by Howard Zinn
There is another striking contrast to Garrison and Phillips, Lewis Tappan and Theodore Weld: these young people are not middle-class reformers who became somehow concerned about others. They come themselves from the ranks of the victims, not just because they are mostly Negroes, but because for the most part their fathers are janitors and laborers, their mothers maids and factory workers.
In late 1963 I checked the backgrounds of forty-one field workers for SNCC in Mississippi (roughly one-third of the total SNCC force in the Deep South). Thirty-five of them were Negro, and twenty-five of them came from the Deep South. Of the six white staff members two were from the Deep South. The white youngsters and most of the Northern Negroes came from middle-class homes; their fathers were ministers or teachers or civil service workers. All of the Southern Negroes, and some of the Northern Negroes (twenty-one out of thirty-five) came from homes where the mothers were maids or domestics, the fathers factory workers, truck drivers, farmers, bricklayers, carpenters. Twenty-nine (about three-fourths) of the total SNCC Mississippi staff were between fifteen and twenty-two years old. There were twelve between twenty-two and twenty-nine, and one person each in his thirties, forties, and fifties. Twenty-six, or about two-thirds, of the Mississippi SNCC staff were either college graduates or had some college education. Ten had finished high school or had some high school education and two had no more than part of an elementary school education. If one were to generalize roughly about the SNCC staff in the Deep South, one would say they are young, they are Negro, they come from the South, their families are poor and of the working class, but they have been to college. Northern middle-class whites and Negroes are a minority.
As of mid-1964, about 150 people worked full-time for SNCC, roughly 80 percent of them Negro. Of the whites, most were Northerners, but the few white Southerners played important roles (Jane Stembridge, the first office secretary in Atlanta; Bob Zellner and Sam Shirah, assigned to white college campuses; Sandra Hayden, in the Jackson, Mississippi office). Of the Negro staff people, most were Southern born; more and more, young Negroes were being recruited out of Deep South towns to become SNCC field secretaries right there at home.
By 1963, the annual budget of SNCC was about $250,000, almost all of this coming from the contributions of individuals and organizations (churches, colleges, foundations). About one-fourth of this income was being used to pay the salaries of field secretaries, $10 a week for most of them, with a few married people in the Atlanta office receiving $50 or $60 a week. Most of the remaining income went to pay for field operations in Mississippi, southwest Georgia, and the other areas of concentration.
The two chief officers of SNCC are the Chairman (John Lewis) and the Executive Secretary (James Forman). One of the field secretaries in each major geographical area is known as a Project Director. An Executive Committee of twenty-one members, including two older “advisors,” is the top policymaking body, and is elected at an annual conference in the spring.
Where do the 150 or so SNCC workers operate? Perhaps a dozen man the central office in Atlanta, a buzzing jumble of rooms above a tailor shop in the Negro section of Atlanta, not far from the Negro college campuses. Long-distance phone connections keep Jim Forman and John Lewis, the two top officers of SNCC, in day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour touch with crisis situations in those parts of the Deep South where SNCC maintains headquarters and “field secretaries” (as its staff members are called).
One of the two main areas of concentration is Mississippi, where SNCC’s first penetration of the Deep South was made by Bob Moses and a few Negro youngsters from the Delta. A half-dozen spots in Mississippi have had varying degrees of attention: Greenwood, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Liberty, Greenville, Clarksdale. The other major focus of activity is southwest Georgia, where Charles Sherrod, a divinity school student from Virginia, came in the fall of 1961 and stayed to become a legend. Albany has been the center there, and, radiating from it, SNCC workers have moved into the terror-ridden towns of the old Cotton Kingdom: Americus, Dawson, Camilla, Sasser. Outside of Mississippi and Southwest Georgia, SNCC groups function in Selma, Alabama; Danville, Virginia; Cambridge, Maryland; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and other places; they register voters, distribute food and clothing, lead demonstrations, conduct classes, vitalize long-dormant communities.
To visit SNCC field headquarters in these rural outposts of the Deep South is like visiting a combat station in wartime. Living conditions are crude. Sometimes there is a “Freedom House,” an old frame dwelling with cots and blankets for the field secretaries and whoever else is staying over for the night. At other times, field people stay in homes in the Negro community. It may take weeks or months to dispel the initial fear on the part of local Negroes now aware of impending change and trouble. Negro women in town often become mothers to the SNCC youngsters far from home and family; they put them up, make meals for them, tend them when they are sick, go out on the line with them in demonstrations. One thinks of Mrs. Boynton in Selma, Mrs. Woods in Hattiesburg, and Mrs. Daniels in Dawson. (Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma, hoping to arrest SNCC leader Prathia Hall, went straight to the home of Mrs. Boynton to find her.)
Over every one of these headquarters in the field, whether a “Freedom House” rented by SNCC, or a home or office donated by a local supporter, there hangs the constant threat of violence. The first SNCC headquarters in Selma was burned down; in Greenwood, two SNCC workers found themselves under siege by a mob of armed men and had to make their way over rooftops to safety; in Danville, police simply marched into the SNCC office and arrested everyone in sight.
