SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  MOSES (gently correcting him): Rabbinical Assembly. No, I am not.

  At one point, the prosecutor, trying to hold in his rage against the quiet calm of the witness, broke out: “Moses! Let me tell you something…” Again:

  ZACHABY: Why didn’t you mind this officer when he gave you an order?

  MOSES: I had a right to be there.…

  ZACHARY: What law school did you graduate from?

  LUNNEY: Objection.

  THE COURT: I will have to overrule you.

  ZACHARY (again to Moses): I want to know what you base this right on. Are you a legal student?

  MOSES: I base the right on the fact of the First Amendment. … That is the whole point of democracy, that the citizens know what their rights are, and they don’t have to go to law school to know what their rights are.

  About 9:15 P.M., with the attorneys’ closing remarks over, the judge denied Lunney’s motion to dismiss, and declared that the court found Robert Moses guilty, sentencing him to a fine of $200 and sixty days in jail. We all filed out of the courtroom into the night, and Patrolman John Quincy Adams took Bob Moses back to his cell.

  A few days later Bob Moses was out on bail, once again directing the Mississippi voter registration drive for the SNCC. Plans were being made for a big summer, with a thousand students coming into Mississippi for July and August of 1964. And, for the first time since Reconstruction, a group of Mississippi Negroes announced their candidacy for the U.S. Congress: Mrs. Fannie Hamer of Ruleville; Mrs. Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg; the Rev. John Cameron of Hattiesburg. Thus, a new native leadership was taking form, already beginning to unsettle the official hierarchy of the state by its challenge.

  SNCC came out of McComb after the summer of 1961 battered and uncertain. It moved on to Greenwood and other towns in the Delta, grew in numbers, gathered thousands of supporters throughout the state. In places like Hattiesburg it took blows, but it left the town transformed, its black people—and possibly some white people—awakened. Most of all, for the Negroes of Mississippi, in the summer of 1964, as college students from all over America began to join them to help bring democracy to Mississippi and the nation, the long silence was over.

  7. Southwest Georgia: The Outsider as Insider

  It has been the particular contribution of SNCC to American democracy to move into long-dormant areas of the Deep South, to arouse Negroes there from quiescence to revolt, and, in so doing, to disturb the conscience of the entire nation. This is what happened in the fall of 1961 when Charles Sherrod, twenty-two, and Cordell Reagan, eighteen, veterans of the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and McComb, arrived by bus in Albany, Georgia, to set up a voter registration office.

  Two months later, Albany was the scene of unprecedented mass arrests in the first large-scale Negro uprising since the Montgomery bus boycott. It became the prototype for demonstrations that later rocked Birmingham and dozens of other cities throughout the nation. It represented a permanent turn from the lunch counter and the bus terminal to the streets, from hit-and-run attacks by students and professional civil rights workers to populist rebellion by lower-class Negroes. And the Albany crisis revealed clearly for the first time the reluctance of the national government to protect constitutional rights in the Deep South.

  Sherrod and Reagan are both of medium height, slim, brown-skinned. When they stand up in front of a church at a mass meeting they can stir a crowd to song like no one else. Sherrod is more outgoing; he smiles boyishly when he speaks, his voice is softly resonant, and he lowers it to a vibrant whisper when he wants to emphasize a point about which he feels very deeply. Reagan is quiet, intense, a thin cord of energy and emotion, with the cheekbones and countenance of a Mongol nomad. When he and Sherrod came to Albany in October, 1961, they came as outsiders, preceded by their reputations as Freedom Riders and agitators with whom it was dangerous to associate. They stayed, locked themselves into the community, and came to be loved with the kind of adoration bestowed on folk heroes.

  Albany was picked for a voter registration campaign for the same reasons Mississippi was chosen: educated Negro youngsters from the border states of the South wanted to return, it seemed, to the source of their people’s agony, to that area which was the heart of the slave plantation system, in order to cleanse it once and for all time. Albany was the old trading center for the slave plantation country of southwest Georgia, and though it was now becoming modern and commercial, and selling more pecans than cotton, it was surrounded by the past. In the counties around Albany blacks outnumbered whites; they worked the land and lived in shacks and didn’t dare to raise a single cry against the rutted order of their lives. Around Albany were “Terrible” Terrell County, “Bad” Baker County; Sherrod added a few appellations of his own—Unmitigated Mitchell, Lamentable Lee.

