 1967. Brown then became Minister of Justice of the Black Panther Party.

Brown also proposed violence against violence if the power structure in the US did not change its racist actions against Blacks. The FBI targeted him and incarcerated him without legal representation during 1968-1969. The government indicted Brown^[when?] to make an example of him, despite a lack of proper evidence.^{[citation needed]}

By then, SNCC was no longer an effective organization. It largely disappeared in the early 1970s, although chapters in communities such as San Antonio, Texas continued for several more years. Mario Marcel Salas, field secretary of the SNCC chapter in San Antonio, operated until 1976. The San Antonio SNCC chapter was part Black Panther Party and part SNCC. Dr. Charles Jones of Atlanta State University termed it a "hybrid organization" because it had panther-style survival programs. Salas also worked closely with La Raza Unida Party, running for political office and organizing demonstrations to expose discrimination against Blacks and Latinos. Salas later helped the New Jewel Movement in the liberation of the island of Grenada from the dictator Eric Gairy in 1979, and became the chairman of the Free Nelson Mandela Movement in San Antonio Texas.

SNCC and feminism[link]

SNCC activist Bernice Johnson Reagon described the Civil Rights Movement as the "borning movement" of the 1960s.^[14] The Women's' Liberation Movement was one of the many movements born out of and inspired by the Civil Rights Movement. SNCC consisted of mostly college-age activists, and therefore provided opportunities for young women. Participation in organizations such as SNCC essentially marked the beginning of second-wave feminism in the US, which focused on changing social inequalities as opposed to the previous focus on legal issues in first-wave feminism. The influence of the Civil Rights movement also introduced mass protests and awareness campaigns as the main methods to obtain sexual equality.

Many black women held prominent positions in the movement as a result of their participation in SNCC. Some of these women include Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Donna Richards, Fay Bellamy, Gwen Patton, Cynthia Washington, Jean Wiley, Muriel Tillinghast, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Pearl Avery, Diane Nash, Ella Baker, Victoria Gray, Unita Blackwell, Bettie Mae Fikes, Joyce Ladner, Dorie Ladner, Gloria Richardson, Bernice Reagon, Prathia Hall, Gwendolyn Delores Robinson/Zoharah Simmons, Judy Richardson, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Ruby Sales, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Anne Moody.

Anne Moody published her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, in 1970, detailing her decision to participate in SNCC and later CORE, and her experience as a woman in the movement. She described the widespread trend of black women to become involved with SNCC at their educational institutions. As young college students or teachers, these black women were often heavily involved in grassroots campaign by teaching Freedom Schools and promoting voter registration.^[15]

Young white women also became very involved with SNCC, particularly after the Freedom Summer of 1964. Many northern white women were inspired by the ideology of racial equality. The book Deep in Our Hearts details the experiences of nine white women in SNCC. Some white women, such as Mary King, Constance W. Curry, and Casey Hayden, and Latino women such as Mary Varela and Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, were able to obtain status and leadership within SNCC.^[16][17]

Through organizations like SNCC, women of both races were becoming more politically active than at any time in American history since the Women's suffrage movement. A group of women in SNCC who were later identified as Mary King and Casey Hayden openly challenged the way women were treated when they issued the “SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement).”^[18] The paper was published anonymously, helping King and Hayden to avoid unwanted attention.^[16] The paper listed 11 events in which women were treated as subordinate to men. According to the paper, women in SNCC did not have a chance to become the face of the organization, the top leaders, because they were assigned to clerical and housekeeping duties, whereas men were involved in decision-making. The degree and significance of male-domination and women's subordination was hotly debated within SNCC; many of SNCC's black women disputed the premise that women were denied leadership roles.^[19]

When Stokely Carmichael took over the leadership of SNCC from John Lewis, he essentially reoriented the path of SNCC towards Black Power. He famously said in a speech, “it is a call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations.”^[20] Thus, white women lost their influence and power in SNCC; Mary King and Casey Hayden left SNCC to become active in pursuing equality for women. They co-authored Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo, which later became an influential piece in feminism.^[21] As SNCC turned its focus to Black Power, black women also lost their voice and became subject to the already-existing patriarchal structure of the organization. The limited opportunities for women from the original community-building ideology were erased by the usurping Black Power movement, in which power was more centralized in the hands of the male-dominated top leadership.