“These are beautiful people down here,” Sandra Hayden wrote to me from Mississippi shortly after she arrived there to work for SNCC. She was speaking about the Negroes of the Delta, aroused to take their first steps out of the past—but she was not speaking of color or of that ordered set of physical characteristics which American society has characterized as “beauty.” She was speaking of the souls of black folk—and of white folk too. She was speaking of a beauty of spirit, of a courage beyond comprehension, which pervades the ranks of the new abolitionists in the Deep South. It is expressed in Sandra Hayden herself, tall, blonde, slender, a Texas girl who moved from the University of Texas into the student movement; it is expressed in the rugged, black, smiling face of Chuck McDew, peering through the bars of Baton Rouge jail; or the tawny, delicate features of Peggy Day in Terrell County; or the agonized, shining eyes of Mrs. Fannie Hamer, a middle-aged woman thrown off her land in Ruleville, Mississippi, who has gone to work for SNCC.
Those who join the SNCC staff agree to work for subsistence wages; this usually means $10.00 a week ($9.64 after deductions), and often weeks going by with no checks coming from Atlanta. It may mean knocking on doors for food, scrounging around for a pair of shoes, riding a mule along a country road because the car donated by some sympathizer has broken down. A typical SNCC automobile has always just run out of gas, and the driver has no money left to buy more. “You know it’s like they’re in another world,” a college girl said after visiting SNCC headquarters in Greenwood, Mississippi.
These are young radicals; the word “revolution” occurs again and again in their speech. Yet they have no party, no ideology, no creed. They have no clear idea of a blueprint for a future society. But they do know clearly that the values of present American society—and this goes beyond racism to class distinction, to commercialism, to profit-seeking, to the setting of religious or national barriers against human contact—are not for them.
They are prepared to use revolutionary means against the old order. They believe in civil disobedience. They are reluctant to rely completely on the niceties of negotiation and conciliation, distrustful of those who hold political and economic power. They have a tremendous respect for the potency of the demonstration, an eagerness to move out of the political maze of normal parliamentary procedure and to confront policy-makers directly with a power beyond orthodox politics—the power of people in the streets and on the picket lin
e.
They are nonviolent in that they suffer beatings with folded arms and will not strike back. There have been one or two rare exceptions of discipline being broken, yet this must be laid against hundreds of instances of astounding self-control in the face of unspeakable brutality.
Next to the phrase “nonviolence,” however, what you hear most often among SNCC workers is “direct action.” They believe, without inflicting violence, and while opening themselves to attack, in confronting a community boldly with the sounds and sights of protest. When it is argued that this will inevitably bring trouble, even violence, the answer is likely to be that given by James Bevel, who in his activity with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference works closely with SNCC in Alabama and Mississippi: “Maybe the Devil has got to come out of these people before we will have peace….”
They have no closed vision of the ideal community. They are fed up with what has been; they are open to anything new and are willing to start from scratch. Erik Erikson talks about young rebels with a “rock-bottom” attitude, who “want to be reborn in identity and to have another chance at becoming once-born, but this time on their own terms.” Nineteen-year-old SNCC veteran Cordell Reagan, brown-skinned, slender, explains himself this way:
It’s not hard to interpret what our parents mean by a better world. You know, go to school, son, and get a good education. And what do you do with this? You get a degree, you move out into some little community housing project, you get married, five kids and two cars, and you don’t care what’s happening…. So I think when we talk about growing up in a better world, a new world, we mean changing the world to a different place.
Is it any wonder that Cordell Reagan and so many other SNCC workers have been put in jail again and again by Deep-South sheriffs for “contributing to the delinquency of minors”?
A young white student, explaining why he wanted to join SNCC, wrote about his new-found view of life:
I have never felt so intense, alive, such a sense of well-being, which is not to be confused with the illusion of “happiness” equated to “having fun.” I have chosen to be outside of society after having been very much inside. I intend to fight that society which lied to and smothered me for so long, and continues to do so to vast numbers of people…. My plans are unstructured in regards to anything but the immediate future. I believe in freedom, and must take the jump; I must take the chance of action.
The nation has suddenly become aware that the initiative today is in the hands of these 150 young people who have moved into the Deep South to transform it. Everyone waits on their next action: the local police, the state officials, the national government, the mass media of the country, Negroes and whites sitting at their radios and television sets across the land. Meanwhile, these people are living, hour by hour, the very ideals which this country has often thought about, but not yet managed to practice: they are courageous, though afraid; they live and work together in a brotherhood of black and white. Southerner and Northerner, Jew and Christian and agnostic, the likes of which this country has not yet seen. They are creating new definitions of success, of happiness, of democracy.
It is just possible that the momentum created by their enormous energy—now directed against racial separation—may surge, before it can be contained, against other barriers which keep people apart in the world: poverty, and nationalism, and all tyranny over the minds and bodies of men. If so, the United States may truly be on the verge of a revolution—nonviolent, but sweeping in its consequences—and led by those who, perhaps, are most dependable in a revolution: the young.