  In Albany itself, Negroes constituted 40 percent of the city’s population of 56,000 and lived in a tightly segregated society from the cradle to the grave. From the world outside came, in the 1950’s, the first tremors of change: the Supreme Court decision, the Montgomery bus boycott, Little Rock, the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, the emergence of the new black nations of Africa. But in Albany few Negroes voted, and those who spoke up did so quietly, among themselves. By early 1961, a small group of Albany Negroes decided to meet and to present complaints in a petition to the city commissioners. But the mass of the Negro population held back, remained silent. It was this screen of silence which SNCC organizers Sherrod and Reagan were determined to penetrate. Sherrod says:

  When we first came to Albany, the people were afraid, really afraid. Sometimes we’d walk down the streets and the little kids would call us Freedom Riders and the people walking in the same direction would go across the street from us, because they were afraid; they didn’t want to be connected with us in any way…. Many of the ministers were afraid to let us use their churches, afraid that their churches would be bombed, that their homes would be stoned. There was fear in the air, and if we were to progress we knew that we must cut through that fear. We thought and we thought… and the students were the answer.

  There was one institution of higher education in town, Albany State College for Negroes. Reagan and Sherrod began visiting the campus, talking to the students, who had begun to stir early in 1961 when marauding whites in automobiles raced through the campus, throwing eggs, firing guns, and once trying to run down a Negro girl. Protesting against this, the students had found themselves up against the conservatism of a Negro college president, dependent for his job on the Board of Regents of the State of Georgia. The Dean of Students at Albany State was a militant young woman named Irene Asbury Wright, married to an Air Force lieutenant stationed in Albany. She sided with the students, and then resigned in protest against the administration’s repressive policies. Sherrod described in his own way the situation he and Reagan found when they began to organize the students:

  There is a school in Albany, Albany State College, where the minds of young men and women are not free to reason for themselves what is most important in life. They are “protected from” all seduction to think on what it means to be a black man in Albany or anywhere else in the South.… The campus is separated from the community by a river, a dump yard and a cemetery. And if any system of intelligence gets through all of that it is promptly stomped underfoot by men in administrative positions who refuse to think further than a new car, a bulging refrigerator, and an insatiable lust for more than enough of everything we call leisure.…

  Sherrod and Reagan were joined by Charles Jones, who came out of the Charlotte, North Carolina student movement, who had been arrested five times in four states, and who now became the third SNCC field secretary assigned to Albany. They set up a SNCC office in a little rundown building not far from the Shiloh Baptist Church in the Negro section. The plaster was falling from the walls; the mimeograph machine kept breaking down; the big room was cold and damp; but they turned out leaflets and newsletters, held meetings with students, registered voters, and conducted sessi
ons in the techniques of nonviolent direct action. The ministers were beginning to be more responsive now, and many of their sessions were held in churches, in Shiloh Baptist, or in the Rev. Ben Gay’s Bethel AME Church. At the workshops they enacted scenes in which students sitting-in would be attacked by “whites,” testing their capacity to remain nonviolent. The simulated attacks were so realistic that fierce emotions boiled up at the sessions; this too was a part of the training process.

  As Sherrod says, “… we drew young people from the colleges, trade schools, and high schools, and from the street. They were searching for a meaning in life.… Every night we grew larger and larger. But we had not been training in nonviolence in a vacuum. November 1 was to be the date.” That was the first day that the ruling of the Interstate Commerce Commission barring segregation in terminals was to go into effect. Sherrod and Reagan had themselves been jailed in Mississippi in the Freedom Ride campaign which led to that ruling. Now they prepared to test it in the segregated terminals of Albany.

