Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students staged a protest by sitting down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. The popularity of using sit-ins as a means of protest had spread throughout the South. Recognizing the untapped energy of college students as a resource for the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) called a conference later that year to found a new organization.

From this conference grew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in 1961 organized its first major project, the Freedom Rides. In concert with the more established Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), white and black activists rode buses together into southern towns and attempted to integrate segregated bus terminals. Soon the SNCC, whose members were generally the most willing to confront authority and risk their own physical well-being, had established a reputation as the “shock troops” of the civil rights movement.

During the Freedom Summer of 1964, the SNCC concentrated all of its resources in the state of Mississippi in order to draw attention to the inequities of racism. SNCC volunteers assisted some 17,000 citizens in filling out voter registration cards and taught black children, who had received little education in segregated schools. They also founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party with the hope (never realized) of taking over the state's Democratic delegation at the party's national convention.

Among the major civil rights organizations, the SNCC was the most ambivalent about King's philosophy of nonviolence. Many members viewed the practice in strictly tactical terms, a strategy to be adopted only to the extent that it remained effective. In 1965, an Alabama activist, Stokely Carmichael, [Page 1350]formed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in order to provide local African Americans the option of working outside the Democratic Party. Its visual icon, a Black Panther, would soon become a symbol for armed black resistance.

By the late 1960s, many within the SNCC also began to reject the prevailing civil rights philosophy of integration in favor of one of black separatism. They argued that the racial integration of the organization compromised its mission. Carmichael's experience with African American self-determination in Lowndes County left him sympathetic to these arguments, and his 1966 election as chairman over long-time incumbent John Lewis signified a major shift in direction for the SNCC. Carmichael began to popularize the term black power, and the SNCC formally ejected whites from the organization later that year.

The SNCC's increasing militancy in later years, along with greater attention from the FBI, would further marginalize the group and compromise its effectiveness. Carmichael became increasingly involved with the Black Panther Party, and was expelled from the SNCC in 1968. His successor, H. Rap Brown, removed the word nonviolent from the organization's name, and later went to prison on armed robbery charges. SNCC faded out of existence in the early 1970s.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee provided a distinct voice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Its confrontational activism, community organizing, and hostility to government reflected the increasingly militant disposition of African Americans themselves. Perhaps its main contribution, however, was in energizing a generation of young activists: the work associated with the free speech movement, New Left, anti-war protests and second-wave feminism all featured tactics and, in many cases, individuals that had begun in SNCC.

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