Former SNCC member Kathleen Cleaver played a key role in the central committee of the Black Panther Party as communications secretary (1968). Her position in this "male dominated" leadership was both effective and influential to Brown, Red and Yellow Power groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010 the Atlanta City Council renamed Raymond Street "SNCC Way".^[22]

Fiftieth Anniversary Conference[link]

A conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of SNCC was held at Shaw University on 15–18 April 2010.^[23]

See also[link]

African American portal

• Ella Baker
• Julian Bond
• Stokely Carmichael
• James Forman
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• John Lewis
• Robert Parris Moses
• Diane Nash
• Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson
• Cleveland Sellers
• Marzette Watts

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

• SNCC 1960 - 1966: Six years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Retrieved 2 May 2005.
• Civil Rights Movement Veterans
• Stokely Carmichael - Leader of SNCC's militant branch

Further reading[link]

Archives

• Ellin (Joseph and Nancy) Freedom Summer Collection. Collection Number: M323. Dates: 1963 - 1988. Volume: 1.7 ft³ (48 L) The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections. Retrieved 2 May 2005.

Books

• Carmichael, Stokely, et al. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Scribner. 2005. 848 pages. ISBN 0-684-85004-4
• Carson, Claybourne. In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1981. ISBN 0-674-44727-1
• Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 1985 and 1997, Open Hand Publishing, Washington D.C. ISBN 0-295-97659-4 and ISBN 0-940880-10-5
• Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. Rutgers University Press. 1998. 274 pages. ISBN 0-8135-2477-6
• Halberstam, David. The Children, Ballantine Books. 1999. ISBN 0-449-00439-2
• Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement, Univ of Georgia Press, 2002. ISBN 0-8203-2419-1
• Holsaert, Faith (and 5 others) Hands on the Freedom Plow Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. University of Illinois Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-252-03557-9.
• Hogan, Wesley C. How democracy travels: SNCC, Swarthmore students, and the growth of the student movement in the North, 1961-1964.
• Hogan, Wesley C. Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America, University of North Carolina Press. 2007.
• Holsaert et al. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. University of Illinois Press. 2010.
• King, Mary. "Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement". 1987.
• Lewis, John. Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1998.
• Pardun, Robert. Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties. California: Shire Press. 2001. 376 pages. ISBN 0-918828-20-1
• Salas, Mario Marcel. Masters Thesis: "Patterns of Persistence: Paternal Colonialist Structures and the Radical Opposition in the African American Community in San Antonio, Texas,1937–2001, by Mario Marcel Salas, University of Texas at San Antonio, John Peace Library 6900 Loop 1604, San Antonio, Texas, 2002. Other SNCC material located in historical records at the Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio as part of the Mario Marcel Salas historical record.
• Sellers, Cleveland and Robert Terrell. The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC. University Press of Mississippi; Reprint edition. 1990. 289 pages. ISBN 0-87805-474-X
• Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press. 1964. ISBN 0-89608-679-8

Video

• SNCC 50th Anniversary Conference 38 DVD collection documenting the formal addresses, panel discussions and programs that took place at the 50th anniversary conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Interviews

• Transcript: An Oral History with Terri Shaw. SNCC member and Freedom Summer participant. The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections. Retrieved 2 May 2005.

• Interviews with civil rights workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Stanford University Project South oral history collection. Microfilming Corp. of America. 1975. ISBN 0-88455-990-4.

SNCC publications and documents

• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founding Statement.
• Memorandum: on the SNCC Mississippi Summer Project Transcript. Oxford, Ohio: General Materials (ca. June 1964). Retrieved 2 May 2005.

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (July 2008)

Julian Bond
Julian Bond in 2005.
Member of the Georgia House of Representatives from the 32nd district
In office 1967–1974
Succeeded by	Mildred Glover[1]
Member of the Georgia Senate from the 39th district
In office 1975–1987
Preceded by	Horace T. Ward[2]
Succeeded by	Hildred W. Shumake[3]
Personal details
Born	Horace Julian Bond (1940-01-14) January 14, 1940 (age 72) Nashville, Tennessee, USA
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	(1) Alice Clopton (1961–1989, divorced) (2)Pamela S. Horowitz (1990–present)
Alma mater	George School Morehouse College (BA, English, 1971)

