In Struggle

SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, With a New Introduction and Epilogue by the Author

Clayborne Carson

• Editorial: Harvard University Press
• Año: 1995
• ISBN:
  9780674253308
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet evenhanded book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white oppression.At its birth, SNCC was composed of black college students who shared an ideology of moral radicalism. This ideology, with its emphasis on nonviolence, challenged Southern segregation. SNCC students were the earliest civil rights fighters of the Second Reconstruction. They conducted sit-ins at lunch counters, spearheaded the freedom rides, and organized voter registration, which shook white complacency and awakened black political consciousness. In the process, Clayborne Carson shows, SNCC changed from a group that endorsed white middle-class values to one that questioned the basic assumptions of liberal ideology and raised the fist for black power. Indeed, SNCC's radical and penetrating analysis of the American power structure reached beyond the black community to help spark wider social protests of the 1960s, such as the anti–Vietnam War movement.Carson's history of SNCC goes behind the scene to determine why the group's ideological evolution was accompanied by bitter power struggles within the organization. Using interviews, transcripts of meetings, unpublished position papers, and recently released FBI documents, he reveals how a radical group is subject to enormous, often divisive pressures as it fights the difficult battle for social change.

PART ONE
COMING TOGETHER

1. SIT-INS

Late Monday afternoon, February 1, 1960, at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, four black college students ignited one of the largest of all Afro-American protest movements. The initial spark of the movement was a simple, impulsive act of defiance, one that required no special skills or resources. Planned the previous night, the “sit-in”—as it would be called—was not the product of radical intellectual ferment. Rather, it grew out of “bull sessions” involving college freshmen who were, in most respects, typical southern black students of the time, politically unsophisticated and socially conventional. The four students would be influenced by the decade of social struggle that unexpectedly followed their protest far more than they affected the course of that struggle. Nonetheless, the initial sit-in contained the seeds of radicalism that would flower in SNCC, the principal organization to emerge from the black student sit-ins of 1960.

The four students, like many other young activists of the 1960s, acted on the basis of suppressed resentments that preceded the development of an ideological rationale for protest. Without an organizational structure and without a coherent set of ideas to guide their actions, the Greensboro students were determined to break with the past. Only after their isolated protest had provided the stimulus for an intense, sometimes chaotic process of political education within the southern struggle would the four students become fully aware of the significance of what they had done. In the beginning, they only spoke of a modest desire: to drink a cup of coffee, sitting down.

The initial sit-in was a tentative challenge to Jim Crow. Joseph McNeil and Izell Blair, roommates at the predominantly black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, along with two other students, Franklin McCain and David Richmond, purchased a few items at Greensboro’s downtown F. W. Woolworth store and then sat down at the lunch counter reserved by custom for whites. They asked to be served but were refused. When a waitress asked them to leave, they explained politely that as they had bought items in other sections of the store, they should be allowed to sit on the stools rather than stand. They received no sympathy from a black woman who worked behind the counter. “You are stupid, ignorant!” she chastised them. “You’re dumb! That’s why we can’t get anywhere today. You know you are supposed to eat at the other end.” Although refused service, the four students became more confident as they observed the lack of forceful opposition by the store employees. When informed that the four students were continuing to sit at the lunch counter, the store manager merely ordered his employees to ignore them. The students had expected to be arrested, but instead they discovered a tactic that not only expressed their long-suppressed anger but also apparently did not provoke severe retaliation from whites. “Now it came to me all of a sudden,” McCain remembered thinking. “Maybe they can’t do anything to us. Maybe we can keep it up.”¹

