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CHAPTER ONE

The Atlanta Movement and SNCC

The Fuel of My Civil Rights Fire

In this recounting of some of his early influences, Bond does not mention the George School, a coeducational Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated before enrolling at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1957. But he did state at other points that the Quaker tenets of nonviolence, speaking truth to power, egalitarianism, and collective decision-making molded him for a life in the civil rights movement. The teachings of his father, Horace Mann Bond, were no less formative, and Bond was told that he had a responsibility to use his education for the betterment of those in need.

In the following text, Bond refers to the scholar and activist E. Franklin Frazier, the first African American president of the American Sociological Association; W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights advocacy group that eventually gave rise to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Walter White, who led the NAACP from 1931 to 1955; and Paul Robeson, the famous singer, actor, and activist.

Bond also cites the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi while on a visit to family. A few days after Till allegedly offended a white woman, the woman’s husband and his half-brother abducted Till from his uncle’s home, beating and mutilating him before shooting him in the head and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. The horribly disfigured body was discovered three days later, and was sent north to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket. Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of Emmett Till’s mutilated body were published in magazines and newspapers.

Like many Southern black youths of my generation, my path to the civil rights movement extended from my college experience. I grew up on black college campuses. My father, the late Dr. Horace Mann Bond, was president of Fort Valley State College for Negroes in Georgia and Lincoln University in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. From 1957 on I lived in university housing owned by Atlanta University, where my father ended his career as dean of the School of Education. Local and state racial policies often froze the black college, its faculty and administrators and students, into political inactivity and grudging acceptance of the status quo. The best of schools did, however, keep alive the rich tradition of protest and rebellion that had existed throughout black communities since slavery.

This was my experience at Fort Valley and Lincoln, and in Atlanta. At the age of 3, I posed with my sister Jane, my father, and noted black scholars E. Franklin Frazier and W. E. B. Du Bois while the elders pledged us to a life of scholarship. At seven, I sat at the knee of the great black singer and political activist Paul Robeson as he sang of the Four Insurgent Generals. I watched as NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White visited the Lincoln Campus, escorted by an impressive phalanx of black-booted Pennsylvania state troopers whose shiny motorcycles were surely designed to attract the attention of small boys and impress them with the importance of the white-looking black man whom they protected. When my father came to Atlanta University, I entered Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. Both Kings and a long list of race men and women, dedicated to the uplift of their people, were paraded before us in daily, required sessions of morning chapel.

But school alone did not fuel my civil rights fires; my father’s house and my mother’s table served daily helpings of current events, involving the world and the race. The race’s problems and achievements were part of everyday discussion. When a fourteen-year-old named Emmett Till was kidnapped, beaten, castrated, and murdered in Mississippi, it terrified the fifteen-year-old me. I asked myself, “If they will do that to him, what won’t they do to me?”

The Conversation That Started It All

In this account of the beginning of the Atlanta student movement, Bond refers to Ella Baker, who moved to Atlanta in 1958 to help direct the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Crusade for Citizenship and its work in registering African American voters.

“Strong people don’t need strong leaders,” Ella Baker told us; we were strong people. We did strong things. I want to talk about some of the things we did.

It began for me as it did for many more.

About February 4, 1960, I was sitting in a café near my college campus in Atlanta, Georgia, a place where students went between or instead of classes.

A student name Lonnie King approached me. He held up a copy of that day’s Atlanta Daily World, Atlanta’s daily black newspaper. The headline read: “Greensboro Students Sit-in for Third Day!”

The story told, in exact detail, how black college students from North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro had, for the third day in a row, entered a Woolworth’s Department Store and asked for service at the whites-only lunch counter. It described their demeanor, their dress, and their determination to return the following day—and as many successive days as it took—if they were not served.

“Have you seen this?” he demanded.

“Yes, I have,” I replied.

“What do you think about it?” he inquired.

“I think it’s great!”

“Don’t you think it ought to happen here?” he asked.

“Oh, I’m sure it will happen here,” I responded. “Surely someone here will do it.”

Then to me, as it came to others in those early days in 1960, a query, an invitation, a command:

“Why don’t we make it happen here?”

He and I and Joe Pierce canvassed the café, talking to students, inviting them to discuss the Greensboro event and to duplicate it in Atlanta. The Atlanta student movement had begun.

With our recruited schoolmates we formed an organization, reconnoitered downtown lunch counters, and within a few weeks, 77 of us had been arrested.

After Lonnie King had recruited him, Bond joined forces with King and Pierce to invite their peers at Morehouse and other schools in the Atlanta University Center (Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Spelman Colleges) to organize a series of sit-ins targeting segregated lunch counters and restaurants in the downtown area. Reports of the plans spread quickly, and the various school presidents asked the young activists to begin their efforts by first seeking cooperation from the wider community with a public appeal. The students agreed, and Bond and Spelman student Roslyn Pope penned “An Appeal for Human Rights,” a statement protesting racial discrimination in Atlanta that concluded with a promise to act. “We must say in all candor,” Pope and Bond wrote, “that we plan to use every legal and nonviolent means at our disposal to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great democracy of ours.”

The Appeal was published in city newspapers on March 9. The sit-ins began on March 15 at taxpayer-supported lunch counters, restaurants, and cafeterias. Although Bond was frightened by the prospect of landing in jail—Emmett Till was front and center in his thoughts—he led his assigned group of student protesters to the Atlanta City Hall cafeteria. A cafeteria worker called the police, and they soon transported the students to jail. It was Bond’s first arrest.

A Student Voice

While Lonnie King served as chairman of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the organization that directed the Atlanta student movement, Bond worked on publicity, writing and editing a publication called The Student Movement and You.

In April 1960 Bond and other COAHR delegates attended a conference for student activists on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Called together by Ella Baker, the students eventually agreed to establish a permanent organization that would coordinate their various protests in the South. Heeding Baker’s advice that they not align themselves with already established civil rights groups, the students created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as an independent entity committed to nonviolent direct action, especially grassroots campaigns to empower local black communities. In June 1960, SNCC issued its first publication, the Student Voice, and Bond contributed the following two pieces, the first of which reveals his early passion for writing poetry.

I, too, hear America singing

But from where I stand

I can only hear Little Richard

And Fats Domino.

But sometimes,

I hear Ray Charles

Drowning in his own tears

Or Bird

Relaxing at Camarillo

Or Horace Silver doodling,

Then I don’t mind standing

a little longer.

———

Students from Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown, Spelman College, the Blayton School of Accounting, Atlanta University, and the Interdenominational Theological Center have come together in a united effort to break the shackles of immorality, archaic traditions, and complacency in an energetic struggle for human rights.

