Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; pronounced “snick”) was founded in 1960. It arose from an incident on February 1, 1960, in which four black college students attempted to sit and be served at a lunch counter in Woolworth's, a store in Greensboro, North Carolina . In most southern states, seating in such public places was strictly segregated according to race, and blacks were prohibited from sitting at the counter. This small act of protest had launched the student sit-in movement that spread rapidly through the South. Reacting to the upsurge of student activism, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) official Ella Baker (1903–1986) invited student protest leaders to a weekend conference. The student leaders expressed their frustration with the slow pace of the major civil rights organizations. Ready to confront the racism and segregation around them, they agreed to form SNCC. The founders agreed that SNCC would use nonviolent but active and confrontational tactics to provoke social change.

Daring activism

In February 1961, four students affiliated with SNCC traveled to Rock Hill, South Carolina , to join a group of protesters arrested at a segregated lunch counter. There, the SNCC members formed a “jail-no-bail” or “jail-in” strategy. So many protestors were imprisoned—and refused to be released on bail—that the local jails faced crisis-level overcrowding.

In May 1961, SNCC rallied when a group organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) went on so-called freedom rides to defy segregation policies on buses and in bus stations; the freedom riders encountered violence in Alabama and were forced to give up their campaign. SNCC knew it would be a terrible signal to white segregationists to learn that their violence had stopped a civil rights effort. Therefore, they organized dozens of black students to take the place of the original freedom riders. The students risked their lives to ride buses from Alabama to Jackson, Mississippi , where they were arrested and jailed.

From the fall of 1961 through the spring of 1966, SNCC shifted its focus from nonviolent desegregation protests to long-term voting rights campaigns in the Deep South. Operating in the most oppressive areas, dedicated SNCC workers became celebrated for their courage in the face of white intimidation.

Freedom Summer

In 1961, SNCC created the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of civil rights groups that launched a huge campaign for voting rights in Mississippi. Acknowledging the need for more outside support, COFO sponsored a summer project in 1964 that was designed to bring hundreds of white students to Mississippi to participate in a statewide voter registration project. Freedom Summer triggered massive resistance in white segregationists. By the end of the summer, four black Mississippians were killed. Scores of volunteers and participants were beaten; more than a thousand arrests were made; and nearly seventy churches, homes, and businesses were burned or bombed. The murder of three civil rights workers, two of them white, during the early days of the project brought national attention to the suppression of black voting rights in the Deep South.

Growing frustration

By 1963, the failure of the federal government to protect the rights of African Americans discouraged many SNCC staff members. SNCC chairman John Lewis (1940–) expressed this growing disillusionment in a controversial speech given at the massive 1963 March on Washington in the nation's capital. Lewis's speech originally contained the question “Which side is the federal government on?” but the question was removed by his group so as not to offend President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963; served 1961–63). Still, the anger lingered.

Black Power: A new direction

Following the bloody 1965 voting rights marches in Selma, Alabama, during which black children, women, and men were beaten, SNCC gave up its early emphasis on nonviolence and Southern community organizing. It adopted instead a philosophy of Black Power , which was being promoted by SNCC leaders Stokely Carmichael (also known as Kwame Turé; 1941–1998) and H. Rap Brown (1943–).

The new SNCC voted to exclude whites from important positions. The organization increasingly pushed for withdrawing from the American mainstream and forming a separate black society. As SNCC made these changes, though, conflicts erupted among its leaders. By 1967, SNCC's Black Power message and internal conflicts had caused many of its former supporters to abandon it. Although SNCC's calls for black pride brought much-needed unity to poor urban blacks, the organization had little impact on African American politics after 1967. It remained in existence until the early 1970s.