Like Sherrod, most of the students attending the Shaw conference were surprisingly unfamiliar with the underlying philosophy of nonviolence, even though they were using nonviolence as a tactic and wound up incorporating the word “nonviolent” into their organization’s name. The nonviolent challenges to white supremacy they had already mounted were influenced more by the example of their fellow students than by any understanding of, much less commitment to, nonviolence as a way of life. They saw nonviolent direct actions like those in Nashville and Greensboro as demonstrations of effective ways to take on segregation and white supremacy.
Julian Bond, for example, was a Morehouse College student when he took part in the sit-ins and picket lines in Atlanta, and he does not remember receiving any kind of formal training for them. He and other students were just responding to headlines and images of the Greensboro sit-ins that had appeared in their city’s black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World. One afternoon a few days after the Greensboro sit-ins, at a student hangout, Lonnie King showed him a headline in the Daily World reading, “Greensboro Students Sit-In for Third Day.” Years later, Bond still remembered the moment clearly. “And Lonnie said to me, ‘Why don’t we do this here?’” The two of them and another student, Joe Pierce, began organizing what became the Atlanta student movement. Their “nonviolent” approach to participating in protests did not have great philosophical depth: “It was, ‘if somebody hits you, don’t hit back,’” recalls Bond. “You said, ‘okay I’ll do that,’ and that was it.” Or if a person could not accept that discipline, he or she could decide, “then I won’t be on the picket line.”
When it came to deciding whether or not to participate in protest, most sit-in participants could see enough of what nonviolence was to reach the same conclusions as Bond and the Atlanta students. And slowly they made their way toward deeper understanding and training. The Atlanta sit-ins began on March 15, 1960, and not until more than a year later—April 1961—was the first nonviolent workshop held at the Spelman College YWCA. In 1962, at Morehouse College, Julian enrolled in a social philosophy class, taught by Martin Luther King Jr. and Atlanta NAACP president Samuel W. Williams, that included considerable discussion of nonviolence. Only seven other students were enrolled.
Although in the beginning the movement was largely made up of college students, it quickly attracted a wider spectrum of young people. In Birmingham, Alabama, Annie Pearl Avery—another one of SNCC’s legendary figures—made her way into the movement from a tougher life than that usually found on a college campus. She brought both a knife and a gun to her first Birmingham protest. Her godmother, who was also participating in the protest, told Avery that she couldn’t have the weapons with her. So, says Avery,
I took the gun home. I came back and told [my godmother], “I still have this knife. I’ve got to take something.” “No,” she said, and took my knife… . I was just hoping that nobody would get me—that’s all! I didn’t know how I would react. I was hoping that I would be able to restrain myself, but I wanted protection, just in case I couldn’t.
Her attitude was not changed by her godmother’s confiscation of her weapons. On another occasion Annie Pearl was arrested in Danville, Virginia, and placed in solitary confinement. “One night a policeman came into my cell. Thinking he wanted to mess with me, I took off my shoe and beat him on the head until he left.”
Whether one had doubts about nonviolence, as Annie Pearl Avery did, or believed in it fully, as did Diane Nash, who was willing to have her child born in prison, commitment to the movement transcended commitment to any particular tactic. Observes Ivanhoe Donaldson, who in 1962 became one of SNCC’s most effective field secretaries, “The civil rights movement was about civil rights, not about nonviolence. Nonviolence was a tool the movement used to create confrontation without hate, without force, without brutality. Yes, all the blood that was shed was ours, [but] we accepted that for the greater good—the mission—and that was not about nonviolence but about change. I didn’t go to Mississippi to celebrate nonviolence; I went down there to fight for the right to vote.”
Like many youthful activists becoming involved with civil rights struggle, Stokely Carmichael—the charismatic SNCC leader who eventually became controversial for his Black Power speech in 1966—came to nonviolence slowly and skeptically. At first, when sit-ins broke out during his senior year in high school, he dismissed them as “inconsequential and fleeting.” He was a New Yorker and thought of himself as hip, smart. He thought the best means for effecting change was organized, ideologically coherent struggle, not spontaneous outbursts—which, to him, was what the sit-ins seemed to be. However, the first time he saw students on television calmly sitting at lunch counters facing racist abuse and sometimes violent assault, “that made a believer out of me. Instantly.” In retrospect, Carmichael would come to view sit-ins as “an apprenticeship in struggle.”
Soon after entering Howard University in the fall of 1960, Carmichael joined the small group of students who had responded to the February Greensboro protests by forming the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), which was committed to the practice, though not the philosophical principle, of nonviolence. The nation’s capital, itself a southern city, had only begun to desegregate a few years earlier; the bordering states of Virginia and Maryland were still segregated. Despite the city’s distance from the Deep South, there was no shortage of work and struggle to engage NAG.