They did. The four remained on the stools for almost an hour, until the store closed. After returning to campus, they contacted the student body president and recruited more students for another sit-in. The following morning a group of thirty students returned to the store and occupied the lunch counter. There were no confrontations, but the second sit-in, which lasted about two hours, attracted the attention of local reporters. A national news service carried an account of the protest, mentioning a group of “well-dressed Negro college students” who ended their sit-in with a prayer. On Wednesday morning a still larger group of students occupied most of the sixty-six seats at the lunch counter. In the afternoon three white students from Greensboro College joined them. Officials at North Carolina A. & T. resisted attempts by state officials to force them to restrict the activities of their students and by Thursday morning hundreds of black students had been drawn into the expanding protest. Many white youths had also gathered in the downtown section of Greensboro, cursing and threatening the black protesters and attempting to hold seats for white patrons. By the end of the week, after continued disruption of business activities and a telephoned bomb threat, the store manager decided to close the store. The mayor of Greensboro then called upon black students and business leaders to forgo temporarily “individual rights and financial interests” while city officials sought “a just and honorable resolution” of the controversy.² The demonstrators, by this time organized as the Students’ Executive Committee for Justice, agreed to halt the protests for two weeks to give local leaders a chance to find a solution.

Although the Greensboro sit-ins were discontinued temporarily, students at nearby black colleges followed news accounts of the protest and quickly organized sit-ins. Over the weekend in which a sit-in moratorium was being arranged in Greensboro, more than one hundred students met in Winston-Salem to plan a protest of their own. Before they could act, however, Carl Matthews, a black college graduate working in Winston-Salem, conducted that city’s first sit-in on Monday, February 8. Later in the afternoon Matthews was joined by about twenty-five other blacks, many of them students at Winston-Salem Teachers College. The same day, seventeen students from North Carolina College and four from Duke University staged a sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Durham. On Wednesday morning students in Raleigh decided to act after hearing a radio report assuring listeners that there would be no protests by college students in that locality. Two days later, when black students demonstrating at a suburban shopping center near Raleigh were arrested for trespassing, other students rushed to the scene to be arrested. In all, forty-one students were arrested and charged with trespassing in the first mass arrests of the sit-in movement. By the end of the week, more sit-ins had occurred in the North Carolina communities of Charlotte, Fayetteville, High Point, Elizabeth City, and Concord. On February 10, Hampton, Virginia, became the first community outside North Carolina to experience student sit-ins. Protests occurred soon afterward in the Virginia cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth. By the end of February, Nashville, Chattanooga, Richmond, Baltimore, Montgomery, and Lexington were among over thirty communities in seven states to experience sit-ins. The protests reached the remaining southern states by mid-April. By that time, according to one study, the movement had attracted about fifty thousand participants.³

Although the initial Greensboro sit-in had been peaceful and polite, the student protests gradually became more assertive, even boisterous. As demonstrations attracted increasing crowds of participants and onlookers, they came to be perceived as threats to social order. Most sit-ins by black college students were characterized by strict discipline among the protesters, but several outbreaks of violence occurred when protests involved high school students. The first serious instance of violence took place on February 16 in Portsmouth, Virginia, where hundreds of black and white high school students fought each other after a sit-in. More extensive violence, involving over a thousand people, took place in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after a demonstration on February 23. Over thirty persons, mostly whites, were arrested and police used fire hoses to end the two days of rioting.

Even in places where sit-ins were not accompanied by violence, there was an underlying current of hostility and fear among both blacks and whites. White onlookers verbally assaulted black protesters and at times only the rapid arrest of protesters by police prevented violent physical assaults. The protesters themselves, though usually peaceful, were engaging in a form of “passively aggressive behavior—stepping over the line and waiting, rather than exhibiting overtly hostile or revolutionary behavior.”⁴ Nonviolent tactics, particularly when accompanied by a rationale based on Christian principles, offered black students an appealing combination of rewards: a sense of moral superiority, an emotional release through militancy, and a possibility of achieving desegregation. The delicate balance between militancy and restraint produced tensions often released through humor. Popular jokes ridiculed the pretensions of white segregationalists:⁵

A Negro goes into a restaurant and asks for “pigs’ feet.” “Don’t serve them,” the counterman answers. “Chitterlings then.” “Don’t serve them.” “Pig’s necks?” “Don’t serve them.” “Pig’s ears?” “Don’t serve them.” “White man,” the Negro says, “you just ain’t ready for integration.”

