Inside that hermetic, vague community called the New Left, one word, above all others, has the magic to inspire blind loyalty and epic myth.  SNCC.

But like a Picasso, or a Bob Dylan, or a Malcolm X, SNCC keeps reexamining its assumptions, changing its ideas, racing through periods faster than printers can set sober analyses into cold type.  Abstract theories about this volatile and kaleidoscopic movement quickly become as dated as last season’s batting averages.  

Howard Zinn’s evocative book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists finished early in 1964, did not describe the SNCC that emerged from the Summer Project and convention challenge of that year.  The perceptive report on the New Radicals by Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau published in the spring of 1966 has apparently been rendered obsolete by the dramatic SNCC staff retreat held at a campsite near Nashville from the 8^th to the 15^th of May, 1966.  Even as the Jacobs-Landau volume was being rushed to bookstores, SNCC was choosing a new leader, a new strategy and a new set of assumptions.

There have been at least four separate SNCCs since its founding in 1960, and even these categories are outsiders’ generalizations that ignore eddies and countertendencies that have always strained for expression just below the surface of this chaotic and decentralized organization.

SNCC began as religious band of middle-class, rather square reformers, seeking only “our rights.”  The lunch counter was their entrance point to the revered American Dream of More.  Their guiding spirit was not even Gandhi so much as the Bill of Rights, the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments, and the Holy Bible.  They were black, liberal integrationists grappling with segregation.

By 1962 and 1963 SNCC workers had moved into the rural communities of the South.  There they were shot, beaten, gassed, whipped, and jailed.  They became a hardened non-violent guerrilla army, challenging not merely segregation, and community organization.  They learned that Northern corporations owned the racist mills in Danville, Virginia, and the segregating factories in Birmingham.  But they still believed that America, if shamed with enough redemptive suffering, would honor its century-old pledge of equality for the black man.

The third SNCC emerged after the traumatic summer of 1964 in the image of Camus’s existential rebel.  The early innocent faith that the Federal Government would the decisive force in ending segregation was shattered at the Democratic convention and by the fact that the killers of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were never tried.  This SNCC was in the clenched-fist tradition of the Russian Narodniks of the 1880’s, and the American Populists of the same period.  

It believed in alliance of the black and white underclass.   It had a mystical and transcendental faith in the inherent goodness of the poor, and even in their infinite wisdom.  It organized in the cities on “a priority of psychological damage”: junkies, hustlers, pimps, prostitutes; a concept rooted more in Genet’s existential notion of an underclass than in the economic ones of Marx or Myrdal.  The keynote words and phrases of this SNCC were freedom, community, decentralization, local leadership, participatory democracy.

The Rise of Stokely to Chairman

Then, slowly, during 1965 and 1966, a new SNCC began to take shape inside the shell of the old existential SNCC.  And this new nationalistic, revolutionary, independent SNCC, nurtured by pessimism and hunger for manhood, was born in May, 1966, in Nashville, with the ouster of its gentle, religious chairman, John Lewis, and the ascension of brilliant, glib, complex, twenty-five-year-old Stokely Carmichael.  

Now the keynote phrases in SNCC are independent black power, race pride, black dignity, and the third world, a psychic crutch for a dead-end theory.

The twenty-five whites on the SNCC staff will now organize only poor whites.  They will be kept out of the black community.  Countywide, independent, all-black political parties will be organized, patterned after the Black Panther party, fashioned by Carmichael in Lowndes County.  Implicitly, SNCC has given up on the over-thirty generation of fearful, church-loving Southern Negroes.  They will now concentrate on organizing the new generation of Negroes, especially those on Southern campuses and in the riot-pocked cities of the North.  SNCC will begin to try to fill the void left by the assassination of Malcolm X.