On Wednesday, March 9th, students from six of the institutions published an “Appeal for Human Rights” in three of Atlanta’s leading newspapers. The “Appeal for Human Rights” is an expression of the students’ dissatisfaction with the treatment of Negroes in Atlanta and Georgia in particular, and discrimination and segregation wherever they may exist. The students of the Atlanta University Center hoped that an appeal of this nature would be successful in provoking the consciences of the people of Atlanta, Georgia, the nation, and the world to refrain from the immoral practices of refusing to grant to some those guaranteed rights which are due every member of the human race.

Tuesday, March 15th, prompted by the same spirit which produced the “Appeal for Human Rights,” while requesting service in nine different eating establishments housed in publicly supported buildings, seventy-seven students were arrested in seven of the restaurants. The two establishments where no arrests were made were located in federal buildings. One of the students, a minor, has been banned from Georgia.

On April 15th, five of the six signers of the “Appeal for Human Rights,” and two students who were not originally arrested for their request for service, were also indicted. The eighty-three students are now awaiting adjudication for violation of Georgia laws. They face possible maximum sentences and fines of forty years in jail and twenty-seven thousand dollars per person.

At this time, students have initiated a program of “selective buying” aimed at large food store chains in an effort to secure equal job opportunities.

On May 17th, in observance of the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision regarding desegregation of public schools, three thousand students from the Atlanta University Center began a peaceful march to the Capitol of the State of Georgia. They were defiantly met by one hundred armed state troopers, sporting three-foot cudgels, tear gas bombs and fire hoses. Upon orders from the chief of the Atlanta Police Department, the students were rerouted.

The Committee on the Appeal for Human Rights is constantly seeking opportunities to negotiate with governmental and private business officials to help secure equal rights through understanding.

The struggle for human rights is a constant fight, and one which the students do not plan to relinquish until full equality is won for all men.

Let Freedom Ring

The Atlanta Daily World, a conservative African American newspaper, did not enthusiastically support COAHR and its desegregation campaigns. To counter the publication’s conservative voice, Bond and his friends joined with progressive black business leaders to found a new newspaper, the Atlanta Inquirer, in August 1960. Bond served as a reporter and then as an assistant and associate editor for the fledgling newspaper. He also ghost-wrote a column for Lonnie King. Three excerpts from the column, “Let Freedom Ring,” including a reflection on a SNCC conference held in Atlanta in October 1960, are below.

It is a special thrill these days to be a Negro and in the South. Perhaps more than any other Americans, we can fully understand the “Spirit of ’76” which began the greatest dream of freedom the world has ever known.

Our struggle today is to make this dream a reality for all Americans.

Negro students this year have written one of the most illustrious chapters of American history. By courageously and uncompromisingly embracing the cause of dignity and freedom, the students have made the American people aware of their un-American treatment of Negroes, and at the same time, have made Negro Americans realize that their just desires are within their grasp. The students’ protests have been the rallying point from which entire Negro communities have moved forward together to achieve their long-awaited and long-withheld rights.

The students’ struggle is, in effect, the struggle of all men who wish to be free. The students, through their parents, teachers, and ministers, have learned that America believes in the principle of equality. The students intend to make sure that this principle is not ignored anywhere in America.

In keeping with the struggle for human dignity, it would seem that it would be good sense for Negroes to spend their money in places where they know they will be treated in a dignified manner. If Negro Atlantans know of businesses downtown where they will be treated with the dignity and respect that is due paying customers and if they can be assured that their job applications will be received with the same willingness as their money presently is, then they should by all means patronize only these stores. If not, Negroes should give their money exclusively to establishments within the Negro community where they know from past experience that they will be accorded the fair treatment that all customers expect.

With the “kneel-ins” of Sunday, August 7, a new dimension was added to the student movement. Christian brotherhood is too often only an empty phrase. The fact that Negro students were graciously accepted in four white churches last Sunday shows that a few of Atlanta’s white citizens firmly believe in the equality of all men before God and that the church is the house of all people.

———

Atlantans can be justly proud of themselves. The unity exemplified by the Negro community is an unheralded event. By working together and sticking together, the community has shown its determination to end a particular phase of segregation. The era of under-the-counter dealers is over. The behind-the-scenes advocates of “go slow” and “not now” must finally realize that their day has ended. During the height of the demonstrations, we heard that this was not the way, that the courts should decide, that businessmen do not yield to pressure. When a store hired Negroes above counter boys and sweepers, these sages told us that the stores had made up their minds from the goodness of their hearts; a picket line which cost the store thousands of dollars a week was not mentioned. We hear that this is a town of “goodwill,” peopled with citizens of “good intentions.” Are we to imagine that this “goodwill” and the proverbial paving of the road to hell, “good intentions,” are the solution to our problems? If so, we wonder why the problem exists at all. We have left the Supreme Court decision to the courts, and in six years barely one percent of the school districts in the South have integrated. As attorney Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP said here last Sunday, what we need is more “do-it-yourself integration.”

Recent events have shown here that people are tired of having a few men, conservative and ever-protective of their vested interests, compromise the rights of people into nothingness. We are tired of seeing the tactics of the segregator, dividing and conquering, used upon us by our own. We are tired of seeing “leading Negroes” leading us into fathomless pits of hopelessness. Too long has the tide of integration been halted by one grain of sand, a grain so horrendous in its implications that it is able to halt the rightful progress of the onrushing waters of freedom. . . .

———

As the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Conference closed last Sunday night I thought of how wonderful the entire conference had been. Here we met and shared experiences and incidents of the summer, many rewarding, some disheartening, all adding to our determination to continue the struggle against discrimination until the battle is won. We have reaffirmed our faith in nonviolence not only as a technique usable in sit-ins and protest demonstrations, but as an actual way of life, as a real and vital part of everyday living. Through discussions and after-conference-hours sessions, we realize that the philosophy of nonviolence is the Christian philosophy that embraces and is embraced by the Golden Rule. We realize that mistakes have been made, and, in spite of these mistakes, the movement has flourished across the land, meeting and surmounting obstacles which were considered too difficult to surmount or situations beyond our control.

We learned that we must reemphasize the philosophies which have built the movement, not because we have begun to stray away but because continued emphasis will serve to make us more effective in the battle. Nonviolence is our weapon and our defense. We must clasp it to us.