Their organization’s name notwithstanding, the Howard students who formed NAG were as skeptical of nonviolence as any of the attendees at the Shaw conference. “I remember my first reaction [to the idea of nonviolence],” says Courtland Cox, who joined NAG because it offered a way to directly fight segregation and white supremacy and not out of any philosophical commitment to nonviolence. “Appeal to a man’s heart? Might as well appeal to his liver; they’re both organs of the body.” However, says Cox, “The conditions of your existence did not have any reality to most whites. Nonviolence was the only way they could understand the movement and not be totally afraid.”
Whatever their opinions about nonviolence, these student activists shared one thing: they were truly the luminaries of the rising generation of Afro-Americans, although they did not think of themselves in such terms. Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond, Lonnie King, Courtland Cox (who would later become SNCC program director), Herchelle Sullivan (a Spelman College student who after returning from study in France cochaired COAHR with Lonnie King), Henry “Hank” Thomas (who sat in alone in St. Augustine, Florida, and would become one of the original Freedom Riders in 1961), Charles Sherrod, Chuck McDew, Diane Nash (who led the Nashville movement), Bernice Johnson (a student leader in Albany, Georgia, and later founder of the renowned a cappella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock), sisters Dorie and Joyce Ladner, Colia Liddell (all three mentored by Medgar Evers in Mississippi and Joyce would briefly be president of Howard University)—these are just a few of the students who represented a prediction made by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth. It is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the masses away from the contamination and death of the Worst in their own and other races.”
The students who participated in sit-ins were, by and large, consciously or unconsciously, members of Du Bois’s talented tenth, the best and the brightest on their college campuses. Good grades and inquisitiveness had marked them for distinction even before they joined the protests; their intellectual and political energy was evident. They held offices in student government: Carmichael, for example, was a philosophy major but also sat on the Howard University student council. Jean Wheeler, one of the young women active in NAG who would later work with SNCC in Mississippi and Southwest Georgia, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Annette Jones White, who as an Albany State College student was one of the young leaders of the Albany Movement, had been voted most likely to succeed
when she graduated from Monroe High School in that city (and she was elected Miss Albany State College in 1961). Charles Jones, leader of the sit-in movement in Charlotte, North Carolina, was president of the student body at the Johnson C. Smith College. Marian Wright, another of the Atlanta movement’s student leaders, graduated from Spelman College as valedictorian of her class.
Given their promise as students, these young leaders might have found it difficult to rebel against the status quo. School administrators, moreover, sometimes put pressure on them and their fellow students to stop protesting. That they resisted is another important aspect of their characters. Inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, students at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, launched a sit-in movement a little over a month after the Greensboro protests began, much to the dismay of the school’s president, Felton Clark. During a school dance on March 27, 1960, the students were excitedly talking about the sit-ins they had planned for the following day. Clark interrupted their partying and told the students, “There will be no more discussion of protest, or no dance. You have one minute to decide!” Immediately, Dr. C. O. Simkins asked to speak. Simkins was a Shreveport dentist who had been important to the founding of SCLC in New Orleans, was an active supporter of the student sit-in movement, and was in Baton Rouge for the pending protest. Because of his prominence, he was given the microphone. He shouted, “You have one minute to decide! Do you want your dance or do you want your freedom?” The students began chanting: “We want our freedom! We want our freedom!”
These students had much to lose, and many were the first in their families to attend college. But students across the South bravely resisted pressure to conform. In Baton Rouge, the day after the dance, seven students sat in at the Kress department store lunch counter downtown and were arrested for disturbing the peace. There were more sit-ins and arrests the next day. And on March 30, three days after the dance, students walked out of their classes en masse and marched on the state capitol.
Throughout the South, young people were pushing back against the established order. Students resisted school authorities and their efforts to slow protests; they chafed at the restraints an older, more cautious civil rights leadership tried to impose. The generation gap would be a source of continuing tension within the movement throughout the 1960s. “I was nervous about being under the leadership of any adult,” recalled Lonnie King later. “I was a strong believer in there being an independent student coordinating committee, and I would have been suspicious of us being under Dr. King or anyone else.”
But sometimes people in authority responded to student militancy in unexpectedly supportive ways. Lonnie King experienced this at Morehouse College, which Martin Luther King Jr. had also attended and which was part of a consortium of six historically black institutions of higher education contiguous to one another (the others being Spelman College for Women, Morris Brown College, Clark College, Atlanta University, and the Interdenominational Theological Center, or ITC). “Not long after we began sitting-in,” he remembers, “the college presidents summoned Julian, myself, and others in the movement into the Council of College Presidents conference room”:
What these powerful men basically told us was, “Go back to class. Your parents did not send you here for protest. Get your education and change the world tomorrow.” Four of the presidents took this position, but Dr. Harry Richardson of ITC disagreed and said, “I believe that the students are right.” The room got quiet. You could hear—to use an old expression—a rat piss on cotton. Dr. Richardson went on to say, breaking with the other presidents and their desire for a gradual approach to change, “I am a Negro. I’m the president of a university. But I cannot go downtown to Rich’s [department store], buy something, then go into the Magnolia Tea Room there and buy something to eat. Something’s wrong with that!” Dr. Frank Cunningham, the president of Morris Brown, was sitting next to him, and he said, “I agree with Dr. Richardson.” All of a sudden the college presidents were split in front of the students.