Horace Julian Bond (born January 14, 1940), known as Julian Bond, is an American social activist and leader in the American civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped to establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bond was elected to four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and later to six terms in the Georgia Senate, having served a combined twenty years in both legislative chambers. From 1998 to 2010, he was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Early life and education[link]

Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to the former Julia Agnes Washington and Horace Mann Bond. The family moved to Pennsylvania when Julian was five because his father was selected as the first African-American president of Lincoln University, also his father's alma mater. In 1957, Bond graduated from George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

In 1957, Bond attended Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta. While there, he earned a varsity letter for swimming. He also helped found a literary magazine called The Pegasus. Bond worked as an intern at Time magazine. He was also a member of the only class taught by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr Ph.D.TogetherinParis (talk) 07:55, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

In 1960, Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and served as its communications director from 1961 to 1966. From 1960 to 1963, he led student protests against segregation in public facilities in Georgia.

Bond left Morehouse in 1961 and returned to complete his BA in English in 1971 at age 31. With Morris Dees, Bond helped found the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a public-interest law firm based in Montgomery, Alabama. He served as its president from 1971 to 1979. Bond continues on the board of directors of the SPLC.

Career[link]

In 1965, Bond was one of eight African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives after passage of civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On January 10, 1966, however, Georgia state representatives voted 184-12 not to seat him because he publicly endorsed SNCC's policy regarding opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. They disliked Bond's stated sympathy for persons who were "unwilling to respond to a military draft".^[4] A federal District Court panel ruled 2-1 that the Georgia House had not violated any of Bond's federal constitutional rights. In 1966, the United States Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in the case of Bond v. Floyd (385 U.S. 116) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his freedom of speech and was required to seat him. From 1967 to 1975, Bond was elected for four terms as a Democratic member in the Georgia House. There he organized the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus.

In January 1967, Bond was among eleven House members who refused to vote when the legislature elected segregationist Lester Maddox of Atlanta as governor of Georgia over the Republican Howard Callaway, who had led in the 1966 general election by some three thousand votes. The choice fell on state lawmakers under the Georgia Constitution of 1824 because neither major party candidate had polled a majority in the general election. Former Governor Ellis Arnall polled more than fifty thousad votes as a write-in cadidate, a factor which led to the impasse. Bond would not support either Maddox or Callaway though he was ordered to vote by lame duck Lieutenant Governor Peter Zack Geer.^[5]

Throughout his House career, Bond's district was repeatedly altered:

• 1967–1969: 136th^[6]
• 1969–1973: 111th^[7]
• 1973–1974: 32nd^[8]

He went on to be elected for six terms in the Georgia Senate in which he served from 1975 to 1987.

During the 1968 presidential election, Bond led an alternate delegation from Georgia to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There, unexpectedly and contrary to his intention, he became the first African American to be proposed as a major-party candidate for Vice President of the United States. While expressing gratitude for the honor, the 28-year-old Bond quickly declined, citing the constitutional requirement that one must be at least 35 years of age to serve in that office.

Bond resigned from the Georgia Senate in 1987 to run for the United States House of Representatives from Georgia's 5th congressional district. He lost the Democratic nomination in a runoff to rival civil rights leader John Lewis in a bitter contest, in which Bond was accused of using cocaine and other drugs.^[9] As the 5th district had a huge Democratic majority, the nomination delivered the seat to Lewis, who still serves as congressman.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Bond taught at several universities in major cities of the North and South, including American, Drexel, Harvard, and the University of Virginia.

In 1998, Bond was selected as chairman of the NAACP. In November 2008, he announced that he would not seek another term as chairman.^[10] Bond agreed to stay on in the position through 2009 as the organization celebrated its 100th anniversary. Roslyn M. Brock was chosen as Bond's successor on February 20, 2010.^[11]

He continues to write and lecture about the history of the civil rights movement and the condition of African Americans and the poor. He is President Emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

From 1980 to 1997 he hosted America's Black Forum. He remains a commentator for the Forum, for radio's Byline, and for NBC's The Today Show. He authored the nationally syndicated newspaper column Viewpoint. He narrated the critically acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize in 1987 and 1990.