We learned what so many of us had begun to realize. We learned that greater sacrifice is needed, that our dedication must be strengthened, that our programs must spread and cover the entirety of segregation. We must not settle for freedom at lunch counters. As have Atlanta and so many other protest centers, we must carry the battle to the enemy and attack him whether he lurks behind the restrictive covenant in real estate, behind the closed door at the employment office, if he manages to close the voting booth, or if he is able to direct us to the back door of the movie theater. Until all men can move freely, the beloved community will not exist. Until no man can restrict the liberties of another in a capricious and arbitrary fashion by using his color as a point of reference in choosing or refusing him, we must press onward and upward.

We learned the importance of sacrifice. As James Lawson, a student who was expelled from Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville for his part in the student protest movement, told the conference: “We lost the finest hour of the movement when so many of us left the jails of the South.” Lawson urged the students arrested for their participation in sit-in activity to stay in jail and told them to tell the leaders who asked them to accept bail and come home, “We can stand it in here just as long as you can stand it out there.”

Attending the conference was like having a breath of fresh air blown into a hot and stuffy room. I saw white students from northern colleges, whose only experience with discrimination must always necessarily be secondhand, ready to dedicate themselves far beyond the sacrifices which many Negro students, deeply touched by the evil in their daily lives, have refused to offer.

The student movement came about because young people saw many of their elders refusing to cope with segregation adequately. They saw other youngsters younger than they in Little Rock and other cities face mobs who would have deterred many a seasoned fighter. They saw that too often one person cries against wrongdoing, and one person cannot effectively act. They saw that ponderous Negroes were being raised to fight the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and they saw that only a massive attack could bring results. They saw that massive resistance must be met with passive insistence, and they saw that only in a movement which involved all of the people involved or in any way connected with the tense problem could any sort of effective change be wrought. They saw, finally, that it does no earthly good to talk and fret about segregation and that only action will enable man to talk of segregation as a thing of the past.

Lonnie King Is an Acid Victim

Responsible for reporting on student activities, Bond gave favorable coverage to COAHR and the larger student movement. Below is an example of one of his news reports—this one appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1961—about an attack on his good friend Lonnie King.

Even though he was almost blinded by acid flung in his face, student leader Lonnie King has vowed that his anti-segregation activities will continue.

King, a Morehouse College senior, is chairman of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the student group here that has been leading the fight against Jim Crow since March 1960.

An unidentified white man threw the liquid, identified in a Grady Hospital report as “acid,” in King’s face while the young integration leader was walking in a picket line before Mann Brothers grocery store here.

King asked police officers D. C. Taylor and D. S. James, who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident occurred, to take him to a hospital, but they replied, “Take a bus.”

Another police officer, Lieut. Strickland, later told them to take King to Grady Hospital for emergency treatment.

A doctor at the hospital told King that “if he had not been wearing sunglasses,” his eyes certainly would have been damaged.

The hospital report said that “acid was thrown into the patient’s face.”

It was so powerful it took paint off the picket sign he was wearing. Student leader Charles Black said that “after the incident, police left the scene.” Bystanders filled the area despite police warnings that gatherings would not be tolerated.

Black, who was marching behind King in the picket line, said that the assailant had been standing near a phone booth for some time before he threw the acid.

Black said that the man finally walked up to King, threw the acid, and ran away.

King immediately threw off his sign, and ran across the street to a Gulf Oil service station and asked for water to soothe his burns.

He was refused and walked a block farther to a Shell service station where he was given water and a chance to use a telephone. After calling COAHR headquarters, he returned to his place on the picket line.

Black said that hecklers who had been standing outside the store “all had disappeared when the acid was thrown. We noticed them inside the store laughing.”

King said that he felt as though “someone had poured gasoline on me and set it on fire.” COAHR headquarters immediately called Grady Hospital and requested an ambulance, which arrived about one-half hour after King left in the police car.

Atlanta’s college students, who had been picketing the store in an attempt to secure better jobs for Negroes, have been subjected to heckling, stone throwing, cursing, and pushing by white onlookers.

A survey conducted by a national soap manufacturer revealed that at least 50 percent of the store’s customers are Negroes.

Police questioned King extensively about the incident, and even returned him to COAHR headquarters after he was released from the hospital.

They turned his shirt over to their crime lab in an attempt to discover the nature of the acid.

Students indicated that “it would take more than a little acid to keep us from doing what we know is right.”

The Murder of Louis Allen

The year 1961 proved considerably stressful for young Bond. His work with COAHR and the Inquirer was consuming, and his new marriage to Spelman student Alice Clopton brought its own responsibilities. Feeling overwhelmed, Bond resigned from his editorial work at the Inquirer in late summer to become the executive secretary of COAHR. Bond also withdrew from Morehouse College, though he was on track to graduate at the end of the academic year.

But thanks to James Forman, a charismatic leader Bond later identified as among the most influential in his life, 1961 also proved to be a pivotal year for the budding civil rights activist. Not long after Forman became SNCC’s executive secretary in the fall of 1961, he asked Bond to begin working on publicity for the organization. Bond agreed, and, before long, SNCC hired him to be communications director, paying him a modest salary. Bond professionalized SNCC’s newsletter, the Student Voice, and reported on the organization’s work in desegregation campaigns and in grassroots voter registration efforts in the Deep South.

Bond later characterized himself as a bureaucrat, an “office functionary,” someone far removed from the danger of the frontlines. “When I traveled, I traveled as a writer, as a publicist, trying to set up press relations in the different places where SNCC had projects. So I was never again on the firing line, so to speak.”28

Although he often depicted his work as being far from courageous, Bond did indeed travel to areas that were dangerous, even deadly, for African Americans seeking to exercise their constitutional rights. Below is his account of the cold-blooded murder of a black man he had met during his travels in Mississippi in 1963.

“If you give me protection, I’ll let the hide go with the hair,” Louis Allen said.

I met Louis Allen on February 12, 1963, in the home of a Negro farmer outside McComb, Mississippi. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had begun its first voter registration drive in McComb in August 1961, and when Negroes from the other counties surrounding McComb asked them to set up citizenship schools nearer their homes, they did.

The student committee, then barely 18 months old, pioneered in southwestern Mississippi a program settling young workers, on a subsistence wage, in rural communities where they take their chances with the Negroes they work and live with. Our host, E. W. Steptoe, was one of the few Negroes in that area who opened their homes to SNCC workers.

A tiny man, 15 years president of the Amite County NAACP, Steptoe had kept the branch going by buying memberships himself, and by then selling them back to local Negroes he cajoled into paying the $2.00 membership fee.

