A Gripping First-Hand Account of the Fight for Civil Rights & the Courage to Change a Nation (2003)

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• published: 07 Apr 2016
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Founded in 1960 and inspired by the Greensboro and Nashville sit-ins, independent student-led groups began direct-action protests against segregation in dozens of southern communities. SNCC focused on mobilizing local communities, a policy in which African American communities would push for change, impelling the federal government to act once the injustice had become apparent.[4] 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. While in the Civil Rights Cases (109 U.S. 3 [1883]), the Court ruled that the equal protection clause "did not cover private individuals, organizations, or establishments," the trials of arrested sit-in protesters created an opening for the Court to reevaluate its earlier ruling and expand the clause to cover acts of private discrimination.[5] The sit-ins were a turning point in using the courts and jail to exert moral and economic pressure on southern communities.[6] In addition to sitting in at lunch counters, the groups also organized and carried out protests at segregated White public libraries, public parks, public swimming pools, and movie theaters. At that time, all those 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 (SNCC), as an organization, began with an $800.00 grant from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for a conference 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 was formed.[7][8] Ella Baker, who organized the Shaw conference, was the SCLC director at the time she helped 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. Ms. Baker later lost her job with SCLC, which she had helped found. 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 from Fisk University; James Lawson; and 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.[9] Stokely Carmichael and H. "Rap" Brown were chairmen in the late 1960s. 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."[10] 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, New Orleans CORE and Nashville SNCC "Freedom Riders," including Dave Dennis, Oretha Castle, Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, and John Lewis, put themselves at great personal risk by traveling in racially integrated groups into Mississippi as they continued the Ride. Other bus riders followed, traveling through the deep South to test Southern compliance with Federal Law. At least 436 people took part in these Freedom Rides during the spring and summer of 1961. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_Nonviolent_Coordinating_Committee