Bond has been an outspoken supporter of the rights of gays and lesbians. He has publicly stated his support for same-sex marriage. Most notably he boycotted the funeral services for Coretta Scott King on the grounds that the King children had chosen an anti-gay megachurch. This was in contradiction to their mother's longstanding support for the rights of gay and lesbian people.^[12] In a 2005 speech in Richmond, VA, Bond stated:

African Americans ... were the only Americans who were enslaved for two centuries, but we were far from the only Americans suffering discrimination then and now. ... Sexual disposition parallels race. I was born this way. I have no choice. I wouldn’t change it if I could. Sexuality is unchangeable.^[13]

In a 2007 speech on the Martin Luther King Day Celebration at Clayton State University in Morrow, GA, Bond said, "If you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay married." His positions have pitted elements of the NAACP against religious groups in the Black Civil Rights movement who oppose gay marriage mostly within the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) who was blamed partly for the success of the recent gay marriage ban amendment in California.^{[citation needed]}

Today, Bond is a Distinguished Professor in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C. He also is a faculty member in the history department at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, where he teaches history of the Civil Rights Movement.^[14]

In January 2007, he delivered the annual Martin Luther King lecture at Siena College.

Personal life[link]

On July 28, 1961, Bond married Alice Clopton, a student at Spelman College. They divorced on November 10, 1989. They had five children: Phyllis Jane Bond-McMillan, Horace Mann Bond II, Michael Julian Bond, (an At-large member of Atlanta’s Council), Jeffrey Alvin Bond and Julia "Cookie" Louise Bond. He married Pamela S. Horowitz, an attorney, on March 17, 1990.

Legacy and honors[link]

• 2002 - National Freedom Award
• In 1999, an honorary LL.D. from Bates College.
• In 2008, an honorary degree from George Washington University. Bond was the 2008 Commencement Keynote Speaker.^[15]
• On October 1, 2009, an honorary L.H.D. from Macalester College.

The above four are among 25 honorary degrees which he has been awarded.

Eyes on the Prize[link]

Bond was the narrator of the PBS video, Eyes on the Prize, recounting the civil rights controversies of the 1950s and 1960s.

Controversial comments[link]

As NAACP chairman, Bond strongly criticized the Republican Party. WorldNetDaily, a conservative Internet-based news service, which inaccurately reported Bond as saying: "[The Republicans'] idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side-by-side." WorldNetDaily accused him of calling Secretary of State Rice and former Secretary Powell "tokens" and comparing the judicial nominees of President George W. Bush to the Taliban.^[16] His actual words were that the Republican Party uses them "as kinds of human shields against any criticism of their record on civil rights."^[17] The issue was resolved when the Fayetteville Observer reported on its review of the audio recordings of the speech.

Bond was a strong critic of the Bush administration from its assumption of office in 2001, in large part because Bond believed the administration was illegitimate. Twice that year, first in February to the NAACP board and then in July at that organization's national convention, he attacked the administration for selecting Cabinet secretaries "from the Taliban wing of American politics". Bond specifically targeted Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had opposed affirmative action, and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who defended the Confederacy in a 1996 speech on states' rights. The selection of these two individuals, Bond said, "...whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection", "appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing". Then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey responded to Bond's statement with a letter accusing NAACP leaders of "racial McCarthyism."^[18]

In 2003 Bond was quoted in a New York Times article criticizing the names of public schools named for Confederate leaders by saying, "If it had been up to Robert E. Lee, these kids wouldn't be going to school as they are today. They can't help but wonder about honoring a man who wanted to keep them in servitude."

Media appearances[link]

During his tenure with the NAACP, Bond was frequently interviewed and appeared on numerous news shows. He also had a small appearance in the movie Ray (2004).

He hosted Saturday Night Live on April 9, 1977, becoming the first black political figure to host the show. The famous segment from this appearance is the "Black Perspective" skit with then-SNL cast member Garrett Morris. Bond explained perceptions of white and black IQ differences with the tongue-in-cheek "theory" that "light-skinned blacks are smarter than dark-skinned blacks."^[19]

On October 11, 2009 Julian appeared at the National Equality March in Washington, D.C. and spoke upon the rights of LGBT community which was aired live on C-SPAN.^[20][21]

Writings[link]

