Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), United States political organization formed in 1960 by black college students dedicated to overturning segregation in the South and giving young blacks a stronger voice in the civil rights movement in the United States.

SNCC was organized to advance the “sit-in” movement, a protest technique that became prominent after February 1, 1960, when four young black men sat at a segregated “whites only” lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave when ordered to do so. This was one of many sit-ins, nonviolent protests against segregation in which protesters “sat” in segregated facilities. In the next two months, similar sit-ins occurred in 54 cities in nine states. Ella Baker, a longtime promoter of community-based civil rights activism in the South, called on the young protesters to gather for a conference to discuss ways to coordinate their efforts and broaden the agenda of the sit-ins to include fighting all forms of segregation. Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960, the students announced the formation of SNCC, a civil rights organization that would be led and staffed primarily by black students. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) encouraged the creation of the student organization, assuming that SNCC would organize itself as an arm of SCLC. The students, however, wanted their own voice and declared their independence from the beginning. Although composed of fewer than 200 college students, SNCC’s influence was widely felt because of its members’ courage in challenging segregation in the Deep South.

After the 1960 sit-in movement, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a New York-based civil rights organization, in the 1961 Freedom Rides. Thirteen people, seven of them black, initially set out to challenge segregated restrooms, restaurants, and waiting rooms at interstate bus facilities along a route extending from Washington, D.C., through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Along the way, some Freedom Riders left, and others joined. In Anniston, Alabama, some riders were beaten and one bus was set on fire by a white mob. Various Freedom Riders were also beaten by mobs in Montgomery, Alabama; subject to an all-night siege in a black Baptist church in Montgomery; arrested in Jackson, Mississippi; or imprisoned for more than a month at a Mississippi state penitentiary. Other Freedom Rides continued throughout the spring of 1961, with the U.S. Justice Department eventually sending federal marshals to protect the riders.

Starting in 1961, SNCC shifted its main efforts to organizing voter registration campaigns in heavily black, rural counties of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. SNCC and CORE made a strong voter registration drive in the Mississippi Delta, where SNCC added to its staff older local activists like Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been jailed and beaten by police in 1962 shortly after registering to vote. In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi’s racism. The project’s primary goal was to register black voters. An estimated 600 young people, many of them white college students, went to the South that summer to help the effort. SNCC organizers recruited teachers, clergy, artists, and lawyers to staff freedom schools and community centers in an effort to educate and mobilize black citizens. Black members of SNCC retained most of the leadership positions and directed projects that were based primarily in four of Mississippi’s congressional districts. Three civil rights activists who participated in the project—two whites and one black—were murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan near Philadelphia, Mississippi, in June of that year.

As an outgrowth of Freedom Summer, SNCC helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to provide an alternative to the official white-controlled state Democratic Party. When blacks were barred from Mississippi’s delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Hamer and other MFDP activists went to the convention to challenge the total control whites maintained over Mississippi’s Democratic Party. National Democratic Party officials offered blacks from Mississippi two convention seats, but the MFDP rejected the compromise offer and went home. Although unsuccessful, the MFDP challenge eventually resulted in more openness toward blacks and other minorities in the Democratic Party.

Throughout 1964 and 1965, SNCC organized voter registration efforts in and around Selma, Alabama. After protesters met with violent opposition in Selma in the spring of 1965, SNCC and SCLC led a march to the state capitol of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi) away. The march created support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in August. The act suspended (and amendments to the act later banned) the use of literacy or other voter qualification tests that had sometimes been used to keep blacks off of voting lists.

By 1965 tensions between SNCC and SCLC had increased. Many SNCC organizers felt they would often put in the hard work of planning and organizing protests and voter registration drives, only to have the charismatic King arrive later and receive much of the credit. SNCC leaders also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of nonviolent protest. Many young black civil rights activists criticized what they saw as SCLC’s willingness to compromise with whites, and argued that blacks needed to be more militant about their demands and fight back when confronted with violence. In addition, the civil rights movement up to that point focused on battling segregation and winning the right to vote for Southern blacks, but had largely ignored the economic difficulties of blacks in Northern cities.

In May 1966 a faction of SNCC committed to black separatism and headed by Stokely Carmichael took over the organization from John Lewis, who favored integration. SNCC then began to eject its white members. Carmichael soon issued a call for Black Power, a term used to describe a series of new tactics and goals, including an insistence on racial dignity and black self-reliance, and the use of violence as a legitimate means of self defense.

As Carmichael and his successor as chairman of SNCC, H. “Rap” Brown, became national symbols of black radicalism, SNCC became an even more controversial organization. Both were accused of instigating racial division and violence. Opposition became stronger in 1968 when the Black Panther Party—founded in Oakland, California, in 1966—emerged as the preeminent organization upholding Black Power. The Panthers advocated violence, if necessary, to achieve their goals and battled police in Chicago and Oakland. Several of the organization’s leaders were killed and others imprisoned for killing policemen.

SNCC and the Black Panthers cooperated on various levels in the late 1960s, organizing rallies and sharing offices in certain cities, but the relationship between the groups was often shaky, with SNCC members often disagreeing with the Black Panther’s advocacy of violent confrontation. Carmichael was expelled from SNCC in August 1968 over his support for guerrilla tactics and the use of violence in urban areas. He worked to organize Black Panther chapters during the next year, but later dropped out of that organization. In the summer of 1969, Brown changed SNCC’s name to the Student National Coordinating Committee, indicating that the group would retaliate violently if forced to do so. However, Brown’s mounting legal problems left him with little time to devote to the group and in 1970 he went into hiding after being charged with arson, inciting a riot, and transporting weapons across state lines. The organization became virtually defunct. Brown was wounded in a shoot-out with New York City police in 1971 while holding up a tavern, convicted and sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison in 1973, and paroled in 1976.

Several of SNCC’s early leaders went on to gain national prominence, including John Lewis, a U.S. congressman from Georgia; Marion Barry, mayor of Washington, D.C.; and Julian Bond, a national spokesman on civil rights issues and state senator in Georgia.