It is still much too early to try to evaluate SNCC’s new direction.  Nationalism may have its roots in wounded, destructive hatred, or in an ugly but necessary psycho-political strategy. Which thread is dominant in SNCC is unclear.  Equally, it is too soon to tell whether SNCC sees its separatism as a temporary tactic to gain for the Negro psychic and political party, or whether it the eternal separation envisaged by the Black Muslims.

My intuition—and I pray that I am wrong—is that SNCC will never get the chance to play out its experiments fully.  Already it has been described as “racist” by Roy Wilkins and it has been by friends like Martin Luther King, the New York Post and The New Republic.  Funds are beginning to dry up.  The mass media are confusing nationalism with racism and self-defense with violence.  I suspect that [the new SNCC] is the doomed with a sinking ship, standing at ramrod attention and saluting the flag.

But even after all this is said, one then sympathizes with the hopeless but proud impulse that is the fuel for SNCC’s nationalism.  One needs only to recall a few of the betrayals of the American Dream that SNCC has suffered these last two years to comprehend that when all hope vanishes, a revolutionary pride still endures.  As Mendy Samstein, a white SNCC veteran told me: “I curse this country every day of my life because it made me hate it, and I never wanted to.”  Mendy—and SNCC—hoped to weave the gold of Utopia from the straw of mid-century America.

Rationale for the New SNCC

In June of 1964 Mississippi Summer Project volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were lynched and murdered and their killers are still free, respected members of their communities.  In August of 1964 SNCC made what turned out to be its final request for entrance to the American Dream at the Democratic convention, where an integrated delegation sought to be seated in place of the regular, segregationist delegation from Mississippi.

Then Malcolm X, the shining black prince of ghetto youth was assassinated.  The war in Vietnam continued to escalate and Santo Domingo was invaded by 20,000 marines because a popular revolution had 53 communists in the ranks.  The anti-poverty Headstart program in Mississippi was emasculated by Sargent Shiver, under pressure from Senators Stennis and Eastland.  

SNCC communications director Julian Bond was twice elected to the Georgia state legislature from Atlanta’s 136^th district—and twice he was denied his seat because he opposed the war in Vietnam.  Mississippi Negroes, homeless and hungry, set up a tent city across the street from the White House to dramatize their plight, but President Johnson refused to even to see them.  

Terror by whites against blacks continued in the Deep South; in the “model city” of Tuskegee, Samuel Younge, a college student active with SNCC was killed.  The Mississippi legislature gerrymandered out of existence the 2^nd delta district, because it had a Negro population majority.  In the Alabama Democratic primary, white integrationist Richmond Flowers was swamped, local Negro candidates defeated, and Mrs. George Wallace elected Governor.  Near Hernando, Mississippi, this June, 15 FBI agents could do nothing as a sniper in ambush pumped 50 shotgun pellets into James Merdith.

The Dream deferred, “dried up, like a raisin in the sun.”

Two other factors contributed to the creation of the new SNCC in Nashville.  One was the general decline of the civil-rights movement as a national force after the Selma demonstrations of February and March of 1965.  Since then, the passage of the Voting Rights Bill lulled liberals into the illusion that The Problem had been solved, and the riots in Watts turned moderate feeling in the country sharply against civil rights.  Further, the war in Vietnam and ghetto poverty began to absorb the energies of student activists.  And almost all the strategies for change in the South seemed implausible.  The civil-rights movement had reached an impasse, with aimless frustrations building up fury behind the barrier of insoluble problems.

Meanwhile, SNCC itself began to deteriorate internally.  The number of organizers in the field fell from 200 in late 1964 to 120 in the winter of 1966.  The prophetic band that had provided the rest of the freedom movement with so many new ideas, grew stale, repeating old formulas.  Programs like all-out support of the MFDP congressional challenge and attempts at urban organizing in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Atlanta proved to be failures.  

