NGE >> History and Archaeology >> Civil Rights and Sunbelt Georgia, 1945-1990 >> Groups/Organizations >> Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced "snick"), was one of the key

Freedom Riders

organizations in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. In Georgia SNCC concentrated its efforts in Albany and Atlanta.

Emerging from the student-led sit-ins to protest segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, SNCC's strategy was much different from that of already established civil rights organizations. In April 1960, on the Shaw University campus in Raleigh, North Carolina, students of the sit-in movement met with Ella Baker, executive secretary of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and they established SNCC. SNCC sought to coordinate youth-led nonviolent, direct-action campaigns against segregation and other forms of racism. SNCC members played an integral role in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, and such voter education projects as the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

In October 1961 SNCC field secretaries Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon arrived in Albany to establish a voter registration office and to test local compliance with the Interstate Commerce Commission's ruling, which barred segregation in interstate transportation terminals.

Within

Albany Movement

two months Sherrod and Reagon, joined by Charles Jones, helped to form the Albany Movement—a coalition of SNCC volunteers, the Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Baptist Ministerial Alliance, the Federation of Women's Clubs, the Negro Voters League, and other groups. The movement coordinated mass rallies and demonstrations to protest the arrests of black residents attempting to integrate the city's bus and train terminals. Many of the demonstrators, including SCLC leader Martin Luther King Jr., were arrested as well.

Although the sit-ins and voter registration drives in Albany, which lasted through the summer of 1962, cannot be considered unqualified successes, Albany produced the largest direct-action campaign since the Montgomery bus boycotts. As a result, civil rights activists learned to organize mass demonstrations that would provoke the federal government to intervene. Also, the protests demonstrated not only the appeal of SNCC to urban blacks but also the importance of the church and religious beliefs as a foundation for mass struggle among blacks in general.

Atlanta was also a center for SNCC activity. Home to a sizable black professional and middle class and five historically black colleges and universities, Atlanta was also King's birthplace and home to the SCLC. In October 1960 SNCC held its second conference in Atlanta and chose the city as its headquarters. Immediately following the conference, SNCC staged massive sit-ins at the lunch counters of several Atlanta department stores, including Rich's. Several students were arrested, as was King.

Soon

Julian Bond

after the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party failed to unseat the state's all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, SNCC volunteers returned their attention to Atlanta. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered reapportionment for the Georgia state legislature during the 1964 General Assembly session, which created several new voting districts. Fulton County and the city of Atlanta, which together had only three legislators, gained an additional twenty-one seats. A reapportionment election was held on June 16, 1965, and Julian Bond, the longtime SNCC communications director, was elected to the 136th district, defeating a local minister and the dean of Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). During the campaign Bond emphasized personal contact, going door-to-door and asking residents in the all-black district what was needed. Concluding that their problems were largely economic, he devised a platform that included a $2 minimum wage, improved urban renewal programs, the repeal of the right-to-work law, and an end to the literacy test for voters. The Georgia General Assembly gained a total of ten African American legislators—two state senators and eight state representatives—the first blacks to serve in the legislature since 1907.

SNCC

John Lewis

changed dramatically in direction and philosophy during 1966, when Stokely Carmichael succeeded John Lewis as chair of the organization. The change came about in part because of the new Atlanta Project. Headed by Bill Ware, the Atlanta Project emerged in the wake of riots in the African American communities of Vine City and Summerhill (which were in Bond's district). The Atlanta Project aimed to increase black community "control over the public decisions which affect" their lives. According to historian Clayborne Carson, project members emphasized racial identity as a means to eliminate racial inferiority and political impotence and, unlike SNCC members, embraced racial separatist doctrines. Although Carmichael initially opposed Atlanta Project staff, he became greatly influenced by many of their positions, some of which he adopted as SNCC chairman.

The separatist nature of the Atlanta Project ran counter to the national SNCC leadership, and within a year after Carmichael assumed SNCC leadership, he had fired all Atlanta Project workers, effectively ending the program. The project's spirit would live on through such federally sponsored programs as Model Cities.

Despite

H. Rap Brown

his firing of the Atlanta Project staff, Carmichael came to embrace racial separatism, eject SNCC's white members, and issue a call for Black Power, which emphasized racial dignity, black self-reliance, and the use of violence as a legitimate means of self-defense. Under Carmichael's successor, H. Rap Brown, SNCC became more controversial. During Brown's tenure, SNCC increasingly collaborated with the Black Panther Party, a radical political organization founded in 1966 in Oakland, California. Members of the Black Panther Party rejected the nonviolent principles that dominated the civil rights movement. In 1968 Brown changed SNCC's name, substituting "national" for "nonviolent." By that time SNCC bore little resemblance to its original form. Facing legal troubles, Brown went into hiding in 1970, and what remained of the organization quickly unraveled.

Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003).

Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

David J. Garrow, ed., Atlanta, Georgia, 1960-1961: Sit-ins and Student Activism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1989).

David Andrew Harmon, Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations: Atlanta, Georgia, 1946-1981 (New York: Garland, 1996).

Irene V. Holliman, University of Georgia

Home | What's New | Index | Quick Facts | About NGE | Help | Contact
Destinations | Galleries | Features

RSS Feeds

A project of the Georgia Humanities Council, in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor.

Copyright 2004-2009 by the Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press.
All rights reserved.