Five Negroes had gathered in Steptoe’s home that day to record their experiences in trying to register to vote on film for a California movie maker, Harvey Richards, who was donating his talents to SNCC. The film, “We’ll Never Turn Back,” has had mild success as a classic of realism, for it depicts black Mississippians telling in their own words, what it means to be black in a state that treats its Negro minority like Jews in early Nazi Germany.

Louis Allen did not record his reminiscences, however, because first Richards, then his assistant, Amzie Moore, a state NAACP official, and finally Steptoe himself agreed any publication of his memories would place his life further in danger and that the “hide” that went with the “hair” would be his.

He did tell his story to us, however. Almost a year to the day later, he was shotgunned to death outside his home.

Steptoe’s nearest neighbor, a fifty-two-year-old farmer named Herbert Lee, was, with our host, the most active of Amite County Negroes.

On September 25, 1961, Lee drove into Liberty, the Amite County seat. He stopped at a cotton gin, and from his truck, engaged a white man, E. H. Hurst, in conversation. Minutes later, Hurst—then a member of the state legislature—shot and killed Lee.

Within two hours, a coroner’s jury had convened, heard testimony, and declared the killing self-defense. Not until then was Herbert Lee’s body removed from a pool of blood on the sidewalk outside the gin.

Louis Allen, who supported his four children, his wife, and his parents as a logger, had witnessed the shooting. His testimony before the coroner’s jury, and at a later grand jury investigation, set Hurst free.

This is how he remembered it before us:

“The morning it happened, I came to the gin. I came up on the highway where Hurst and this colored fellow was arguing. Hurst looked at me and quieted down, but I could still hear him. I walked up the highway past the truck, behind, where I could still hear and see. Lee hopped out on the passenger side. Hurst ran around the front. Hurst lowered the gun at him, but didn’t shoot the first time. He shot the second time.”

After the shooting, Allen saw another white man lead Hurst into a truck and drive away from the gin. Allen, knowing full well what he had seen could mean only trouble for him, walked away also.

He told us the rest of his story. No one can know, now, whether he told it true. It can never be told in court or proved or rebutted. But Louis Allen believed it, and so a listener who knew the history and manners of Mississippi might also.

“I was sitting in the garage when Mr. B---- came along and said, ‘Come to the gin.’ When we were going down he said, ‘They found a piece of iron on that nigger.’ I said I didn’t see no piece of iron. ‘They found a piece of iron, you hear?’ he said.

“At the coroner’s jury, someone asked about the piece of iron. I said I hadn’t seen no iron.

“Is this the piece of iron?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then they swore me in, and I left.”

Bob Moses, the former New York school teacher who had begun SNCC’s Mississippi work, told us that Allen had come to him, wanting to change his testimony but fearing for his life. Together they had called the Justice Department in Washington.

“We’re not running a police department,” they were told.

Allen, a heavy and serious man, told us he wanted to leave Mississippi but had his family and elder parents to support. When his parents died, he would leave.

During the week of January 19, 1964, Allen’s mother died. A brother who lives in Milwaukee came down for the funeral and persuaded Allen to leave. He had been arrested twice since the Lee shooting, and once a deputy, swinging a flashlight, broke his jaw.

He made plans to leave on February 1, early in the morning. He would go to Milwaukee, live with his brother, get a job, and send for his family.

On the night of January 31, around 8:30, his wife heard him drive up. His truck stopped, but she assumed he had gotten out to close the gate. She heard three shots but still didn’t leave the house because the truck’s motor kept going.

When it stopped, at 1:30 A.M., Louis Allen’s body was found under it. He had been shot three times with a shotgun, once in the face so badly his coffin was kept closed at the funeral.

Newspaper reporters, pondering an angle for the shooting, wondered if Louis Allen had been “active” in the rights drive.

“He had tried to register once,” a SNCC worker said, “and had seen a white man murder a Negro who tried. In south Mississippi, that made him active.”

SNCC and JFK

Another part of Bond’s work was to send telegrams to the Kennedy administration about crises that posed serious and imminent danger to the lives of SNCC workers. On June 12, 1963, just one day after President Kennedy had delivered his historic civil rights address, Bond sent Robert Kennedy the following telegram: “Request federal marshals to protect Negro citizens and voter registration workers in Dallas County, Alabama, where SNCC field secretary Bernard Lafayette was brutally beaten last night. Will the federal government act to protect the rights of American citizens in the South? We also request that you take immediate steps to halt persecution of seven voter registration workers jailed and beaten in Winona, Mississippi.”29 Like his SNCC coworkers, Bond was disappointed with the Kennedy administration’s lack of attention to civil rights as well as the slowness of its actions when it finally did take note of the movement. Below is Bond’s 1993 account of his assessment of President Kennedy before and after his assassination.

We know so much more about public figures today than we did when I was young; their private and public lives are laid bare for all to see. It is harder to have heroes now. When I ran for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives for the first time in 1965, a pinch-penny campaign treasury dictated that most of my electioneering would be conducted in person. This candidate wasn’t seen in television ads or heard on the radio; my constituents-to-be saw me first on their porches and heard me after they’d answered their doors.

If I could talk my way inside, where I could deliver my election pitch away from the competition of street sounds, I almost immediately saw one feature common to nearly every home in the low-income district in Atlanta I wanted to represent. Almost every living room wall had three pictures, heroes, usually hung together: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy.

Seeing the late president’s picture there summoned many memories, both for the voters whose homes I had invited myself into and for me.

When my coworkers in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and I first heard, on the early afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, that President Kennedy had been shot, we immediately assumed the attack on him came from forces opposed to his views on civil rights.

Those views weren’t ours. We thought the three-year-old Kennedy administration had been cowardly in enforcing existing civil rights laws, cautious in seeking new, stronger legislation from Congress, and too eager to trade justice for order when racist whites threatened violence against civil rights forces in the South.

In his time in office, Kennedy had failed to satisfy critics like us: young black men and women who had left our segregated southern college campuses to work full-time in the activist civil rights movement that spread like wildfire after the sit-ins began in earnest in early 1960.

In fact, some of our resentment against Kennedy stemmed from his failure to properly acknowledge the way he had won the White House. News of a telephone call he had made to the wife of jailed civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., expressing his sympathy, had been trumpeted to black voters in the closing days of the 1960 campaign. When Vice President Richard M. Nixon refused to comment on King’s arrest and jailing, 30 percent of black voters shifted their allegiance from the Republicans to candidate Kennedy.

King had been arrested in an Atlanta sit-in. We sit-in veterans felt the new president owed the growing movement some reward for having given him the opportunity to claim the White House.