Factionalism increased inside SNCC, and large numbers gathered around Bob Parris and began to drift off into other directions, some to organize on their own, others to form a bohemian subculture in New York’s East Village.  Drinking, auto accidents, petty thievery, pot smoking, personality clashes, inefficiency, and anti-white outbursts all increased inside SNCC during this period. The mood of SNCC on the eve of the Nashville staff retreat was sullen and desperate for life.

The Nashville SNCC Conference

The minutes of the Nashville meeting read like a group therapy session, or more likely, a macabre sequel to Genet’s The Blacks.

For a whole week the staff met, over 130 people, including 25 whites.  All had been jailed, all had known hunger and exhaustion, most, including the 20 girls, had been beaten. James Forman, who was stepping down as executive secretary, had a bleeding ulcer and a heart aliment. Ivanhoe Donaldson had his scalp shattered in Danville, Virginia.  John Lewis suffered a fractured skull in Selma. Gloria Larry had seen Reverend Jonathan Daniels murdered on the streets of Haynesville, Alabama.

There were open expressions of anti-white feeling at the meeting. White staffers were sometimes taunted and mocked when they tried to speak. One field secretary seriously suggested SNCC arrange for 100 Negroes to study nuclear physics at UCLA and then be sent to an African country to help it construct an atomic bomb to “blow up America.”  Another proposed that only the black press and the African press be invited to all future SNCC press conferences.

But the dominant figures in the emerging SNCC—Carmichael, Courtland Cox, Charley Cobb, and Ivanhoe Donaldson—spoke not in racist terms—but in nationalist terms, insisting on the necessity of independent black political, economic, and cultural institutions.  They said, “Being pro-black was not being anti-white.”  Carmichael at one point exclaimed, “Man, I’m not in that racist bag—I just dig black.”

Early in the meeting Carmichael ran against Lewis for chairman, backed primarily by the fellow organizers of the Black Panther party.  Lewis was reelected 60 to 22.

Then the staffers began a grotesquely honest exploration of the assumptions of their organization.  Gradually the realization grew that they no longer believed integration into the American Dream was possible or desirable, and that any contact with white mainstream institutions was damaging to black psyches.  It was at this point that the election of Lewis, a popular but not authoritative symbol of SNCC’s religious and moral past, was reopened.

Lewis told his former cellmates that he wanted to attend the upcoming White House Conference on Civil Rights.  The staff voted to boycott the conference.  Lewis insisted he had joined in the planning sessions and would go in defiance of the staff decision.  

On the second vote Carmichael was chosen the new chairman of SNCC by a vote of 60 to12.  The SNCC of Camus and James Baldwin and Fannie Lou Hamer was suddenly a nostalgic chapter of radical history.  And a new SNCC was forged in the stark image of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and John Brown.  America had its first indigenous revolutionary movement since the Wobblies.

With intentional symbolism, the first act of the new SNCC was the release of its statement rejecting the invitation to the White House Conference on Civil Rights.  Couched in the exaggerated cadences of an underground manifesto, the statement read:

The next day Carmichael, lounging in the Atlanta SNCC office in T-shirt and faded dungarees, told the press that the Black Panther party would not seek Federal protection or observers in the Alabama election on November 8^th.  The party’s all-Negro countywide slate of candidates, he said, would be “protected by the toughest Negroes we can find in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, and Washington . . . . We have discovered the Justice Department cats just take notes and never do anything to protect our people, or stop voting frauds by whites.”

The Heroics of Stokely & SNCC

The first time I met Stokely Carmichael was in August of 1961.  I was a reporter for a weekly newspaper in the Bronx and he, Bronx resident, had just come out of the infamous Parchman State Reformatory in Mississippi, after serving forty-nine days as a freedom rider.  During the interview he said, “You know how dumb them crackers are?  In jail they took away all my books—stuff by Du Bois, King, Camus.  But they let me keep Mills’ book about Castro, Listen, Yankee, because they thought it was against Northern agitators.”

