SNCC: What We Did - Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Throughout its brief history, SNCC insisted on group-centered leadership and community-based politics. It made clear the connection between economic power and racial oppression. It refused to define racism as a solely southern phenomenon, to describe racial inequality as caused by irrational prejudice alone, or to limit its struggle solely to guaranteeing legal equality. It challenged U.S. imperialism while mainstream civil rights organizations were silent or curried favor with President Lyndon Johnson, condemning SNCC's linkage of domestic and international poverty and racism with overseas adventurism. SNCC refused to apply political tests to its membership or supporters, opposing the redbaiting that other organizations and leaders endorsed or condoned. And it created an atmosphere of expectation and anticipation among the people with whom it worked, trusting them to make decisions about their own lives. Thus SNCC widened the definition of politics beyond campaigns and elections; for SNCC, politics encompas sed not only electoral races, but also organizing political parties, labor unions, producer cooperatives, and alternative schools.

SNCC initially sought to transform southern politics by organizing and enfranchising blacks. One proof of its success was the increase in black elected officials in the southern states from seventy-two in 1965 to 388 in 1968. But SNCC also sought to amplify the ends of political participation by enlarging the issues of political debate to include the economic and foreign-policy concerns of American blacks. SNCC's articulation and advocacy of Black Power redefined the relationship between black Americans and white power. No longer would political equity be considered a privilege; it had become a right.

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.

They did then and can do so again.

Julian Bond was Communications Director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1960 until 1965, when he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. Today, he is Distinguished Professor in Residence at the School of Government at American University in Washington, D.C., and a professor of History at the University of Virginia. In February 2000, he was elected to a third term as Chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Copyright [C] 2000 by Julian Bond.

A note on sources and suggestions for further reading:

This essay has made extensive use of the papers of SNCC, interviews with Ivanhoe Donaldson, William Hall, and letters from and between SNCC staffers. Important books utilized, and recommended for further reading are: Braden, Anne, The Wall Between (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1958); Branch, Taylor, Parting The Waters: America in The King Years, vols. 1 & 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Carson, Clayborn, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: Open Hand Press, 1985); Forman, James, 1967: High Tide of Black Resistance (Seattle: Open Hand Press, 1994); Grant, Joanne, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998); King, Mary, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1987); Marable, Manning, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1990 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Pr ess, 1984); Sellers, Cleveland and Robert Terrell, The River of No Return (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1973); Sullivan, Patricia, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Zinn, Howard, SNCC The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). A reference-noted version of this paper is available from the Monthly Review office.