But with a narrow Democratic margin in Congress, and with Southern committee chairs dominating the flow of legislation, civil rights retreated from the new president’s agenda. A campaign promise to eliminate housing segregation “with the stroke of a pen” was stricken from the agenda until civil rights supporters flooded the White House with pens.

In 1961, groups of Americans known as Freedom Riders boarded buses to test orders requiring integrated interstate transportation facilities. The president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, with the president’s approval, negotiated an agreement with Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland to allow Mississippi to arrest the Freedom Riders under the very segregation laws which the U.S. Supreme Court had already declared illegal. In return, Eastland guaranteed the only violence done to the Freedom Riders would be to their constitutional rights, not their bodies.

After violence against the Freedom Riders produced embarrassing headlines in newspapers around the world, the Kennedy administration persuaded movement activists to abandon confrontational tactics like the riders, and to place their energies into registration drives, promising federal protection for registration workers. Any protection was slowly given, however, and then only when white violence was threatened, not when black rights were violated.

Our elders, men and women who had long labored in civil rights in the years before we were old enough to sit in a high chair, let alone at a lunch counter, warned that we didn’t understand politics, that Kennedy’s heart was in the right place, that he could do more quietly than by making a big noise.

For us, it didn’t matter. He was the president, sworn to uphold the Constitution. We knew that the Constitution guaranteed our right to work for civil rights without fearing attacks from midnight riders or small-town sheriffs, and we wanted the new president to believe what we believed too.

There were times during his 1,000 days when he did believe, and when we believed him. During the middle of King’s campaign in the summer of 1962 against segregation in Albany, Georgia, Kennedy reminded Albany’s white officeholders that the United States was negotiating with the Soviet Union. Why, he asked, couldn’t Albany’s city government negotiate with its own citizens?

The Kennedy administration conspired with Albany officials to have a local lawyer secretly pay King’s bail, freeing him from jail. Robert Kennedy had privately complained to an Albany lawyer that King’s jailing there had embarrassed “the United States in the court of world opinion. It must be terminated by any means necessary.”

Just five months before he was killed, Kennedy claimed the civil rights mantle we had wanted him to wear.

In a partially extemporized speech from the Oval Office, he told the nation, as no president before him had ever done, what was being fought over in the American South.

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”

In subsequent years, when I saw Kennedy’s picture with Christ’s and King’s in humble homes, I understood why.

Kennedy’s youthful martyrdom, and his publicly expressed exasperation at recalcitrant racists, erased our dismay at his cautious fears about the civil rights movement.

John F. Kennedy was a hero in those homes.

Freedom Summer: What We Are Seeking

When asked about his accomplishments at SNCC, Bond pointed to the professional quality of the Student Voice as well as his office’s ability to help the organization survive and flourish. “I think part of the reason SNCC was able to get the money that it did get was because people were able to see the kind of work that we did,” he said. “I think a large part of the credit goes to the publicity department for making SNCC visible.”30

Bond also highlighted his office’s work during the 1964 Freedom Summer project, when about 1,000 students from the North were invited to join SNCC workers in the effort to register African American voters in rural Mississippi, advance the cause of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), and create Freedom Schools where black children were taught basic skills in math and science, as well as lessons about their constitutional rights and the civil rights movement. Bond was especially proud that his office had “a traveling reporter with a camera who would go to a project, find out that there were people there from, say, Columbus, Ohio, and be able to send to their weekly papers long detailed stories, with photographs, of these kids in the field.”31

Although he enjoyed his work with SNCC, he also found it occasionally exasperating. “We always had a lot of trouble with the press . . . for two reasons,” Bond said. “People in the press were always suspicious of us—they thought we were either communists or crazy kids—and because their concern was with brutality, with the big sensationalism. They weren’t interested in writing about the day-to-day work that SNCC was undergoing from 1961 through ’64 and ’65.”32

When he was especially disturbed, Bond fired off letters of protest to reporters, columnists, and editors who maligned or falsely reported on SNCC personalities and actions. Below is his response to a column penned by conservative Republican Joseph Alsop in 1964.

Dear Sir:

You have done your readers, the civil rights movement, and your reputation a disservice by presenting an inaccurate picture of recent events in Mississippi.

I am referring specifically to your column of June 17, 1964, in which you state “the real aim of SNICK . . . is to secure the military occupation of Mississippi by federal troops.”

This statement is untrue. What we are seeking, and what we have requested, time and time again, is protection and enforcement of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts.

First, let me correct some misstatements of fact you made about Louis Allen. Allen had witnessed the slaying of Herbert Lee, a Negro active in voter registration, by E. H. Hurst, then a member of the state legislature.

Shortly after the shooting, Allen was picked up and driven to a coroner’s jury, where he was made to testify that Hurst killed Lee in self-defense. He later admitted he had lied under duress, and asked the Department of Justice if they would protect him if he would change his story and tell the truth. They told him they could not offer protection. Sheriff Daniel Jones, the man who broke Allen’s jaw last summer—and the man who is charged with investigating his death—told his widow he would not be dead if he had not spoken to the FBI about the Lee killing. Incidentally, Allen did not die “a few nights ago.” He was found dead in his front yard on the morning of February 1, 1964, the day he had planned to leave the state of Mississippi for good.

Second, let me state there are no armed guards outside, inside or around the COFO office in Jackson, or any civil rights office anywhere in the state of Mississippi.

Finally, I doubt if you are in any position to state the real aims of SNCC, or of the Mississippi Summer Project. Let me state them for you. We are seeking the right of American citizens to live and work where they choose. We want every Mississippi Negro to have a chance to register to vote, or to get a job.

You are a respected columnist with a wide audience. I submit you have allowed opinion and prejudice to cloud your judgment, and you have slandered the hard work and determination of hundreds of people, young and old, black and white.

If you sincerely seek the truth, might I suggest you contact this office. . . .

Do not forget, Mr. Alsop, that the Summer Project involves not only SNCC, but the NAACP (which suggested last week that the government “take over” Mississippi), CORE, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Let me apologize for the haste in which this letter was written. I think it important, however, that you realize exactly what is going on in Mississippi today, what has been going on there, and what the legitimate aims and goals of local Negroes and the civil rights workers who are in the state are.

I think it merits a trip there, a talk with white and Negro state residents, and talks with the young people who are helping bring Mississippi back into the Union.

Sincerely,

Horace Julian Bond

How to Remember the Atlanta Student Movement

Bond continued to write occasional articles for the Atlanta Inquirer while working for SNCC. Below is a news analysis he penned for the Inquirer’s August 7, 1965, issue about the demise of the Atlanta student movement. Absent from his analysis, which is both critical and appreciative, is any discussion of the ways that SNCC supplanted the Atlanta movement and coopted some of its leaders, Bond among them.