This was unprecedented, not something Du Bois would have anticipated in the development of his desired talented tenth, despite his own quarrels with Booker T. Washington’s leadership early in the century. But this meeting reveals an important aspect of the southern Freedom Movement of the 1960s: as much as it challenged white supremacy, it was also shaped by the challenges black people made to each other within the black community, challenges most often initiated by young people. Such defiance reflected just how rapidly and radically times were changing. Nonetheless, says Lonnie King, “I don’t know what it was in the ether that caused the southern black Negro student revolt.” They were certainly fed up with segregation and with the slow pace of change, but in addition, many of the college students were the children of World War II veterans—and that, Lonnie King thinks, might be part of the explanation: “My daddy was a World War II veteran; they changed the climate of the South.”
There were certainly sympathetic professors on historically black college and university (HBCU) campuses who supported student protesters, as Lonnie King’s anecdote vividly illustrates. But students often found themselves challenging the deference expected of them by the generally conservative school administrators. They soon discovered there were consequences. At Southern University in Baton Rouge, as well as at other HBCUs and high schools, students who participated in sit-ins were expelled. In Mississippi, Jackson State College president Jacob L. Reddix dissolved the student government because of civil rights protests.
The opposition of college authorities like Reddix to student protest was more complex than simple aversion to militant student activism. Almost certainly they had experienced far harsher encounters with white supremacy than most of their students, and in their guts many of them, like Richardson and Cunningham, were sympathetic to the students’ impatience. But they considered their primary mission and duty to be the protection of the institutions they headed—and all these institutions, whether state or private schools, were dependent on white patronage, through the allocation of tax money or through financial gifts from white benefactors. “I understood why adults favored gradualism,” says Lonnie King. “It was safe. But I felt young people had been waiting long enough and thought, let’s organize and bring [segregation] to an end.” Franklin McCain, one of the four students to begin the sit-ins in Greensboro, puts it a different way: “We had the confidence of a Mack truck.”
With rebellion against their elders and with their movement involvement, many students began thinking differently about themselves, discovering a strength they did not know they had. “Something happened to me as I got more and more involved in the Movement,” wrote Anne Moody, a Mississippian active with CORE in that state. “It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.” For Bernice Johnson in Albany, Georgia, “There was a clarity about everything. I knew where I was; I knew what I was doing… . I was where I was supposed to be. My life was being used for a purpose—fighting racism—and it lifted me up… . I was free and centered.” Like Moody and Johnson, the most committed of these student activists found that their involvement in protests had altered their view of the lives they were expected to lead. Indeed, some of them left school or put off attending college in order to work full time with SNCC or CORE.
The ranks of civil rights organizations swelled with these new student activists, and their commitment to the movement would soon take them into uncharted territory. In June 1961, Charles Sherrod became SNCC’s first paid field secretary, earning $9.64 a week after taxes. In less than a year, a handful of students, themselves also SNCC field secretaries, would plunge into the rural Black-Belt South, a wilderness where white supremacy had a tighter grip on black life than anywhere else in the country. CORE too was undergoing a similar process as young southern blacks entered its ranks and transformed the organization. In the violently antiblack terrain of the rural South, the idealism lodged in nonviolent protest at whites-only restauran
ts met the harsh realities of trying to stay alive in politically hostile and physically murderous counties or parishes. Working there finally settled the argument in SNCC between the advocates of massive nonviolent direct action that would take on every aspect of segregation and the advocates of a more narrowly focused effort to gain voting rights.
This question had sharply divided SNCC. The organization might have been destroyed by its fierce internal debate over this were it not for a suggestion from Ella Baker. Her experience as the NAACP’s director of branches in the 1940s and her recognition of the importance of the student sit-in movement had led to the creation of SNCC and had made her the most respected adult voice among the students. At the height of heated argument at the Highlander Folk School in Knoxville, Tennessee, she suggested that SNCC form two wings: a voter-registration wing and a direct-action wing. She knew that this distinction was largely meaningless; voter registration was a form of direct action, as students would soon discover. She also knew that there was a consensus among local black leaders in the South that voter registration was what was most needed, and that to do any sort of organizing would require working within the consensus that existed.
Baker’s pragmatic suggestion would also change the student activists’ views about the viability of nonviolence. The antiblack, antimovement violence they encountered in rural areas of the Black Belt was unlike anything they had ever experienced. Segregationists and white-supremacists targeted homes, families, and communities, not just picket lines or sit-in protesters. Collective punishment was the rule. Confronted with such indiscriminate terror, the students would have a much harder time practicing nonviolence—never mind subscribing to the demanding philosophy behind it. And they would find, too, that the question of armed self-defense was far more relevant than it had been in their previous activist experience.
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