• Black Candidates: Southern Campaign Experiences. Atlanta: Voter Education Project, Southern Regional Council, 1969.
• A Time To Speak, A Time To Act: The Movement in Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
• Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table: A Documentary History of the Civil Rights Movement. (with Andrew Lewis). American Heritage, 1995.
• Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Celebration of the Negro National Anthem, 100 Years, 100 Voices. (with Sondra Kathryn Wilson, eds.) New York: Random House, 2000.
• Nationally syndicated column Viewpoint.
• Poems and articles have appeared in a national list of magazines and newspapers.
• Julian Bond's papers reside at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Further reading[link]

References[link]

1. ^ "Members of Georgia House of Representatives alphabetically arranged according to names, with districts and post offices for the term 1974-1975", Acts and resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Georgia Legislature) 1: p. 2019, 1974, http://metis.galib.uga.edu/ssp/cgi-bin/legis-idx.pl?sessionid=ae3209bc-778f764566-3062&type=backdiv&byte=357672973 
2. ^ "Members of the Senate of Georgia by Districts in Numberical Order and Post Offices for the Term 1973-1974", Acts and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia 1: p. 1671, 1973, http://metis.galib.uga.edu/ssp/cgi-bin/legis-idx.pl?sessionid=ae3209bc-778f764566-3062&type=backdiv&byte=347539990 
3. ^ "Members of Georgia House of Representatives for the term 1987-1988 by districts and addresses", Acts and resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia (Georgia Legislature): p. CLXXIV, http://metis.galib.uga.edu/ssp/cgi-bin/legis-idx.pl?sessionid=ae3209bc-778f764566-3062&type=backdiv&byte=480518459 
4. ^ The World Almanac 1967, pp. 54–55
5. ^ Billy Hathorn, "The Frustration of Opportunity: Georgia Republicans and the Election of 1966", Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South, XXXI (Winter 1987-1988), p. 47
6. ^ Acts and resolutions, 1967, 1968
7. ^ 1969-1970 house roster (page 1284)
8. ^ [1]
9. ^ Jet Magazine (Johnson Publishing Company) 72 (5): 54–55. 1987. 
10. ^ "Bond won't seek re-election as NAACP Chairman". International Herald Tribune. 2008-11-18. http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/18/america/NAACP-Bond.php. Retrieved 2008-11-20. 
11. ^ "NAACP chooses successor to Chairman Julian Bond". CNN. 2010-02-20. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/20/naacp.leadership/index.html. Retrieved 2010-02-20. 
12. ^ Black Voices Q&A 09/25/06 http://www.blackvoices.com/black_news/canvas_directory_headlines_features/_a/bv-qanda-with-julian-bond/20060908115409990002
13. ^ "NAACP chair says ‘gay rights are civil rights’". Washington Blade. 2004-04-08. Archived from the original on March 21, 2006. http://web.archive.org/web/20060321202124/http://www.washblade.com/2005/4-8/news/localnews/naacp.cfm. Retrieved 2009-09-24. 
14. ^ http://www.american.edu/spa/faculty/hjb7g.cfm
15. ^ "NAACP chairman will speak at Commencement". The GW Hatchet. 2008-03-13. http://media.www.gwhatchet.com/media/storage/paper332/news/2008/03/13/News/Naacp.Chairman.Will.Speak.At.Commencement-3280172.shtml. Retrieved 2008-11-18. 
16. ^ WorldNetDaily: NAACP chairman compares GOP to Nazis
17. ^ http://www.fayettevillenc.com/article?id=225894^{[dead link]}
18. ^ Wickham, DeWayne (2001-07-16). "Julian Bond: Master needler" (Opinion). USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/wickham/2001-07-12-wickham.htm. Retrieved 2007-05-07. 
19. ^ "SNL Transcripts: Julian Bond / Tom Waits". http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76rblackperspective.phtml. Retrieved 2008-11-18. 
20. ^ Street vs. suite by Richard J. Rosendall. October 13, 2009. Bay Windows
21. ^ C-Span archive

External links[link]

• NAACP biography
• SPLC biography
• Julian Bond at the Internet Movie Database
• Brief video clip From the State Library & Archives of Florida.
• Julian Bond at Answers.com
• Oral History Interview with Julian Bond from Oral Histories of the American South
• Faculty Profile

James Forman (October 4, 1928 — January 10, 2005) was an American Civil Rights leader active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the International Black Workers Congress. He was also the author of several notable books.

