SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  As I approached the intersection I saw the police arrest Don Harris… (a Negro, football captain at the Fieldston School, graduate of Rutgers University, now with SNCC) Police then began to wade into the crowd of demonstrators with clubs, driving them back down the street with me, while someone in plain clothes stood at the intersection firing a pistol in the air…. Then the city marshal charged me from across the street and hit me a couple of times on the back and shoulders. … I then noticed another white SNCC worker, John Perdew, as the marshal attacked him. After beating Perdew up … he came after me and hit me twice on the head with a billyclub. … Then he said, “When I say run, you’d better run, you nigger-lovin’ son-of-a-bitch….” My head was streaming blood.… Don, John, and I were charged with “inciting an insurrection,” a capital offense.

  The following night, 150 Americus Negroes marched towards the city hall to protest the arrests, walking slowly in twos across a lot to avoid blocking- traffic. Police appeared, armed with guns, clubs, and cattle prods, and began bludgeoning anyone they could reach. Two sixteen-year-old boys and one sixty-seven-year-old man were knocked bleeding to the ground. James Williams, a young father of two children, who had not been in the demonstration but was simply walking nearby, was attacked by police, who clubbed him repeatedly on his head and kicked him, leaving him with a broken leg. Twenty girls, many of them eleven, twelve, and thirteen years old, were kept for weeks in the Leesburg stockade with nothing to sleep on but the floor, no mattresses or blankets or covering of any kind.

  A week later, thirty-five people were arrested when they went to pray at the police station. Among them was white CORE worker Zev Aelony, a veteran of the Freedom Walk, who was also charged with “inciting to insurrection.” For the next four months Aelony, Perdew, Harris, and Allen were kept in jail in Americus, with no bail permitted and a death penalty hanging over them. Finally, a three-judge federal court ruled unconstitutional the Georgia statute under which they were held, and they were released.

  While the four men were in the Americus jail, some of the young Negroes in Sumter County corresponded with them. One Americus girl wrote to Ralph Allen:

  White boy, only a fool

  Would leave his heaven

  on earth just to fight

  For undeserving Negroes.

  He replied, and their exchange suggests the poignant, troubled feelings of Negroes and whites as they abandon the mystique of race.

  I do not understand, Gloria. It’s no heaven on earth I left.… Depends on what you mean by heaven. If you mean a place where everyone has so much money they have no sensitivity—no love, no sympathy, and no hopes beyond their own narrow little worlds…. But to me the conceited, loud, self-centered All-American free white and twenty-one college boy stinks. I know, I was one. But something happened to make me human, something that I don’t yet understand.… There’s a poem by E. E. Cummings which reads:

  What of a much of a which of a wind

  Should give the truth to summer’s lie,

  Bloodies with dizzying tears fall down.

  Well, Gloria, that is what I hope we can do. I hope we can upset people enough to make them human….

  One last thing. I love four people: my mother, a girl in New York named———, another named———, and a minister named Charles Sherrod.———, ———, and Sherrod are all black. If I did not have my friends, I would be very much alone. And I don’t want to eat in anyone’s restaurant alone, to go to nobody’s movie alone, to swim in nobody’s pool alone. You dig?…

  Race, which should mean nothing more than the insignificant fact of physical difference, has been invested by history and circumstance, by accident and by design, with a thousand mysteries which we now, at this stage of history, must pull apart one by one. It is a delicate operation, in which mistakes are easily made, where there are no primers on behavior, where perhaps the only absolute requirements are honesty in seeking the truth, and an affection for those others who seek it too.

  While no one can point out the path, it may be possible to note some common mistakes. It is a mistake to think that one can forget completely about race, can pretend that the structure of artifice has not been erected and does not have to be dealt with in some way. It is also a mistake to think that one must not try, as often as possible, to forget about race. It is a mistake to ignore the fact of Negro sensitivity; it is also a mistake always to play up this sensitivity.

  It is a mistake for a white person to play at being black. Sam Shirah’s advice to other whites in the movement was: “You can’t be black, so don’t try.” It is easy to romanticize the Negro, simply because in this period of our history, he is carrying the torch of American idealism. But one should ponder the fact that the new integrated world will have unjust and power-hungry people of both races, that the problems of freedom and justice cross the color line. Our dilemma is that we must somehow build a raceless society with the tools of a race-conscious world.

  The key to a solution of the dilemma is contact—continued and massive contact among people of different races. Inside SNCC, people have been able to create marvelously warm friendships, because there is a magical social effect that comes from people living, working, sacrificing together. Friendships, and love affairs, have crossed race lines in SNCC. At least two interracial marriages have taken place among SNCC staff members: Chuck McDew married a white Sarah Lawrence girl; Bill Hansen married a Negro girl from Arkansas A & M College in Pine Bluff. (The Attorney General of Arkansas, where Mr. and Mrs. Hansen are now working in the movement, called their marriage “a deliberate, direct disservice to the white and colored people of our state.”)

