SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Howard Boone's Zinn
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of the new student movement:
… The ache of every man to touch his potential is the throb that beats out the truth of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. America was founded because men were seeking room to become…. We are again seeking that room.… We want to walk into the sun and through the front door. For three hundred and fifty years, the American Negro has been sent to the back door…. We grew weary….
Barry spoke directly to the charge made by ex-President Harry Truman during the sit-ins, that the student movement was somehow connected with communism. He said:
To label our goals, methods, and presuppositions “communistic” is to credit Communism with an attempt to remove tyranny and to create an atmosphere where genuine communication can occur. Communism seeks power, ignores people, and thrives on social conflict. We seek a community in which man can realize the full meaning of the self which demands open relationship with others.
In October of 1960, at a conference of several hundred delegates in Atlanta, SNCC was put on a permanent basis. It was not (and never has become) a membership organization. This left the adhesion of individuals to the group fluid and functional, based simply on who was carrying on activity. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee consisted of a delegate from each of sixteen Southern states and the District of Columbia, plus a few voting members and many observers from various national student and race relations organizations, such as CORE, SCLC, the YWCA, the National Student Association, the NAACP, and the Southern Conference Educational Fund.
Again, the purpose was to coordinate the student movement. But the movement, still with a quality of abandon, still spontaneous and unstructured, refused to be put into a bureaucratic box. The twig was bent, and the tree grew that way. For SNCC, even after it had a large staff, its own office, and money for long-distance phone calls, managed to maintain an autonomy in the field, an unpredictability of action, a lack of overall planning which brought exasperation to some of its most ardent supporters, bewilderment to outside observers, and bemusement to the students themselves.
Throughout the winter of 1960–1961, sit-ins continued, linked only vaguely by SNCC, but creating a warmth of commitment, a solidarity of purpose which spurred awareness of SNCC by students all over the South. They also sustained a vision—or perhaps, knowing SNCC, a set of various visions, which kept Marion Barry, Jane Stembridge, Julian Bond, Diane Nash, Charles Sherrod, Charles Jones, and others, going.
When ten students were arrested in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in February, 1961, the SNCC steering committee, meeting in Atlanta, made its boldest organizational decision up to that date. Four people, it was agreed, would go to Rock Hill to sit in, would be arrested, and would refuse bail, as the first ten students had done, in order to dramatize the injustice to the nation. The Rock Hill action was the start of the jail-no bail policy.
Sit-in veterans Charles Sherrod (Petersburg, Virginia), Charles Jones (Charlotte, North Carolina) and Diane Nash were to go. The fourth person was a relative novice in the movement, Spelman College student Ruby Doris Smith, who talked her older sister out of the trip so she could go instead. “I went home that night to explain to my mother. She couldn’t understand why I had to go away—why I had to go to Rock Hill.”
Ruby Doris and the others spent thirty days in prison, the first time anyone had served full sentences in the sit-in movement. “I read a lot there: The Ugly American, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Exodus, The Wall Between.… Every day at noon we sang ‘We Shall Overcome’….” The fellows had been put on a road gang: Tom Gaither of CORE, Charles Sherrod and Charles Jones of SNCC, and nine others. The captain of the guards took their textbooks away, saying: “This is a prison—not a damned school.” He turned out to be wrong.
“Jail-no bail” spread. In Atlanta, in February, 1961, eighty students from the Negro colleges went to jail and refused to come out. I knew some, but not all, of the participants from Spelman, where I taught history and political science. That fall, when a very bright student named Lana Taylor, fair-skinned, rather delicate looking, joined my course on Chinese Civilization, I learned she had been in jail. In early 1964 I came across a reminiscence of Jane Stembridge:
… the most honest moment—the one in which I saw the guts-type truth—stripped of anything but total fear and total courage… was one day during 1961 in Atlanta…. Hundreds went out that day and filled every lunch counter.… There was much humor—like A. D. King coordinating the whole damn tiling with a walkie-talkie… The moment: Lana Taylor from Spelman was sitting next to me. The manager walked up behind her, said something obscene, and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Get the hell out of here, nigger.” Lana was not going. I do not know whether she should have collapsed in nonviolent manner. She probably did not know. She put her hands under the counter and held. He was rough and strong. She just held and I looked down at that moment at her hands … brown, strained … every muscle holding. … All of a sudden he let go and left. I thought he knew he could not move that girl—ever….”
The sit-ins of 1960 were the beginning. They left not only excitement, but a taste of victory. The spring and summer of 1961 brought, for the youngsters in SNCC and for many others, an experience of a different kind: an ordeal by fire and club. These were the Freedom Rides.
Stokely Carmichael, tall, slim, brown-skinned, gives the impression he would stride cool and smiling through Hell, philosophizing all the way. Arriving in the Jackson, Mississippi, train terminal as a Freedom Rider in the spring of 1961 (he was twenty, and a student at Howard University) Stokely and a young woman Rider made their way past what seemed an endless mob of howling, cursing people who screamed and threw lighted cigarettes; then they went into the white waiting room, where they were arrested. They were part of that extraordinary group of Americans who, in the Freedom Rides of 1961, embarked on a dramatic attempt to expose and challenge segregation in interstate travel in the Deep South.
In Parchman jail, the state penitentiary, Stokely almost drove his captors crazy: when they decided to take away his mattress because he had been singing, he held tightly to it while they dragged it—and him—out of the cell, and they had to put wristbreakers on him to try to make him relinquish his grip; after six fellow Riders had been put in solitary confinement, he demanded the same treatment, and kept banging loudly on his cell door until his wish was granted. When, after 49 days, Stokely and the others left Parchman, the sheriff and his guards were somewhat relieved.
At the time of the Freedom Rides in the spring and summer of 1961, SNCC was one year old and still loosely put together; it had an office in Atlanta with two full-time workers who maintained sporadic communication with affiliated student movements all over the South. But the students who went on the Rides—most of them veterans of the sit-ins—came out of jail to become central figures in a stronger SNCC organization that would now take up forward positions in a no-man’s-land untouched since Reconstruction.
The sit-ins had begun a new phase of the Negro upsurge, in which students—matured overnight into social revolutionaries—started to play the leading role. These same students, in the brutal training ground of the Freedom Rides, became toughened, experienced. And in the course of it all, they somehow decided that the Deep, Deep South, out of which they had just barely escaped alive, was the place where they must go back to do their work.
To CORE should go most of the credit for the Freedom Rides. Formed in Chicago in 1942 to conduct nonviolent direct action against racial discrimination, CORE worked successfully in Chicago, in St. Louis, in New Jersey, to end segregation in restaurants and other public places. In 1947, CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, in order to follow up a Supreme Court decision outlawing discrimination in interstate travel, sponsored a Freedom Ride which they called a “Journey of Reconciliation.” Bayard Rustin, a Negro and a fiercely eloquent pacifist, and James Peck, white (he had startled his Harvard classmates years back by bringing a Negro date to the freshman dance), also a pacifist, were among sixteen Negro and white riders. They rode two buses through the upper South, with very little violence and only a few arrests, and established that most passengers and drivers would not go out of their