Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee - Founding and Early Years

Founding and Early Years

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, independent student-led groups began direct-action protests against segregation in dozens of southern communities. The most common action of these groups was organizing sit-ins at racially segregated lunch counters to protest the pervasiveness of Jim Crow and other forms of racism. In addition to sitting in at lunch counters, the groups also organized and carried out protests at segregated public libraries, public parks, and public swimming pools. At that time, all those facilities financed by taxes were closed to blacks. The white response was often to close the facility, rather than integrate it.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, as an organization, began with an $800.00 grant from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) for a conference where attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges, the SCLC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Out of this conference the SNCC (SNCC) was formed.

Ella Baker, who organized the Shaw conference, had been the SCLC director before helping to form SNCC, but SNCC was not a branch of SCLC. Instead of being closely tied to SCLC or the NAACP as a "youth division", SNCC sought to stand on its own. Among important SNCC leaders attending the conference were Stokely Carmichael from Howard University; Charles F. McDew, who led student protests at South Carolina State University; J. Charles Jones, who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at department stores throughout Charlotte, North Carolina; Julian Bond from Atlanta, Diane Nash; James Lawson; John Lewis; Bernard Lafayette; James Bevel; and Marion Barry from the Nashville Student Movement.

SNCC's first chairman was Marion Barry, who later became the mayor of Washington DC. Barry served as chairman for one year. The second chairman was Charles F. McDew, who served as the chairman from 1961 to 1963, when he was succeeded by John Lewis. SNCC's executive secretary, James Forman, played a major role in running the organization.

In the years that followed, SNCC members were referred to as “shock troops of the revolution." SNCC took on greater risks in 1961, after a mob of Ku Klux Klan members and other whites attacked integrated groups of bus passengers who defied local segregation laws as part of the Freedom Rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Rather than allowing mob violence to stop them, CORE and SNCC "Freedom Riders," including Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Angeline Butler, and John Lewis, put themselves at great personal risk by traveling in racially-integrated groups through the deep South. At least 436 people took part in these Freedom Rides during the spring and summer of 1961.

Robert Parris Moses (also known as Robert Parris or Bob Moses) played a central role in transforming SNCC from a coordinating committee of student protest groups to an organization of organizers dedicated to building community-based political organizations of the rural poor. The voter registration project he initiated in McComb, Mississippi in 1961 became the seed for most of SNCC's activities from 1962-1966.

After the Freedom Rides, SNCC worked primarily on voter registration, along with local protests about segregated public facilities. Registering to vote was extremely difficult and dangerous, as blacks who attempted to register often lost their jobs and their homes. SNCC workers lived with local families and often the homes providing such hospitality were firebombed.

The actions of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC forced the Kennedy Administration to briefly provide federal protection to temporarily abate mob violence. Local FBI offices were usually staffed by Southern whites (there were no black FBI agents at that time) who refused to intervene to protect civil rights workers or local blacks who were attempting to register to vote.

One of the ways in which SNCC was unusual among civil rights groups was the way in which decisions were made. Instead of "top down" control, as was the case with most organizations at that time, decisions in SNCC were made by consensus. Group meetings would be convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone was in agreement with the decision. Because activities were often very dangerous and could lead to prison or death, SNCC wanted all participants to support each activity.

By 1965, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. It had organized nonviolent direct action against segregated facilities, as well as voter-registration projects, in Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi; built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural cooperatives; and given the movement for women's liberation new energy. It inspired and trained the activists who began the "New Left." It helped expand the limits of political debate within black America, and broadened the focus of the civil rights movement. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself. —Julian Bond