Activism within the SNCC[link]

In 1961, Forman joined and became the executive secretary of the then newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. From 1961 to 1965 Forman, a decade older and more experienced than most of the other members of SNCC, became responsible for providing organizational support to the young, loosely affiliated activists by paying bills, radically expanding the institutional staff and planning the logistics for programs. Under the leadership of Forman and others, SNCC became an important political player at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. ^[1]

In 1964, Forman, expressing his frustration with the gradualist approach of some Civil Rights leaders, made one of his best known quips: "If we can't sit at the table [of democracy], let's knock the fucking legs off!" ^[2]

Post-SNCC work[link]

After being replaced by Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson as executive secretary, Forman remained close to the leadership of SNCC helping to negotiate the ill-fated "merger" of SNCC and the Black Panther Party in 1967 and even briefly taking a leadership position within the Panthers. ^[3] In 1969, after the failure of the merger and the decline of SNCC as an effective political organization, Forman began associating with other Black political radical groups. In Detroit he participated in the Black Economic Development Conference, where his "Black Manifesto" was adopted. He also founded a nonprofit organization called the Unemployment and Poverty Action Committee. ^[4]

As a part of his Black Manifesto, on a Sunday morning in May, 1969, Forman interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries. Although Riverside's preaching minister, the Rev. Ernest T. Campbell, termed the demands "exorbitant and fanciful," he was in sympathy with the impulse, if not the tactic. Later, the church agreed to donate a fixed percentage of its annual income to anti-poverty efforts.^[1]

On May 30, 1969 Forman made plans to pursue a similar course at a Jewish Synagogue, Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York. Members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, showed up carrying chains and clubs promising to confront Forman if he attempted to enter the synagogue. Kahane and the JDL forewarned Forman and the public about their intended actions and Forman never showed up at the Synagogue. ^[1]

Later life[link]

During the 1970s and 1980s, Forman completed graduate work at Cornell University in African and African-American Studies and in 1982, he received a Ph.D. from the Union of Experimental Colleges and Universities, in cooperation with the Institute for Policy Studies.^[1]

James Forman spent the rest of his adult life organizing Black and disenfranchised people around issues of progressive economic and social development and equality. He also taught at American University in Washington, DC. He wrote several books documenting his experiences within the movement and his evolving political philosophy including "Sammy Younge Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement" (1969), "The Making of Black Revolutionaries" (1972 and 1997) and "Self Determination: An Examination of the Question and Its Application to the African American People" (1984).^[1]

He died on January 10, 2005 of colon cancer, aged 76, at the Washington House, a hospice in Washington, DC.^[1]

Family[link]

Forman's marriages to Mary Forman and Mildred Thompson ended in divorce. He was married to Mildred Thompson Forman (now Mildred Page) from 1959 to 1965, during the most active period of SNCC. Mildred Forman moved to Atlanta with James and worked at the Atlanta SNCC office as well as working as coordinator for tours of the SNCC Freedom Singers.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Forman lived with Constancia ("Dinky") Romilly, the second and only surviving child of the British-born journalist, anti-fascist activist and aristocrat, the Hon. Jessica Mitford, and her first husband, Esmond Romilly, who was a nephew-by-marriage of Sir Winston Churchill. Though obituaries and other posthumous articles about Forman have stated that he and Romilly were married, correspondence between Romilly's mother and aunts state that the couple were not legally husband and wife.^[5]

Forman and Romilly (who later became an emergency-room nurse and married, in 1980, schoolteacher Edwin "Terry" Weber) had two sons:

• James Robert Lumumba Forman (born 1967 and uses the name James Forman Jr. to differentiate him from his father), a professor at Yale Law School[5]
• Chaka Esmond Fanon Forman (born 1970), an actor

Atheism[link]

In one of his books "The Making Of Black Revolutionaries" Foreman devoted an entire chapter to explaining his disbelief in God and his distaste for "religious crap".^[6][7] He also received the African American Humanist Award in 1994.

References[link]

94, Open Hand Publishing Inc., Seattle, (ISBN 0-940880-42-3)

External links[link]

• Washington Post Obituary
• Spartacus
• Stanford University
• James Forman's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• "Letters on the Arab-Israeli Dispute in James Forman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries"

Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture; June 29, 1941 – November 15, 1998) was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced "snick") and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party. Initially an integrationist, Carmichael later became affiliated with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist movements.^[1] He popularized the term "Black Power".^[2]