Lonnie King, Ben Brown, Julian Bond, John Gibson, Joe Pierce, James Felder, Carolyn Long, Ruby Doris and Mary Ann Smith, Frank Holloway, Joe Felder, Robert Mants, Frank Smith, Danny Mitchell, Herschelle Sullivan, Morris Dillard, Marion Wright, Johnny Parham, Otis Moss, Leon Greene, Ralph Moore, Lydia Tucker.

These are a few of the names that helped make Atlanta what it is today. These are a few of the names that made racial change in Atlanta everyone’s business, instead of the business of a small group of leading Negroes. These are a few of the college students who joined together over five years ago to force lunch counter integration on Atlanta’s merchants, and who became a strong, determined force in the Atlanta community.

Any list of the important participants in Atlanta’s student movement is sure to leave out at least 20 important names. The ones listed above are but a few of the young people who became, in March 1960, the Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), and became for the space of a year and a half the best organized, most productive student organization in the country.

From this group has come lawyers and lawmakers, teachers and ministers, and, most important, a corps of young people still dedicated to achieving racial change.

Their activities differed from those of their elders, who laid important groundwork for student movements across the South.

These young people were determined that they would not wait a minute longer before they achieved full racial equality in Atlanta.

But today, there is no effective student movement here. The former student leaders are in school, working for national civil rights organizations, or teaching school.

Although Atlanta has not yet even begun to solve the pressing problems its Negro citizens face, the student movement here has disappeared.

Where did it go? What did it do? Who controls these forces now?

The Atlanta student drive began in March, 1960, when 111 students were jailed downtown at bus and train stations, at city hall and state capitol eating places, and at cafeterias in Atlanta’s federal buildings.

A week before, at the urging of Atlanta’s Negro college presidents—some hoping to stall any action—the students had published their “Appeal for Human Rights,” a full-page ad in Atlanta’s daily newspaper asking for complete social, educational, economic, and political rights for Atlanta’s Negroes.

Demonstrations at Atlanta’s department stores didn’t begin until that summer, when students staged their first sit-ins at Rich’s Department Store.

Then, as always, some Atlanta Negro leaders tried to halt the student action. One college president refused the students permission to meet on his school’s property. Some Atlanta Negro leaders threatened the students.

But they continued and a year later won agreements from 77 stores here integrating over 200 lunch counters. Movie theater integration followed, and after brief attempts—successful ones at getting Negroes hired at white businesses in Atlanta’s Negro neighborhoods and a short time-concentrated voting drive—Atlanta’s student movement collapsed.

Why did it fall? Most observers think the student movement fell apart here because its leaders failed to consider the basic economic problems that most Atlanta Negroes face: poor housing, poor education, poor employment.

The movement here, like so many others across the South, thought only about lunch counters, but, as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Chairman John Lewis has said, “you can’t go to a lunch counter with champagne ideas on a beer pocketbook.”

Then, too, one or two Atlanta college presidents cracked down on crusading students. One or two lost scholarships. Influential teachers were either fired or chased away. Some community leaders and institutions never really supported the movement or its methods, suspecting correctly that they were aiming at getting rid of black and white domination of Negroes.

But did the movement accomplish anything beside the surface gains of integration of some public accommodations?

It certainly did!

It developed among many Atlantans, most specifically those who had been voiceless until then, a feeling that they were able to act for themselves.

It made the so-called man in the street even more discontented with some of the city’s white and Negro politicians, and gave them a method and a willingness to dispose of them.

Finally, it created a climate in which the much-maligned masses of people, mostly Negro and mostly poor, felt that in them and them alone rests a chance for changing their own lives.

If it did nothing else, Atlanta’s short-lived student movement did this, and for this primarily it should be remembered.

SNCC: Alienated, Paranoid, and Near Collapse

Bond resigned from SNCC in September 1966, around the time of riots in the black communities of Vine City and Summerville in Atlanta. Through the years Bond identified a number of reasons for his resignation, including his decision to run for the Georgia state legislature in 1965, a move that shifted his focus away from SNCC and toward electoral politics.

In 1968 Bond claimed that he “had begun to feel the way a great many public relations people must feel . . . that I had to go and sort of snatch at the sleeves of newspapermen and say, ‘Look at this thing I’ve got! It’s good. Write something about it.’ I had to beg and plead and cajole them to get them to write what I considered the right things about SNCC. It was just an unsavory job.”33 And in later years, Bond also emphasized the discomfort he had felt with the major changes that SNCC was making. “A lot of new people had come in. I just, I felt uncomfortable with it. I didn’t like the direction it seemed to be taking.”34 The new direction resulted partly from the May 1966 election of Stokely Carmichael as SNCC’s new chair. Carmichael led SNCC to emphasize black racial identity, expel whites from the organization, and accept the use of force as a legitimate means of self-defense.

The changes at SNCC created internal and external pressures on the organization, and in 1967 Kenneth B. Clark—whose groundbreaking psychological studies of black children had helped Thurgood Marshall build his case in Brown v. Board of Education—asked Bond to write an analysis of the challenges faced by SNCC. Bond agreed to pen the report (see below), but was wary of having his name attached to it, as he explained in his cover letter: “Because of what may be interpreted as the highly volatile nature of this paper, I would urge and expect that it would be disclosed solely within MARC and, even there, treated as an administrative secret without specific identification to me as its author.”35 MARC, or the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, was a nonprofit organization headed by Clark, which focused on urban problems in the United States.

This paper concerns the past, present, and future employees, members, and followers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It also describes the condition of workers formerly and presently affiliated with other civil rights organizations active in the South. For that reason, I have referred to “the organization” instead of SNCC in particular; many of the forces that played upon SNCC members also affected some few others in other organizations, and the history of SNCC follows trends felt in other organizations.

The material herein comes from my own memory and my own observations as well as from conversations with past and present SNCC members, most in New York City.

BACKGROUND

The organization faces a bleak future. Finances are barely existent. New recruits cannot be fed; field programs are nearly nonexistent. The campus student action group base of 1960 and 1961 has long since eroded, although attempts are being made to revive it.

The present condition, however, is only a reflection of past crisis and internal debate over the nature and purpose of the organization as well as public reaction to the shifting position of the organization itself.

Present financial difficulties began after the summer of 1964, intensified in 1965 with the organization’s anti–Vietnam War stand, and have become nearly insurmountable with the election of two new chairmen (in 1966 and 1967) and the adoption of an anti-white policy in staffing the organization.