  The complexity of it all is perhaps revealed in a brief exchange which took place at a SNCC meeting between James Baldwin and Ella Baker. Someone had asked Baldwin about the role of whites in the movement. He replied, “A white man is a white man only if he says he is—but you haven’t got to be white.” Then Ella Baker added, “The place of the Negro is not as a Negro, but as a human being.” And Baldwin said, “That’s right.”

  Later, Ella Baker returned to that idea and, noting Baldwin’s exhortation that whites coming into the movement should forget they’re white, said, “We too must forget we’re Negro.” Responding to what she detected as a rising mood of something akin to black nationalism among some SNCC workers, she said:

  I can understand that as we grow in our own strength and as we flex our muscles of leadership … we can begin to feel that the other fellow should come through us. But this is not the way to create a new world.… We need to penetrate the mystery of life and perfect the mastery of life, and the latter requires understanding that human beings are human beings.

  In November, 1963, the SNCC staff in Mississippi met in Greenville for three days of planning and discussion. There were some representatives there from CORE and SCLC; about forty of the forty-five people at the meeting were from SNCC. On Friday, the first day of the session, before Bob Moses had arrived, there was a lively discussion on the role of whites in the movement, and several suggestions for restricting their role. On Saturday evening, with Bob Moses chairing, the discussion started at 7:00 P.M. and ended at midnight and, as it turned out, a good deal of this talk centered on the role of whites. The exchange was candid and open, and revealed in a remarkable way the complexity of feeling among those there (roughly thirty-five Negroes and seven whites) trying desperately to escape the bind of race, while at the same time tyrannized in varying degrees by it.

  The discussion was precipitated by two facts: The first was that proposals were being made at this meeting to bring one or two thousand students from other parts of the United States to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 in a determined effort to break through the shell of absolutist rule in the state. The second was that the coming of sizable numbers of white students to Mississippi to help with the Aaron Henry Freedom Ballot in October had led to much grumbling among Negro staff members that some of the white students had rushed into leadership positions,
they had come quickly, gotten publicity, and left.

  Four or five of the Negro staff members now urged that the role of whites be limited. For whites to talk to Mississippi Negroes about voter registration, they said, only reinforced the Southern Negro’s tendency to believe that whites were superior. Whites tended to take over leadership roles in the movement, thus preventing Southern Negroes from being trained to lead. Why didn’t whites just work in the white Southern community? One man noted that in Africa the new nations were training black Africans to take over all important government positions. Another told of meeting a Black Muslim in Atlanta who warned him that whites were taking over the movement. “I had this feeling inside. I felt what he said was true.”

  This was countered by other Negroes at the meeting. Lawrence Guyot said the coming of whites to Mississippi would have a powerful and a good effect, “a lot of Negroes in Mississippi meeting a lot of white people, on a human individual to human individual relationship.” Another said: “This thing has got to be a colorless movement. We all have these little feelings … we all have these little reactions—workin’ for the white man. Okay. Then we start thinking. And that’s why we’re here. This is a colorless group and it’s got to remain this way.” Mrs. Hamer said: “If we’re trying to break down this barrier of segregation, we can’t segregate ourselves.”

  Several of the people, young Negro fellows in the field, discussed their inner turmoil on the question. “I think one way and act another way. It’s not rational. But these feelings are there.” Another: “These feelings are inside the Negro. Now we may feel we are all brothers. But these feelings in the Negro community cannot be ignored…. We must take the reality out there, that race has corrupted America tremendously. We want to change that. But in the meantime, we cannot act out in society the way we act in here.”

  A teenage Negro from Itta Bena, Mississippi, disagreed: “I think that when the white people come down here into the Negro areas, I think this makes the people from Mississippi understand better, see? Makes people change their minds.”

  One interesting thing was that the whites and Negroes at the meeting were split among themselves about the role of whites in the movement, with complex divisions of opinion inside both groups.

  Bob Moses argued against the idea of judging on the basis of color who should come to Mississippi to work. “My feeling has been that the type of person you have is much more important than whether he’s white or not.” He was careful, he said, to bring to Mississippi the kind of white worker who could “break down the depersonalization of people,” those whom Negroes would learn to know as human beings in all their qualities, good and bad. He was concerned, he said, that the Mississippi movement should become integrated “because otherwise we’ll grow up and have a racist movement.”

  It was important, Moses said, to break down the idea that Negroes could get things completely by themselves. “And the only way you can break that down is to have white people working alongside of you, so then it changes the whole complexion of what you’re doing, so it isn’t any longer Negro fighting white, it’s a question of rational people against irrational people.”

  Yes, someone interjected, but shouldn’t there be something in American society where Negroes could lead? “I always thought,” Moses said quietly, “that the one thing we can do for the country that no one else can do is to be above the race issue.”

  It was midnight now. Everyone was very tired. The meeting was called to a close. Everyone stood up, and locked hands, every single person there in the circle, and sang, “We Shall Overcome,” stanza after stanza. I had heard the song sung many times at various meetings with deep passion, but never quite like this. I felt that people were gripping each other’s hands tighter than usual. When they came to the stanzas “We shall brothers be” and “Black and white together,” the voices somehow grew louder, more intense. People looked at one another. A few broke hands and applauded. The song came to an end, and the people at the meeting, talking in low voices, moved out together into the darkness.