2. Out of the Sit-ins
“My stomach always hurt a little on the way to a sit-in…. I guess it’s the unexpected.” Candie Anderson, a white girl attending Fisk University as an exchange student from Pomona College in California, had joined her Negro classmates to demonstrate against segregation in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the explosion of sit-ins throughout the South in early 1960 that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen at A & T College in Greensboro, North Carolina, took seats at a lunch counter downtown, not knowing they were starting a movement that would soon take on the proportions of a revolution. “For about a week,” David Richmond recalled later, “we four fellows sat around the A & T campus, talking about the integration movement. And we decided we ought to go down to Woolworth’s and see what would happen.” They spent an hour sitting at the Woolworth’s counter, with no service. Then the counter was closed for the day, and they went home.
In a matter of days, the idea leaped to other cities in North Carolina. During the next two weeks, sit-ins spread to fifteen cities in five Southern states. Within the following year, over 50,000 people—most were Negroes, some were white—had participated in one kind of demonstration or another in a hundred cities, and over 3600 demonstrators spent time in jail. But there were results to show: by the end of 1961, several hundred lunch counters had been desegregated in scores of cities—in Texas, Oklahoma, the border states of the South, and even as far as Atlanta, Georgia. A wall of resistance, however, apparently impenetrable, faced the student in the rest of Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana—the hard-core Deep South.
It is hard to overestimate the electrical effect of that first sit-in in Greensboro, as the news reached the nation on television screens, over radios, in newspapers. In his Harlem apartment in New York City, Bob Moses, a former Harvard graduate student and mathematics teacher, saw a picture of the Greensboro sit-inners. “The students in that picture had a certain look on their faces,” he later told writer Ben Bagdikian, “sort of sullen, angry, determined. Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.…”
In Atlanta, Morehouse College student Julian Bond, who wrote poetry and thought about being a journalist, reacted quickly to the Greensboro sit-in. He and another student, discussing it in the Yates & Milton drug store across the street from the campus, decided to summon Morehouse men to a meeting. Out of that grew the Atlanta student movement, which six weeks later erupted in one of the largest and best organized sit-in demonstrations of all.
Also in Atlanta, seventeen-year-old Ruby Doris Smith, a sophomore at Spelman College, heard about the Greensboro sit-in and ran home that evening to see it on television:
I began to think right away about it happening in Atlanta, but I wasn’t ready to act on my own. When the student committee was formed in the Atlanta University Center, I told my older sister, who was on the Student Council at Morris Brown College, to put me on the list. And when two hundred students were selected for the first demonstration, I was among them. I went through the food line in the restaurant at the State Capitol with six other students, but when we got to the cashier, she wouldn’t take our money. She ran upstairs to get the Governor. The Lieutenant-Governor came down and told us to leave. We didn’t, and went to the county jail.
Charles (“Chuck”) McDew, a husky former athlete from Massilon, Ohio, was studying at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg. McDew had never adjusted to South Carolina; he had been arrested three times in his first three months there, and was struck by a policeman for trying to enter the main YMCA. When, during Religious Emphasis Week at the College, some visiting white Protestant ministers had responded negatively to his question about attending their churches, and a rabbi invited him to the temple, he converted to Judaism. With the news of Greensboro being discussed all around him, McDew read in the Talmud: “If I am not for myself, then who is for me? If I am for myself alone, then what am I? If not now, when?” He became a leader of the local sit-in movement.
To these young people, the Supreme Court decision of 1954 was a childhood memory. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the first mass action by Southern Negroes, though also dimly remembered, was an inspiration. The trouble at Little Rock in
1957 was more vivid, with the unforgettable photos of the young Negro girl walking past screaming crowds towards Central High School. The Greensboro sit-ins struck a special chord of repressed emotion, and excitement raced across the Negro college campuses of the South.
Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Ruby Doris Smith, Chuck McDew: all were to become stalwarts in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And for so many others in SNCC, the Greensboro sit-in—more than the Supreme Court decision, more than the Little Rock crisis, more than the Montgomery bus boycott, more than the recent declarations of independence by a host of African nations, and yet, perhaps, owing its galvanic force to the accumulation of all these events—was a turning point in their lives. James Forman, studying French in graduate school in the North, began turning his thoughts southward. Exactly what was going on in the minds of so many other students, soon to leave school for “The Movement,” remains unknown.
Out of the Nashville, Tennessee, sit-ins, a battalion of future SNCC people took shape. Tall, quiet, Marion Barry, a graduate student in chemistry at Fisk University, who would later become the first chairman of SNCC, took a leading part in the Nashville sit-ins from the beginning. His father, a Mississippi farmer, migrated to Memphis, Tennessee, and Barry went to school there. As an undergraduate at LeMoyne College in Memphis, he publicly protested an anti-Negro remark made by a prominent white trustee of the college, created an uproar in the city, and barely avoided being expelled.
I came to Fisk… inquired about forming a college chapter of the NAACP…. But we didn’t do much.… We had not at any time thought of direct action…. In the meantime in Greensboro, N.C., the student movement began February 1, 1960. So we in Nashville decided we wanted to do something about it…. I remember the first time I was arrested, about February 27.… I took a chance on losing a scholarship or not receiving my Master’s degree. But to me, if I had received my scholarship and Master’s degree, and still was not a free man, I was not a man at all.