SNCC- The New Abolitionists

by Howard Zinn

  We see, therefore, that experience itself has brought certain qualifications to the pure notion of “nonviolence”: that the search for justice must continue even if it draws violence against the seeker; that economic and other pressures may be more decisive than moral suasion to bring about social change; that SNCC cannot oppose the use of self-defense by other people whose lives are in danger; that the power of the national government needs to be used with vigor to clear the way for nonviolent demonstrative activity in the Deep South.

  Members of SNCC—and indeed of the whole civil rights movement—have faced in action that dilemma which confounds man in society: that he cannot always have both peace and justice. To insist on perfect tranquility with an absolute rejection of violence may mean surrendering the right to change an unjust social order. On the other hand, to seek justice at any cost may result in bloodshed so great that its evil overshadows everything else and splatters the goal beyond recognition. The problem is to weigh carefully the alternatives, so as to achieve the maximum of social progress with a minimum of pain. Society has been guilty of much quick and careless weighing in the past: on the one hand, it has conducted the most horrible of wars for goals that were dubious to begin with or were soon lost in the clamor of victory; on the other hand, it has permitted the most monstrous injustices which it might have ehminated with a bit of trouble.

  Every new situation brings a new weighing of alternatives. If the national government should not use its overwhelming power to bring the rule of the United States Constitution to Mississippi, and if unmitigated violence continues there against local Negroes and civil rights workers, it may take a new set of daring and imaginative tactics to deal with terror in the Black Belt.

  SNCC’s stress on nonviolence—even if couched in absolutist language which does not correspond with reality, and does not take into consideration the weighing process involved—is healthy. It is a reminder to a violent world that man has been too quick to reach for the sword in the past, that we have a devilish capacity to invent the noblest of reasons for mass slaughter. At the same time, SNCC’s insistence on the use of pressure—the willingness to depart in a small way from an absolutist position in order to make important changes in society—is a valuable counter to complacency.

  There is another issue, beyond the race question, which is illumined by the civil rights struggle: the problem of free expression in the United States. We have always assumed, because the First Amendment contains guarantees for freedom of speech and press and peaceful assembly, that these are an iron-bound fact of national life. But those who have subjected the Bill of Rights to severe test have often ended up in concentration camps or jails: the pacifists during World War I, the Japanese during World War II, the Jehovah’s Witnesses in small towns all over the country, the Communists during the Cold War. Radicals and extremists were so small a minority that they could be safely put away without any nationwide burst of outrage. The rest of the country remained free mainly because it remained silent, or, when it spoke, stayed within acceptable limits.

  Restrictions on free expression go beyond the closed societies of the Black Belt. The spread of civil rights protests all over the nation revealed that police forces everywhere stand as a permanent obstacle to the rights of petition and peaceful assembly. We are now learning that what is true in the South is also true, to a lesser extent, all over the country, that the guarantees of the Bill of Rights are often in the hands of the policeman, and that the national government offers the individual no effective protection against local abuse of the Constitution.

  We have learned also, in the past few years, a good deal about jails, judges, and justice. Not since Dorothea Dix investigated the jails of Massachusetts over a hundred years ago has there been such an opportunity to study penal conditions. With students, ministers, college professors, and distinguished society ladies taken off to prison in civil rights demonstrations, we may now listen, as we never listened to the pleas of ordinary, unknown prisoners. Thousands of involuntary inspectors have become aware suddenly that police brutality, jailhouse beatings, detention without hearing or trial, have been a permanent feature of our system of justice. Out of it all we may learn that jails are cruel and simplistic means of solving complex social problems.

  All of these people, through the civil rights demonstrations, have learned about bail bonds, trial procedures, and the absolute power of the judge over everyone in his courtroom. Danny Mitchell, a CORE worker in the South who continued his activity when he returned to Syracuse University, wrote to me in the fall of 1963:

  Yesterday, we went to court for the first session of our trial. I stood in the back of the courtroom and watched a tall, white-haired judge enter. He sat under a sign reading: “IN GOD WE TRUST.” My immediate reaction was that here was a man, educated in the law, living in a nice quiet section of town, who probably never walked through the Fifteenth Ward (the dismal swamp adjacent to the University). He, like so many others, lived in a Romance. And there he sat… playing God!

  It is also possible now to make a national issue over the fact that the rich get a different kind of justice than the poor; that for lack of $20 a man may stay in prison for months on some petty charge; that not only color, but also wealth, determines whether a man goes free or to jail.

  It was inevitable that at some point the civil rights movement, like any other militant American reform movement of modern times, would need to confront charges of Communism or exhortations to act cautiously in order to avoid charges of Communism. The direct accusations come in flagrant form from members of Southern officialdom who, like Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma, see the whole movement as a gigantic international Communist conspiracy. Or they come from middle-of-the-road Americans who are concerned about civil rights but worried lest these rights become a springboard for Communist activity. Sometimes they come from civil rights organizations themselves, whose leaders may scrupulously inspect their own and neighboring groups to make sure no Communists, or former Communists, or near-Communists, or suspected Communists, exist to provide targets for the racist enemy.