The next time I met Stokely was in Lowndes County in the spring of 1965.  He had been there three months and there already had been one murder.  Fear paralyzed the energy of the black community, which outnumbered whites 4 to 1.  Stokely broke that fear by taunting the sheriff, walking behind him in broad daylight, mocking his stride, mimicking his dress, and cursing him in Yiddish: “Kish mir tuchas, baby,” he said.

The next time I saw him was four months later at a press conferences in the New York SNCC office, which he held on the way back from Reverend Jonathan Daniels’ funeral in Keene, New Hampshire.

The four months in Lowndes had changed him more than the four years between our first two meetings.  The manic emotionalism was gone, replaced by the somber serenity of a man, now twenty-five, resigned to early death.  The lean, tall athletic body, [the] “starch fat” of the poor; Stokely’s angular face was becoming puffy from his diet of greens and spices.  He was no longer a wisecracking performer.  He was a revolutionary who said, “Look, man, I’ve been to seventeen funerals since 1961.  I know I’m going to die, but that just makes me work all the harder and faster, dig?”

Stokely was brought by his parents from Trinidad to the Negro ghetto in the Bronx in 1952, when he was eleven years old.  Just as Bob Parris—a hero to Stokely—broke out of Harlem by attending Stuyvesant High School, Stokely overcame his environment and passed the rigorous entrance examination for the Bronx High School of Science.

Carmichael lived a double life; winning good grades and going to posh parties downtown with his white friends, and running with a wild gang in Harlem, fighting, stealing, smoking pot.  His teachers at Bronx High told him he would become “a brilliant Negro leader”; his Negro friends in Harlem called him a faggot for reading books.  And Stokely reflected upon the famous quote of W.E.B. Du Bois:

Stokely resolved his “two-ness” by going to almost-all-Negro Howard University in September of 1960 and majoring, like Parris and Mario Savio, in philosophy.

But all through Howard, where he was a classmate of Courtland Cox, Charley Cobb, and a dozen other future SNCC field secretaries, were pilgrimages to the South.  Slowly, his colorful, cocky, creative personality made him one of SNCC’s leaders among equals.  When the 1964 Summer Project came, Stokely was made director for the 2^nd Congressional District in the delta.

As writers and journalists poured over that wounded land that summer, legends and tale of Stokely began to filter into the national press.  That he was SNCC’s wildest driver quickly became part of the myth.  In The New Abolitionists, Howard Zinn wrote that Stokely “would stride, cool and smiling through Hell, philosophizing all the way.”  

By the end of the summer, there was a 100-member national organization with the initials FASC — standing for the Friends and Admirers of Stokely Carmichael.  And every few days there arrived in the SNCC office in Jackson a package for Stokely from some local chapter of the FASC, filled with insect repellent, delicacies, shaving cream, cigarettes, and magazines.  After some bragging and strutting, he would always share his bounty with the less visible SNCC organizers.

In January of 1965 Stokely, along with Courtland Cox and Bob Mantz, moved into Lowndes County, Alabama, where not one of the 12,000 Negroes was registered, and white registration was 117 percent.  Later Stokely was to say of his venture into Alabama’s most feared county, “I just got into that Bob Moses [Parris] bag.  I had to see what I could do in the place no one else would go.”

On March 25, 1965, Mrs. Viola Gregg Liuzzo was killed in Lowndes as she ferried civil-rights workers between Montgomery and Selma at the finish of the protest march of 50,000 led by Martin Luther King that day.

In August, Reverend Jonathan Daniels was shot in Hayneville, the sleepy county seat of Lowndes, and Father Richard Morrisroe was seriously wounded.  Three SNCC field secretaries—Willie Vaughn, Ruby Sales and Gloria Larry, plus a local girl, Joyce Bailey, saw Thomas Coleman, a fifty-two-year-old shopkeeper and part-time deputy sheriff, shoot the two clergymen. Two trials failed to convict Coleman.

