From the Lunch Counter to an Organisation
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC and pronounced “snick,” grew out of the sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, on 1 February 1960. Within weeks, students were holding similar protests in dozens of southern towns. In April 1960 about 120 of them gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, at a conference organised with the help of Ella Baker, a veteran organiser who worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Baker encouraged the students to form their own group rather than become a youth wing of an existing body, and SNCC was the result.
From the start the group favoured local, grassroots leadership and a style of decision-making based on discussion rather than a single figurehead. Its early members included Marion Barry, Diane Nash, John Lewis and James Bevel, among others. Many left college or took leave to work full time for subsistence pay.
Freedom Rides and Voter Registration
SNCC’s profile rose with the Freedom Rides of 1961, when interracial groups travelled on buses through the South to test the enforcement of desegregation in interstate travel. When the first riders were attacked in Alabama, SNCC members, including Nash, helped ensure that the rides continued. Later that year the group turned its attention to voter registration, working in southwest Georgia and, from 1961, in Mississippi, where Bob Moses led the work.
Mississippi was the hardest ground. Black residents who tried to register faced loss of jobs, eviction and violence, and SNCC field workers were beaten, jailed and sometimes shot at. In 1964 the group helped organise Freedom Summer, which brought several hundred mostly white northern volunteers to the state to run registration drives and freedom schools. Three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June of that year. That summer also saw the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, organised to challenge the all-white state delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The party was offered only a compromise it largely rejected, and many SNCC workers came away deeply disillusioned with national party politics.
Selma and a Widening Rift
In 1965 SNCC took part in the Selma campaign in Alabama, where John Lewis, then SNCC’s chairman, was among those beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on 7 March, the day called Bloody Sunday. The resulting Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a large success for the broader civil rights movement, yet the relationship between SNCC and the larger, more established groups was becoming strained. SNCC staff felt that national leaders took credit and made compromises with the federal government that the field organisers did not accept.
The organisation also began to take positions that distanced it from liberal allies. In January 1966, after Samuel Younge Jr., a Black student and Navy veteran, was shot dead in Tuskegee, Alabama, SNCC issued a statement opposing the Vietnam War and the draft. The Georgia legislature refused to seat Julian Bond, a SNCC communications director elected to the state House, because of his support of the statement; the Supreme Court ruled in December 1966 that the exclusion was unconstitutional.
Lowndes County and the Turn to Black Power
In Lowndes County, Alabama, SNCC workers helped local residents form an independent party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, in 1965. Its symbol was a black panther, which later inspired the name of a separate organisation in California. The experiment was an early model of independent Black political action.
In May 1966 the group elected Stokely Carmichael, a young organiser from Trinidad and New York, as its chairman in place of Lewis. A month later, during the march through Mississippi begun by James Meredith, Carmichael used the call for Black Power in Greenwood. The slogan expressed a demand for Black control of Black communities and a rejection of a strategy that relied on white goodwill, though many observers and critics read it as a call to violence. SNCC defended its meaning as political and psychological self-assertion. By the end of 1966, the group had voted to remove white members from its staff, a decision that remains one of the most debated in its history. The argument for that view was set out in the 1967 book Black Power, written by Carmichael and Charles Hamilton.
1967: Brown and Decline
In 1967 the organisation’s leadership changed again. H. Rap Brown became chairman in May, and Carmichael travelled widely, including trips abroad. Brown’s blunt rhetoric attracted attention. In July 1967, following a speech in Cambridge, Maryland, a disturbance broke out, and Brown was charged in connection with it; a phrase about violence being as American as cherry pie is widely attributed to him. Official attention on SNCC grew, and law enforcement agencies treated it with growing suspicion. Congress passed a federal law in 1968 that was nicknamed the Rap Brown Act, aimed at people who crossed state lines to incite riots.
The pressures took a toll. Funds fell as northern donors withdrew, and members faced arrests and surveillance. The organisation lost much of its field presence in the South, and its relationship with the Black Panther Party in 1968 proved unstable, with Carmichael joining the Panthers briefly before breaking with them. By 1969 it had renamed itself the Student National Coordinating Committee and then faded.
Assessing SNCC
Historians often point out that SNCC’s influence was larger than its size. Its members did much of the dangerous work of persuading Black Southerners to register to vote, and many of its veterans later became politicians, academics and organisers. Its shift toward Black Power is often treated as the moment the civil rights movement broke into several strands, but members themselves described the change as a development from their experience in Mississippi and Alabama, not a break. The group’s story also shows how much the movement’s mood in 1967 differed from that of 1963.