  The approach thus far shown by SNCC, though it is complex and varies from one person to another, seems to be that individuals within SNCC will be judged on the basis of their contribution to the movement, and not on their political ideas. Bob Moses, speaking at a SNCC conference in the fall of 1963, addressed himself to an article by Theodore White in Life, in which White, without citing evidence, referred accusingly to a “penetration” of SNCC “by unidentified elements.” Moses said:

  I think we have to, as an organization, come to the point where in policy and in public we take an absolute stand on the right of people to associate with whom they choose…. It seems to me that…we have to throw what little weight we have on the side of free association and on the side of autonomy within our group to pick and choose those people whom we will work with, on relevant criteria, and one of the criteria which is not relevant is their past political associations. And what we have to decide then is if the people who are genuinely concerned with what we are about to do … if we put our cards on the table and we discuss openly what it is that we’re about then I don’t see how it is that these people can somehow subvert what we’re doing.

  In January, 1963, a writer in the Manchester Guardian noted an attempt by Southern segregationists to get the House Committee on Un-American Activities to investigate SNCC. “Deviously and subtly,” he wrote, “the idea is being sown in the receptive minds of some senators, that there must be some Reds in so militant an organization.” The students themselves, he reported, “held a frank discussion of their political commitments during their rally in Nashville. They concluded that the organization had none, and that the Communists could make no use of it as long as they were true to their aims.”

  There is no evidence that there are indeed Communists in SNCC. The organization is rather a heterogeneous collection of young people with various ideas, many of them radical, but not tied to a political organizat
ion or a frozen dogma. Theirs is a healthy and independent radicalism. As Sherrod said, in one very candid discussion of the problem: “I’m going head-on into this stuff. I don’t care who the heck it is—if he’s willing to come down on the front lines and bring his body along with me to die—then he’s welcome!”

  In the course of that discussion, one SNCC worker said other organizations have criteria for exclusion, and one of them should be membership in the Communist Party. One or two other people agreed, saying it was a practical problem of survival of the organization. But most of the people in the discussion agreed with the SNCC worker who said: “I don’t feel that we as a minority group fighting for the right to freely speak and think can take such a position.”

  With the criterion of relevancy, perhaps the SNCC people will move far beyond race to a libertarian frontier which few reform movements in this country have approached. And that is to break down the idea of categorizing people, of depersonalizing them by reducing them to no more than members in a group. This requires a profound concern for every person to be treated as an individual, regardless of race, or nation, or whatever. For such arbitrary groupings can only approximate—and sometimes seriously distort—the qualities of a single human being.

  It was not the Negro revolt that brought poverty to national attention. The statistics on unemployment, the conditions in Appalachia, the cries of distress from here and there, the studies of Michael Harrington and Leon Keyserling—these had their own impact, and ordinarily would bring some moderate economic reform, for such is the American tradition. What the civil rights movement has done is to bring into question whether perhaps we need a fundamental restructuring of the economic system in the United States, a change beyond Fair Deals and New Deals and other temporary aids.

  Part of the impetus for radical thinking about economics comes simply from the fact that the reforms of the past have not affected the Negro’s position at the bottom of the economic barrel. He still gets one-half of the average white person’s wage throughout the country, and only one-third of what the white gets in the South. As poor as anyone else is, the Negro is always poorer. Hence there is a bitterness, an anger, that generates demands for more than mild reform. Frank Smith of SNCC talks about its helping to bring about “revolutionary” changes in society: “You know why we became SNCC? We were barefoot, hungry, dirty—and we were mad!”

  The Negro in the Deep South, battling for the right to vote and looking North, where his people can vote, and are still poor, begins to wonder: can we end the Negro’s poverty without some radical overhaul of the economy—without ending poverty for everyone? It is one thing, as Bayard Rustin has pointed out, to ask for a table in a cafeteria, or a seat on a bus; there are enough of those to go around. But North as well as South, when one asks for jobs, or decent homes, or new schools, it is not a matter of gaining access; there are not enough of those to go around. The only way the Negro can acquire a reasonable measure of these resources is for the entire nation to make them available for all deprived people—black and white. “Until there is a planned economy,” Rustin has told SNCC people, “these problems cannot be solved.”

  The paradox is blunt. This country is tremendously wealthy in its natural resources; it has more than enough of certain things (automobiles, highways, office buildings, speedboats, all the appurtenances of wealth) and not enough of other things (schools, hospitals, food, housing, medical care). The problem is not production, but rational organization and equitable distribution. And this seems to require national economic planning on the basis of public need rather than private profit. SNCC people at an economic conference in Washington on Thanksgiving weekend, 1963, applauded enthusiastically when AFL-CIO official Jack Conway spoke of “democratic central planning” and said that the expectations of America’s poor could not be met “without a profound reorganization of our politics, our government, and our economy.”