With this in mind, present conditions and attitudes date from the beginning of the massive effort of the summer of 1964 and hardened in the years following.

The organization’s present status and any possible future ought to be viewed from that perspective.

Prior to the summer of 1964, the organization’s staff numbered nearly 150, about one-quarter white. These young people—most under 25—came largely from the South and secondly from the East and West Coasts. . . .

By the fall of 1963, an increasingly large number of employees were recruits, indigenous to their project areas. Without exception, these new employees suffered under a lower level of literacy, verbal ability, and knowledge of national and international affairs.

Against this background, in 1963, plans were laid for the development of a three-month summer program for the state of Mississippi in 1964.

From intensive staff discussions following the adoption of this program emerged the very real fear, held largely by “indigenous” staff members, that a temporary “invasion” of their state by hundreds of white summer volunteers would be more harmful than helpful and that the summer’s activities, when concluded, would lead to bitter repressions against the local Negro population and permanent staff.

Additionally, there was veiled suspicion and envy of the summer invaders, based in this instance on the fear of having individual jobs and leadership “taken over” by the more articulate, better educated volunteers.

A strong move to reverse earlier decisions and to dissolve the summer project was quashed, although bitterly debated. Although no precise date can be placed on the beginning of overt anti-white hostilities, it is safe to place a beginning for some feelings here among those fearful for the summer and those defeated in their attempts to turn the summer’s programs away.

The summer’s programs were considered a success with an important exception: departing volunteers failed in nearly every case to leave their skills behind, and most failed to create a viable structure for continuing the summer’s programs, and while the expected repression failed to materialize, an additional sense of frustration and incompetence at making the summer a continued success must have developed among those, white and Negro, remaining at the summer’s end. A comparison might be made to pacification efforts by the United States in South Vietnam; in this instance, towns and areas which gave the appearance of “pacification” (in this case, of being “movement” towns) probably because of the intensity of the summer’s work, became “enemy strongholds” immediately after the summer soldiers departed.

Another blow dealt the organization came from the 1964 Democratic Convention and the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP).

The refusal of the convention to summarily unseat the obviously illegal all-white delegation, the unfair “compromise” urged upon the FDP delegates, the dissolution under presidential pressures of civil rights, labor, liberal, and political support all served to remind the organization staff members and supporters that they operated at the mercy of the “system” and convinced many that reform of that system was impossible.

Despite initial widespread sympathy for the FDP, there began to appear the suggestion that organization staff members were “wreckers” (rather than “builders”) who should have urged compromise, who cynically “used” the unsophisticated Negro Mississippians who composed the FDP, and who were more interested in failure and disruption rather than success through relaxation of principle.

The FDP challenge was the culmination of three years of intense, dangerous work; its success would have changed the nature of the organization today. In 1968, such a success would be meaningless to the organization, which has since discarded the notion of reform through political action.

The 1964 Convention marked the beginning of real cynicism by organization staff members toward “establishment” liberals, Negro and white, and a beginning of national liberal cynicism toward the organization, its methods and ideals.

The passage of national civil rights legislation in 1964 and the riot of Watts that summer helped to cool the ardor of a few white sympathizers who believed the total movement was a part of the riots or that the ’64 bill achieved many of the movement’s goals.

Through this period and over the year before, there existed with the organization a loose group called sarcastically the “Freedom Highs.” This group professed a belief in democracy, in “letting the people decide.” Too much democracy produced eleven-day staff meetings, an unwillingness on the part of executives to make decisions, and the beginning of a pretense, under which programs were to be decided by “local people.” Aggressive organizing will not wait for local decision making, and the conflict between honest intent and impatience for immediate action produced further internal stress.

Over the fall of 1964 and the winter and summer of 1965, the organization’s programs stilled and hopes diminished, despite additional national legislation.

Following the murder of an organization staff member (a Navy veteran who had seen service in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the first employee to lose his life in the organization’s history) and in response to internal pressures from staff members and to external pressures from liberal whites, some active supporters of the organization, there was issued a statement, highly critical, in strong language for that time and region, condemning the war in Vietnam, linking it to American imperialism and explaining that the organization considered itself one with the “Third World” and considered the American enemy to be domestic racism and domestic colonialism and the continental United States to be the proper battleground.

The response to this document was near unanimous condemnation. The organization again lost important financial support from liberal whites, some few of whom supported the anti-war position but questioned the wisdom of a civil rights organization taking such a lead.

Some members of the staff had correctly predicted this reaction, but internally such criticism and condemnation deepened organization distrust of the liberal American community and hostility to the American government.

In 1966, a new chairman was elected in a late night meeting, sensationally reported in the press as a “coup.” News reports of the election process, militant speeches made by the winning candidate, and anti-white sentiments expressed at the election meeting and elsewhere caused further public estrangement from the organization and consequent organizational alienation from the public at large, the white media, and the liberal establishment in particular.

Shortly thereafter, the “Black Power” slogan was created, defined (by the organization to no avail; by the public as a sinister ideology), attacked, and discredited.

Each new attack frustrated . . . future attempts at communication with the greater public, the “outside world,” the world composed of white and Negro opponents and antagonists to Black Power under nearly any definition.

Indeed, some critics refused to accept organizational definitions; Roy Wilkins, for instance, declared that he “knew” Black Power meant racism and ruin, while Vice President Humphrey both condemned and supported the slogan in the space of one month.

The resignation that summer of the organization’s former chairman (a firm advocate of nonviolence, often reviled as “super militant” when active as chairman but revered as a temperate force in retirement) and the resignation of the publicity director just prior to a riot connected to the organization in Atlanta gave credence to the liberal notion that “moderate militants” were leaving the organization.

The organization’s field activities lapsed under the new administration. The lack of funds and programmatic aid from the headquarters, as well as the preoccupation in the headquarters with scheduling public appearances for the new chairman, caused less concentration of manpower, support, and finances in field operations. One project, located in Atlanta, operated for more than a year without registering a single voter, organizing any semblance of a community group, or doing little more than issuing polemics defining Black Power.

A new chairman has been elected. Both the old (’66) and new chairmen are public figures, often appearing to compete for militancy.

Organizational field activities are presently carried on by a small number of dedicated workers whose number is constantly shrinking (two were killed on August 5th).

In the headquarters, work that formerly occupied 35 persons is done by five. The professional photography labs are barely used; the immense and expensive printing shop does occasional job work and little organization literature.

In sum, the organization engages in little of the form of substance of the field work that won its reputation. Its research library is unused, and the research staff gone.

