Student Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee

Student Non‐Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This organization was founded at a 1960 conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, to give students a voice in the civil rights movement. Ella Baker, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and James Lawson, a divinity student, played key roles. Initially formed to bring student leaders together, to share experiences and discuss future goals and strategies, SNCC quickly evolved into an organization of full‐time organizers and protesters. Committed at first to nonviolent direct action, group‐centered leadership, and multiracial democracy, SNCC's increasing militancy was mainly shaped by members' direct experiences.

SNCC members reorganized the Freedom Rides in 1961, after the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) encountered bus‐burnings and beatings. They also organized local African Americans to register to vote in Selma, Alabama, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and to demonstrate against racial segregation in Albany, Georgia. Early in 1964, SNCC joined with CORE to invite northern white college students to Mississippi that summer to teach in Freedom Schools, help with voter registrations, and bring national attention to racial injustice in the South. More than one thousand responded. During Freedom Summer, three young activists, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney, were murdered by white racists. In August 1964, SNCC helped form the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, which challenged the all‐white Mississippi delegation at the national convention in Atlantic City, but was ultimately rebuffed.

In 1966, amid increasing racial violence in U.S. cities, SNCC's new president, Stokely Carmichael (1941– ), articulated his vision of Black Power, including black self‐reliance, racial exclusivity, and violent self‐defense. Under Carmichael's incendiary successor, H. Rap Brown, this increasing spiral of radicalism and violence caused internal fissures that ultimately led to the disintegration of SNCC in the early 1970s. Despite this downfall, SNCC played a pivotal role in the southern civil rights movement and prefigured later social movements, particularly the student movement and the women's rights movement of the 1970s.
See also Black Nationalism; King, Martin Luther Jr.; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Clayborne Carson , In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, 1981.
Charles Payne , I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, 1995.

Patrick D. Jones