  Martin Luther King, Jr., in some of his lesser known sermons (as Staughton Lynd has brought to our attention), has been sharply critical of the American economic arrangement, of “our unswerving devotion to monopolistic capitalism.” King notes, as have so many of the younger civil rights leaders, the maldistribution of wealth in the United States:

  Our nation’s productive machinery constantly brings forth such an abundance of food that we must build larger barns and spend more than a million dollars daily to store our surplus…. What can we do? Again the answer is simple: We can store our surplus food free of charge in the shriveled stomachs of the millions of God’s children who go to bed hungry at night.

  The sit-ins stimulated, among other things, a rethinking about the sanctity of “private property”; the debate over the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Bill has called the issue to widespread attention. The implications go far beyond race, to a fundamental fact about the national economy: that the slogan “private property” has long disguised the fact that so-called private enterprises drastically affect the public interest, and the public therefore has a right to make certain demands upon them.

  A restaurant, the Negro revolt has reminded us, may be privately owned, but it is publicly used. It is private in one way, public in another. The Negro is not intruding on that aspect of it which is private—he is not demanding admission to ownership. He is insistent that in that aspect of it which is public he has certain fundamental rights.

  Does this not go also for the manufacture of vital goods—like drugs for instance, where the sanctity of “private” property has enabled manufacturers to make incredible profits (as the Kefauver Committee hearings showed a few years ago)—out of people’s desperate medical needs? Is television a private matter because private businesses own the television stations and advertise their products? Is the design of automobiles a purely private matter when the refusal of manufacturers to eliminate certain structural features contributes to the loss of thousands of lives a year?

  In other words, it is just possible that the civil rights movement may lead us to re-examine our concern for “private” property, and to redefine what is private and what is public.

  Early in 1964, a distinguished group of public figures (Gerard Piel, Linus Pauling, Norman Thomas, Robert Heilbroner, W. H. Ferry, and twenty-nine others) drew up a memorandum entitled The Triple Revolution, which they addressed to President Lyndon Johnson and to the nation. In it they wrote:

  The demand of the civil rights movement cannot be fulfilled within the present context of society.… There is an urgent need for a fundamental change in the mechanisms employed to insure consumer rights.… We urge, therefore, that society, through its appropriate legal and governmental institutions, undertake an unqualified commitment to provide every individual and every family with an adequate income as a matter of right.… The unqualified right to an income would take the place of the patchwork of welfare measures—from unemployment insurance to relief—designed to ensure that no citizen or resident of the U.S. actually starves.

  They were asking for democratic planning of the economy, for a guaranteed minimum income for every American. Public need, they said, should replace private profit as the major stimulus to production, as the chief determinant of what kinds of things society decided to create. At this point in American life the young militants of the Negro revolt are probably closest to pressing for such a program with the same kind of energy and imagination that have gone into the civil rights upsurge.

  Almost as soon as SNCC came into being, the first signs of an upheaval in the American college became apparent. Until the sit-in movement, college students in the United States were the silent generation, the unconcerned, the cynical, the ambition-ridden, the imbibers of middle-class pretense. With the formation of SNCC came the first break from this, small in the numbers immediately affected, but large in the psychological impact on others. In the beginning, it was a handful who left school. As Forman put it: “Sixteen cats in 1961 decided it would be good if a small group devoted itself full time to the movement.”
By 1963, hundreds of young people began to leave colleges in various parts of the country, for a summer, a semester, a year, or permanently, to work in the Deep South.

  These departures from the academic community are not only the result of a new-found commitment to a specific cause; they represent a revolt against the whole value-structure of American education today—a new, profound seeking for life’s meaning. A nineteen-year-old white student from California, ready to join SNCC in the South, wrote:

  A relatively short time ago I began to awake after at least an eighteen-year sleep…. I have said no to almost all of my past…. One influencing factor has been my reading…. Perhaps what profoundly influenced me, what made me make a decision … was the present Negro revolt. I could have so easily and tragically slipped through life and never really experienced life. I needed the Negro revolt to make me reflect, question, examine, probe a little deeper—in fact a great deal deeper… as the student or citizen begins to become conscious that he is immediately at odds with society instead of becoming a packaged good citizen.

  Certainly … the University is not much different than a giant marketplace of mediocrity, an extension of a corrupt, warped, illusion-ridden, over-commercial, superficial society, which categorizes in neat semester packages “knowledge”; whose basic purpose seems to be turning out students to be good citizens—dead, unconscious automatons in our hysterically consuming society. It gives pat answers where there is ambiguity, certainty where there is uncertainty…. I want to work in the South as this seems to be the most radical (to the core), crucial, and important place to begin to try and enlarge the freedom of humanity. The problem is a door open to me and cries out for me to come through.

  The young people who leave college to join the movement have not deserted education. In an important sense, they are getting the best education in the country today. Those students who stay in college, beleaguered by transcripts, grades, credits, and graduate record exams, are the ones whose education is limited. Once the student is out “in the field,” the contrast becomes even sharper. For a young person going through the intense learning experience of a direct clash with the entrenched social structure, to sit in a classroom seems pallid and unrewarding.