Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

Establishing SNCC

The impetus for the organizational development of SNCC grew after Izell Blair, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, all North Carolina A&T College students, challenged Jim Crow laws in a local F. W. Woolworth store in February 1960. The four young men sat down at the lunch counter reserved for whites and waited for service. After being refused, the students remained seated until the store closed. They repeated their demonstration in the following days, which attracted local reporters. As news spread about their defiance, students on campuses [Page 2024]throughout North Carolina organized similar sit-ins, with some demonstrations leading to student arrests. Protests soon developed in Virginia and quickly spread to other southern states such as Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, and Tennessee.

Noting the efforts of these young activists, Ella Baker gained approval from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to sponsor a meeting of the protest leaders. This meeting was convened in April 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. More than 200 students attended and expressed their impatience with the leading civil rights groups for an overreliance on challenging legal statutes to effect change. The students desired to use civil disobedience, and they refused to accept token gains. The meeting resulted in a Temporary Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee with a separate structure from the SCLC.

In October 1960, the students declared SNCC a permanent organization and voiced nonviolent methods as their primary tactic. With its formation, SNCC brought a new dynamic to the civil rights movement that established a new phase of activism. Instead of relying on the traditional modes espoused by the major civil rights organizations at the time, SNCC employed a distributive leadership model that helped galvanize southern blacks in their own efforts at political activism.

Development of SNCC

SNCC's development has been traced traditionally within three phases. During the first phase, the goals of SNCC were identified in a string of activities that sought to disassemble the legalized racism that thwarted the advancement of blacks. SNCC adopted and operated under Ghandhian and American Christian Ideals, and its initial direct action campaigns targeted disenfranchisement and desegregation. In attempting to dismantle discrimination and segregation in the Deep South, SNCC embarked on Freedom Rides and voter registration. Both of these attempts resulted in violent white backlash. At the March on Washington, John Lewis, the SNCC chairman at the time, delivered a collective SNCC statement— which he was forced to edit in order to partake in the program—about the lack of progress in race relations. In 1964, SNCC began larger and notable black voter registration campaigns in Mississippi. Many whites aided in these efforts, but their involvement was continually questioned and eventually led to internal struggles about the role of whites within the organization.

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