  10. “I Want To Know: Which Side Is the Federal Government On?”

  When 200,000 people gathered in the historic March on Washington, D.C., in August, 1963, and listened near the huge Lincoln Memorial to the speeches made by leaders of the civil rights organizations, they did not know that one of those speeches, at the last moment, had been altered. It was the one delivered by John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His prepared text was objected to by Catholic Archbishop O’Boyle of Washington and other leaders of the March persuaded him to moderate it, though Lewis did this with misgivings. Even so, the speech was a study in controlled anger. But some of its most trenchant passages had been removed, just before it was delivered.

  Why was Lewis’ speech toned down? Why did national leaders of civil rights, of labor, of the church, put such coercive pressure on him, in a movement sacrificing so much for freedom? The exact cause is not certain—but one reasonable hypothesis is that John Lewis, instead of confining his attack to generalized and customary targets—the Southern racists and opponents of Civil Rights legislation—was lashing out immoderately at the federal government itself, charging the Kennedy Administration with failure to fulfill its responsibility to Negroes in the South.

  Until the moment Lewis began to speak, the Administration had been successful in directing the indignation of those 200,000 people at everyone but itself. The bitterness of Lewis’ attack must have startled his liberal listeners, who looked on President Kennedy as a friend of civil rights, who were impressed by the Administration’s sponsorship of a new Civil Rights Bill, and by its endorsement of the great March.

  But John Lewis, twenty-three years old, born on an Alabama farm, veteran of the Nashville sit-ins, beaten in the Freedom Rides, jailed twenty times, and now national chairman of SNCC, represented a point of view rarely heard in Washington. He was speaking that day for the SNCC people on the front lines in Mississippi, Alabama, and Southwest Georgia, for the Negroes of the Black Belt, for people who had endured the unendurable and had been left on their own by the national government. John Lewis knew that while the President and the Attorney General spoke out on civil rights in Washington, D.C., their voices were scarcely whispers in the towns and hamlets of the Deep South; that while Negroes were shot and beaten in Mississippi and Alabama, the federal government scrupulously maintained a policy of minimum interference.

  From the time the civil rights movement became a revolt, in the spring of 1960, SNCC has been the most persistent critic of national policy on civil rights. There are two reasons for this.

  One is that, more than any other civil rights group, SNCC works deep in the Black Belt, in outlaw territory, in a kind of no man’s land where the most terrible attacks on human dignity take place while the rest of the nation looks elsewhere. Only when such attacks reach a crescendo and receive national publicity, as in the prolonged Birmingham crisis of 1963, do the public and the government take notice; when the crisis is over the attention recedes, and five million Negroes are left alone again, every hour of every day. And when this happens, the SNCC workers remain with them.

  The second reason for SNCC’s alienation from the Washington establishment is that SNCC holds a view of federal constitutional authority which is different from that of the Department of Justice. The legal reasoning of SNCC is as follows: The United States Constitution says that Americans have the right to speak freely, to distribute literature, to assemble peacefully, to petition the government for a redress of grievances (First Amendment), and that no state or local official may deprive anyone of these rights (Fourteenth Amendment), or subject any person to discrimination or abuse because of his color. These constitutional provisions are “the supreme law of the land” (Article VI). The President of the United States, according to Article II of the Constitution, has the responsibility to see “that the laws be faithfully executed.” But on countless occasions these past few years, state and local officials have
violated the constitutional rights of Negroes and whites in the Deep South, and the Executive Branch of the government has not taken any effective action to stop this. The President of the United States, then, and specifically the Department of Justice, which is the law enforcement arm of the Administration, have not been fulfilling their responsibilities under the Constitution.

  Though SNCC’s interpretation of the powers of the government is simple and blunt, it is supported by some of the leading experts on constitutional law in the nation. There is little dispute on the facts. In literally thousands of instances these past few years, Southern policemen and local officials have trampled on the Constitution with no interference, as if they were a law unto themselves, as if they were not in the United States, as if the Constitution did not apply to them, as if the power of the federal government was non-existent. They have done this openly, in many cases under the eyes of federal officials, and have remained untouched by the law.

  This book is filled with the details of such instances: the violence in McComb; the murder of Herbert Lee; the beating after beating, cruelty upon cruelty, in Hinds County jail, in Winona jail, in Parchman jail; the murders and attempted murders throughout the state of Mississippi; the use of electric prods on helpless prisoners by sheriffs and deputy sheriffs in various places; the caning of C. B. King; the kicking and beating of the pregnant Mrs. Slater King; the beating of Bill Hansen; the shooting of Charlie Ware; the breaking of James Williams’ leg; the wave of shootings and bombings in Southwest Georgia; the clubbing of women and children in Danville; the jailing under the most unbearable conditions of women and old people and small children. And beyond this, the putting into jail of thousands of innocent people throughout the South who had done nothing but speak out peacefully to air their grievances. In fact, these people were only trying to accomplish by themselves what the national government had failed to do for them: to establish the rule of the Constitution in the Deep South.