  On November 1 Sherrod and Reagan, who had been visiting the SNCC office in Atlanta that day, rode back on the Trailways bus to Albany with Charles Jones and Jim Forman. With them too was a friend, sitting apart from them on the bus, but prepared to act as witness to the test when they got to Albany. The friend was Salynn McCollum, a white girl from Tennessee who had attended Peabody College in Nashville, gone on the Freedom Rides, been arrested in Birmingham, and was now working in the SNCC office in Atlanta.

  From the moment the bus left Atlanta, police in Atlanta and in Albany were in communication with one another. State troopers halted the bus en route and looked over the occupants. But no arrests were made. When the bus arrived in Albany, ten Albany policemen were waiting for it at the station, and the SNCC people feared they wouldn’t even get into the white waiting room. It was therefore decided to postpone the test, to evade the policemen, and later get back to the terminal to carry out the original plans. Salynn darted out of the terminal and raced through the streets and back alleys in the Negro section to the home of Irene Wright.

  In the meantime, Sherrod, Reagan, and Jones were talking to students in Albany about testing the ICC ruling. Later that afternoon, Salynn, in a makeshift disguise, slipped out of the Wrights’ home and made her way back to the terminal. Nine students were there, sitting in the white waiting room. She watched them being ordered out by the police, and within forty-eight hours, the violation was reported to the Justice Department. It was the first in a long series of tests for the United States government in the Albany area, in which it proved ineffectual in enforcing federal law.

  Albany was beginning to stir now. The Youth Council of the NAACP, the Baptist Ministers’ Alliance, other Negro groups, were meeting, talking, arguing, but agreeing on one basic fact: it was time to act. On November 22, these organizations, along with SNCC, formed a coalition group called the Albany Movement, with local osteopath Dr. William G. Anderson as president, and real estate man Slater King as vice-president. They agreed to begin an assault on all forms of segregation and discrimination in Albany. Irene Wright said: “The kids were going to do it anyway… they were holding their own mass meetings and making plans … we didn’t want them to have to do it alone.” With the coalescing of all forces into a united and militant movement, it meant that massive reinforcements would be ready to act when the next reconnaissance action took place.

  That action came Thanksgiving weekend, November 22, 1961, three weeks after the ICC ruling. Three members of the NAACP Youth Council entered the Trailways bus terminal, went into the restaurant there, and were met by Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett. Pritchett called them outside and told them that if they re-entered the lunch room he would arrest them. They went back into the restaurant, and were promptly arrested. A half hour later, they were released on bond.

  Later that afternoon, hundreds of Albany State students arrived at the terminal to go home for the Thanksgiving holidays. The new Dean of Students at Albany State College was stationed there, to point out the colored waiting room. Two students who had been working with SNCC, Bertha Gober of Atlanta, and Blanton Hall of Athens, went into the white waiting room, and were arrested. Rather than be freed on bond, they stayed in jail for several days. By the time they came out, the Negro community was moving into action behind the Albany Movement. A mass meeting was called, the first such meeting in the history of Albany. Sherrod describes the excitement of that evening:

  The church was packed before eight o’clock. People were everywhere, in the aisles, sitting and standing in the choir stands, hanging over the railing of the balcony, sitting in trees outside the windows.… When the last speaker among the students, Bertha Gober, had finished, there was nothing left to say. Tears filled the eyes of hard, grown men who had seen with their own eyes merciless atrocities committed…. Bertha told of spending Thanksgiving in jail.… And when we rose to sing “We Shall Overcome,” nobody could imagine what kept the church on four corners…. I threw my head back and closed my eyes as I sang with my whole body. I remembered walking dusty roads for weeks without food. I remembered staying up all night for two and three nights in succession writing and cutting stencils and mimeographing and wondering—How long?

  Bertha Gober and Blanton Hall were hardly out of jail when they received letters from the dean of Albany State College expelling them. Students marched to the president’s house to protest the expulsion, and many were fired from jobs they held on campus. But things were moving now.