[In the] Stabilization and Conservation Services (ASCS) election, which elect a local board that determines crucial allotments for cotton acreage and subsidies, there were massive frauds and the Negro candidates lost, although they constituted a 4 to 1 majority among the farmers eligible to vote.

Meanwhile, with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Justice Department appointed a Federal registrar for Lowndes County.  Lashed by the sharp-tongued goads and organizing skills of the SNCC workers, Lowndes Negro began to register.  When Stokely arrived in January, not one Negro was on the voting rolls; eleven months later, Negro registration passed 2,000 matching that of the overregistered whites in the county.

In November, the SNCC organizers decided to form a separate political party at the county unit level in Lowndes and in six nearby counties.  At a meeting of about 100 liberal and radical intellectuals held in Washington that month, following the SANE- march against the Vietnam war, Carmichael, a hypnotic orator, said:

The liberals cheered and promised money.

Stokely went back into the community and began to organize for the nominating convention in May and the statewide ballot in November.  There were emotional mass meetings [in] the democratic nomination [of] candidates.  Stokely wanted an all-black ticket, but the more conservative local Negroes, wanted an integrated ticket.  Stokely asked a local Negro, “You’re all black, ain’t you, so what’s wrong with an all-black slate?”

But in true SNCC style, Stokely agreed to “let the people decide.”  When no local whites would run under the symbol of the charging black panther, he felt vindicated.

On May 3^rd, on the steps of the same courthouse in Hayneville where Tom Coleman was acquitted for the murder of Reverend Daniels, 900 Negroes assembled to formally nominate their slate of candidates.  Almost all them had guns.  Lowndes had become what the Pike-Amite project was to SNCC in 1961—the only place where it could claw a beachhead.  So it was understandable that the two weeks later the floundering movement should turn to Stokely to put it back on the path that had bathed it with the aura of myth only two years before.

The unions, the liberals, the moderate civil-rights leaders, have all displayed their displeasure at SNCC’s nationalist direction, expressions equally as logical and inevitable as SNCC’s policy.  As Carmichael once put it, “Man, every cat’s politics comes from what he sees when he gets up in the morning.  The liberals see Central Park and we see sharecropper shacks.”

Even before the Nashville meeting, SNCC’s historic contributions to the freedom movement tended to be down-graded by the “Negro expert” industry spawned by the movement.  Few of the instant historians would admit—or possibly knew—that it was SNCC who first ventured into the wasteland of Mississippi, who first conceived the watershed of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project.

A Bleak Future for SNCC

The arrogant victims of SNCC are now in for a long season in hell.  The Klan, HUAC, the unions, the moderates, the press, the Uncle Toms, they will all hound—and isolate—SNCC, and then try to peck out its vitals like a modern Prometheus.  In a half century detached scholars—who will have the admitted benefit of no contact with the race-haunted kamikazes of SNCC—will probably enshrine its organizers alongside those other singing Utopians, Wobblies.  In fifty years Stokely may be mythicized like Joe Hill is today, but SNCC now will be treated the way the IWW was in 1917.

The root of the SNCC tragedy is, I suppose, the larger fate of the whole Southern freedom movement, which now seems at a dead end, invigorated only by occasional outrages like the shooting of James Meredith.  Every symptom is that the Southern movement is now burnt out, exhausted by unredemptive suffering, cynical because daily conditions are little changed in fundamental ways.

It is a joyless desperation that fuels SNCC’s gamble with black nationalism today.  It is the final, heroic gesture of proud Cyrano, jabbing his glistening blade at fate.

Perhaps these desperate pioneers, who created the sit-ins, the freedom rides, the freedom parties, the summer projects, the whole superstructure of myth that illuminated the freedom movement for one historical moment, perhaps they now believe that only their own final destruction can somehow prove to the nonwhite majority on this planet the utter wretchedness of the nation they tried so long to reform and redeem.

Source: Jack Newfield. A Prophetic Minority. New York: The New American Library, 1966.

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updated 21 October 2007