YOU ARE MEMBERS of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization founded in 1960 dedicated to using non-violent tactics to challenge racial segregation in the South.
In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Boynton v. Virginia, and several other court cases, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled Jim Crow segregation unconstitutional. But from movie theaters to swimming pools, parks to restaurants, buses to schools, almost every aspect of public life in the South remains segregated.
In 1955, 50,000 African Americans in Montgomery (Alabama’s second-largest city), participated in a boycott to end segregation of the city buses. This mass upsurge against the racist system in the South was a huge inspiration to you. Watching the protest gave you new role models, like Martin Luther King Jr., and a strong sense that change was possible.
But after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movement struggled to move forward. Segregationists launched a massive campaign of terror that prevented further gains. When nine Black students tried to integrate Little Rock Central High School in September 1957, they were driven back by racist mobs. President Eisenhower was forced to send in the National Guard to escort students to school.
Meanwhile, the courts increasingly took the view that to demand a school district be integrated, those bringing the case needed to prove not just that segregation existed but that school districts were segregated intentionally. In practice, this meant that fewer and fewer schools were being integrated. So, in the first three years after the Brown decision, 712 school districts were desegregated, but by 1960 that number fell to just 17.
While the protests of the 1950s gave you a sense of pride and power, it increasingly became clear that larger, more dramatic actions would be necessary to break the back of Jim Crow. You were prepared to act and you were not alone.
On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat at a “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter. When the four were asked to leave, they refused and remained seated until the store closed. The next day they returned with 23 students, and the day after that with 63.
These sit-ins made national news and spread like wildfire. Within two weeks, sit-ins had spread to 15 other cities in five different states. In a year, tens of thousands of students had taken part in sit-ins in more than 100 Southern cities.
By April, it became clear that students from across the South needed to come together to discuss how to strengthen and extend the new student movement. The founding conference of SNCC was organized by Ella Baker, the executive director in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It took place in Raleigh, North Carolina, at Shaw College, a Historically Black College and Ms. Baker’s alma mater. One hundred and fifty student activists from all over the South, plus 19 delegates from Northern colleges attended the conference.
Though some in the movement wanted SNCC to have official ties with SCLC or be absorbed into existing civil rights organizations, Baker asserted that students “had the right to direct their own affairs and even make their own mistakes.” She encouraged us to make our own decisions and not subordinate ourselves to existing civil rights organizations. Therefore, while SNCC of course collaborates with other civil rights organizations, we have autonomy and come to our own decisions as a group.
The sit-ins and the formation of SNCC were an important new development for the Civil Rights Movement, but for you the pace of change seemed unbearably slow. There is a sharp debate among SNCC organizers on how to take the movement forward. How can we end segregation and win full equality for African Americans? That is the question we face today.
Before participating in this discussion, make sure you read the previous page in this module: Background: SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
To complete this discussion, do the following:
1) Read both situations and decide where you stand on the two questions.
2) Write a discussion post explaining your stance on the two situations and why.
3) Respond to someone who has a differing view from you on at least one of the issues, and RESPECTFULLY try to come to an agreement; try to sway them to support your stance, or come up with a compromise.
After completing this discussion, you should view the next page in this module, which explains what ACTUALLY happened in Freedom Summer.
SITUATION 1:
Cleveland, Mississippi: NAACP President Amzie Moore came to meet with SNCC to encourage you to join his voter registration efforts in Mississippi. President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, also have contacted SNCC to encourage you to focus on voter registration, and ask you to abandon your direct-action tactics (sit-ins, Freedom Rides). The negative attention that SNCC’s direct action generated worldwide presented a dilemma for the Kennedys. If they enforced federal laws that SNCC wanted them to, they risked losing the white vote in the South; if they didn’t enforce the law, damaging images and evidence of civil unrest were sure to be used by opponents inside the country and enemies outside. Because of this, the Kennedy administration has contacted SNCC, encouraging you to redirect the energy from the sit-ins and the freedom ride campaign toward the goal of registering Southern Blacks to vote. The Kennedy administration has assured SNCC that they would receive financial support for such projects.
QUESTION: Should SNCC focus its efforts on voter registration or direct action?
ARGUMENTS for either side Download ARGUMENTS for either side(optional reading – you can use this to inform your decision but do NOT copy)
SITUATION 2:
While SNCC has always been a Black-led, majority-Black organization, there has always been a small number of white SNCC members. But Northern white students have been increasingly getting involved. At SNCC’s 1963 conference, one-third of the participants were white. Some staff members are now proposing to bring 1,000 mostly white students from all around the United States to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help with voter registration efforts. This plan has sparked discussion in SNCC on the role of whites in the movement.
QUESTION: Should SNCC bring 1,000 mostly white volunteers to Mississippi? If so, should SNCC limit the role of white volunteers?
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