Many employees have sought temporary or full-time outside jobs simply to feed themselves.

The organization, except for the former and present chairmen and a few workers, has come to a halt.

At present writing, it consists of 50+ employees and perhaps 1,000 supporters who will engage in volunteer work. . . .

Members live insular lives, effectively contained by their own unwillingness to trust the “outside world.”

Suspicion and theories of conspiracy plague their lives. During the week of July 30, members were convinced President Johnson had given the FBI, state, and local police forces a list of the names of 15,000 Negro militants, all of whom were to be arrested that week and held in concentration camps. Needless to say, all organizational staff members believed their names were on the list.

ALTERNATIVES

. . .

The present organization seems likely to continue as long as it receives minimal financial support and as long as its public figures retain the necessary charisma to draw crowds and raise funds. The jobs held by members outside the organization will allow part-time participation without pay in organization work and could bolster the group’s staying power for years.

The organization is, then, a fact and a staying presence.

Assuming the need for retaining a cadre of militant youth whose main thrust will be southern, rural, community and political action, the group could be maintained in the following ways:

—by developing among present members a rationale for a return to large-scale political action through the suggestion and urging of outside forces and outside funds. . . .

Or the organization could be funded to engage in urban activities, or both urban and rural, although past performance would indicate an expertise at rural work.

Or the organization might be encouraged to choose one particular section of the South for experimentation with a new “Reconstruction,” attempting to use movement techniques of direct action, political and economic organization attempts, youth organizing, and a multitude of communitywide attempts at mobilizing the total Negro community for political, educational, and economic advancement.

Or the organization may be induced to direct its efforts into a single phase of community work. . . .

Finally, attempts at “rehabilitating” both the organization and the individuals who make it up are attempts which deal with a symptom of a national disorder; to really set the organization right is to set the nation right, a difficult task, the trying of which set the organization on its present course.

In summary, any attempt to redirect the individual members of the organization or the organization as a whole into other channels will be viewed with great suspicion and met with intense hostility.

Conversations with ex-members over the last two weeks have confirmed a general disappointment with the present organization, a feeling of helplessness at redirection of the group intact, and a comparable feeling of helplessness at diverting individual members away from the present course.

The alternatives listed earlier might succeed in the best of worlds; in this year’s changing and fast-moving racial scene, all alternatives seem dim.

At best, the organization may wither away, its workers absorbed into other, viable groups or general society. At worst, it will remain an active irritant, engaged in useless sloganeering, in petty demagoguery, in self-destructive upheavals and losing jousts with both the conservative and liberal forces in America today. Its public positions increasingly approach fascism; its internal mental state, to an untrained, layman’s eye, seems in a constant state of paranoia and hysteria.

The organization seems doomed to continue, its former activities consigned to the past, its future chaotic.

Those who wish otherwise can try to exert pressures from outside or simply watch until the end.

ADDENDUM

. . . After completing the paper, drawing conclusions and summing up a collection of conversations with SNCC and SNCC-connected people, I cannot help but believe that reform, redirection, and reemphasis for the total group are nearly impossible.

The standard phrases, alienation and isolation, do not appear to have strength enough to describe the organization’s present views.

The few individuals susceptible to change represent a minority whose susceptibility is directly related to organizational willingness to release them.

A perhaps relevant incident from this week will illustrate the group’s physical condition. One member needed whole blood for an operation. Five staff workers applied at the local Red Cross to donate blood, and all five were rejected because of anemia.

The hope that these young people, all capable of lending their talents to the general movement in various ways and capacities, will begin to do so is perhaps a vain one.

An attempt ought to be made, however, to salvage these lives before they are physically or mentally destroyed. MARC may be the agency that could perform this task, particularly with the group’s individual members.

I hope this paper can further existing consideration of that notion.

SNCC’s Legacy

By the end of the 1960s, SNCC had effectively dissolved. In 2000, sixty years after SNCC first emerged as a formidable player in the black civil rights movement, Bond wrote the following about the student organization’s demise and legacy.

There are many reasons for the demise of this important organization. The current of nationalism, ever-present in black America, widened at the end of the 1960s to become a rushing torrent which swept away the hopeful notion of black and white together that the decade’s beginning had promised.

SNCC’s white staff members were asked to leave the organization and devote their energies to organizing in white communities; some agreed, but most believed this action repudiated the movement’s hopeful call to “Americans all, side by equal side.”

For many on the staff, both white and black, nearly a decade’s worth of hard work at irregular, subsistence-level pay, under an atmosphere of constant tension, interrupted by jailings, beatings, and official and private terror, proved too much.

When measured by the legislative accomplishments of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Right Acts, SNCC’s efforts were successful. But the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to gain recognition at Atlantic City predicted the coming collapse of support from liberals. The murders of four schoolgirls in Birmingham and Medgar Evans in Jackson in 1963, of civil rights workers and others in Mississippi in 1964, and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 argued that nonviolence was no antidote to a violent society. The outbreak of urban violence at the decade’s end further produced a sense of frustration and alienation in many SNCC veterans.

Throughout its brief history, SNCC insisted on group-centered leadership and community-based politics. It made clear the connection between economic power and racial oppression. It refused to define racism as solely southern, to describe racial inequality as caused by irrational prejudice alone, or to limit its struggle solely to guaranteeing legal equality. It challenged American imperialism while mainstream civil rights organizations were silent or curried favor with President Johnson, condemning SNCC’s linkage of domestic poverty and racism with overseas adventurism. SNCC refused to apply political tests to its membership or supporters, opposing the red-baiting which other organizations and leaders endorsed or condoned. It created an atmosphere of expectation and anticipation among the people with whom it worked, trusting them to make decisions about their own lives.

SNCC widened the definition of politics beyond campaigns and elections; for SNCC, politics encompassed not only electoral races but also organizing political parties, labor unions, producer cooperatives, and alternative schools.

It initially sought to liberalize southern politics by organizing and enfranchising blacks. One proof of its success was the increase in black elected officials in the southern states from 7 in 1965 to 388 in 1968.

But SNCC also sought to liberalize the ends of political participation, by enlarging the issues of political debate to include the economic and foreign policy concerns of American blacks.

SNCC’s articulation and advocacy of Black Power redefined the relationship between black Americans and white power. No longer would political equity be considered a privilege; it had become a right.

One SNCC legacy is the destruction of the psychological shackles which had kept black southerners in physical and mental peonage; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee helped to break those chains forever.

It demonstrated that ordinary women and men, young and old, could perform extraordinary tasks; they did then and can do so again.