  On December 10, 1961, came the fourth contest between the resoluteness of the Albany police in violating the ICC ruling, and the determination of the national government in enforcing it. It was a first-round knockout. The national government never even came out of its corner. That day, four SNCC people rode from Atlanta to Albany on a Central of Georgia passenger train: Jim Forman, Executive Secretary; Norma Collins, Office Manager; Bob Zellner, of SNCC’s white student project; and Lenore Taitt, a volunteer worker. With them were: Bernard Lee, of SCLC; Per Laursen, a writer from Denmark; Tom Hayden, of Students for a Democratic Society, and his wife, Sandra; and Joan Browning, a white girl from Georgia. They sat integrated, ignored a conductor’s request that they move, and went on to Albany. Over a hundred Negroes gathered at the railway terminal to meet them. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, with little traffic, and few whites nearby. The police, led by Chief Pritchett, were waiting for them. The group came off the train, went into the white waiting room briefly, came out again, began to get into cars to take them downtown, and at that point were placed under arrest by Pritchett, who called out, “I told you to get off the street. You are all under arrest.” In addition to the group from Atlanta, Bertha Gober was pulled out of the crowd and arrested, as were Charles Jones and an Albany State student named Willie Mae Jones. All were hustled off in a paddy wagon, charged with obstructing traffic, disorderly conduct, and failure to obey an officer, with the bond set at $200.

  A witness of the scene, editor of a Negro newspaper in Albany named A. C. Searles, commented on the arrest: “There was no traffic, no disturbance, no one moving. The students had made the trip to Albany desegregated without incident. Things had gone so smoothly I think it infuriated the chief. There was a good feeling in the group. They wanted to stop this.” (Months later, the Mayor of Albany told me he thought that arrest was “a mistake.”)

  With the eleven young people in jail, the Albany Movement began a series of actions which soon brought the city to national attention. On the day that the eleven were to be tried in city court, over four hundred high school and college students marched downtown to protest, singing as they went by the courthouse. The police, in cars with loudspeakers, ordered them to disperse, but they continued on their way. Police then herded them into an alley alongside City Hall, where they stood for two hours in a driving rain before being booked, one by one. On Wednesday morning, Slater King was arrested as he and seventy others knelt in prayer in front of the City Hall. That same evening, three hundred people ma
rching to City Hall were arrested for parading without a permit. Chief Pritchett told reporters: “We can’t tolerate the NAACP or the SNCC or any other nigger organization to take over this town with mass demonstrations.”

  Two nights later, Martin Luther King, Jr., invited by the Executive Committee of the Albany Movement, arrived from Atlanta with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and told 1000 people packed into the Shiloh Baptist Church: “Don’t stop now. Keep moving. Don’t get weary. We will wear them down with our capacity to suffer.” The following evening, King and Dr. Anderson (President of the Albany Movement) led 257 hymn-singing men, women, and youngsters toward the county courthouse, and were arrested by Chief Pritchett for parading without a permit. The total arrested now stood at 737, and with the Albany jails packed tight, prisoners were farmed out to jails in nearby counties. Never in the nation’s history had so many people been imprisoned in one city for exercising the right of protest.

  With the Albany crisis now in the front pages of newspapers all over the country, negotiations between the Albany Movement and city officials got under way. Verbal agreement was reached on desegregation in train and bus facilities, the release of all the demonstrators on the signing of property bonds, with the exception of the original Freedom Riders who had come down on the train from Atlanta; the calling off of further demonstrations; and a promise by the city to hear Negro complaints at the first business meeting of the new city commission. A young fellow in the SNCC office, just out of jail, asked what he thought of the agreement, smiled and said: “You curse first, then I will.” It seemed a pitifully small payment for weeks of protest, for centuries of waiting.

  I arrived in Albany as people were coming out of jail. They spoke of their experiences. Charles Sherrod had been taken with a group of demonstrators to “Terrible” Terrell County, escorted there by Sheriff Zeke Matthews, who announced: “There’ll be no damn singin’ and no damn prayin’ in my jail.” The sheriff added, “I don’t want to hear nothin’ about freedom!” Sherrod spoke up: “We may be in jail, but we’re still human beings and still Christians.” Sheriff Matthews hit him in the face, then took him into his office, where another officer hit him, cracking his lip. His mouth was full of blood. Then he was put in a cell by himself.