A waitress told a pair of sit-inners, “I’m sorry but we don’t serve Negroes here.” “Oh, we don’t eat them either,” came the reply.

The sit-ins brought to the surface interracial tensions that had long been suppressed in the South, and they stimulated a process of self-realization among blacks that would continue through the decade. The goal of lunch counter desegregation certainly did not exhaust the range of black aspirations; nor did the sit-in tactic fully express the dormant emotions of southern blacks. But, as many other groups had discovered both in the United States and elsewhere, nonviolent direct action was a starting point for the emergence of a new political consciousness among oppressed people. For southern black students in the spring of 1960, it offered an almost irresistible model for social action.

Never again during the decade would the proportion of students active in protest equal the level reached at southern black colleges during the period from February to June 1960. On many campuses support for the sit-ins was almost unanimous. Over 90 percent of the students at North Carolina A. & T. and three nearby colleges took part in demonstrations or aided the movement by boycotting or picketing segregated stores. Student protesters commented that it was “like a fever. Everyone wanted to go. We were so happy.”⁶

The emergence of a protest movement among black college students surprised many observers who were aware of the restrictive rules and conformist atmosphere that existed at southern black institutions. The sit-ins occurred only a few years after the publication of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie, which painted black college students as politically apathetic, imbued with white middle-class values, and determined to achieve material success. Other observers saw the sit-in movement not as a signal for a basic shift in these attitudes and values but as an attempt to overcome the barriers that still separated black students from their white middle-class counterparts, through tactics that were in accord with prevailing American values. Thus, rather than representing a rejection of the mainstream of American life, the sit-ins were viewed as an outgrowth of racial assimilation and as an expression of the desire for further assimilation. Ruth Searles and J. Allen Williams made the point that black students had selected nonviolent protest “as an acceptable means of demonstrating their anger at barriers to first-class citizenship. Far from being alienated, the students appear to be committed to the society and its middle class leaders.”⁷

This interpretation was reinforced by an extensive survey of black students carried out in the spring of 1962. John Orbell found that protest participation was strongly influenced by situational factors, such as the relative quality and type of school, the degree of urbanization, and the proportion of blacks in the college community. Students attending high-quality private black schools in urban settings with a low proportion of black residents were most likely to take part in demonstrations. Orbell concluded that these situational factors provided greater opportunities for interracial communication, and the resulting “higher awareness of the wider society” made students “more prone to develop the particular set of attitudes and perceptions that lead to protest.” In short, most scholars who studied black protest during the early 1960s insisted that continued assimilation was the only realistic aspiration for blacks. “The Negro American judges his living standards, his opportunities, indeed, even judges himself,” affirmed social psychologist Thomas F. Pettigrew, “in the only cultural terms he knows—those of the United States and its ‘people of plenty.’”⁸

The upsurge of black militancy during the mid-1960s would undermine such assumptions. Moreover, the movement itself would become a source of new experiences and ideas that would alter the attitudes of black students. In the spring of 1960, however, few students would have disagreed with the view that they were motivated by conventional American values. In statements to reporters, student leaders often stressed the limited nature of their goals. “All I want is to come in and place my order and be served and leave a tip if I feel like it,” Charles Jones asserted after leading Charlotte students in a sit-in. Like most student protesters, Jones was imbued with the anti-communist attitudes of the Cold War era. He had recently testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) about his experience in 1959 as a delegate to the Seventh World Youth Festival in Vienna, which he attended to give foreign youths “a clearer understanding of the American way of doing things and show them that the racial situation wasn’t as black as other delegations had painted it.”⁹ Similarly, Diane Nash, a student leader in Nashville, explicitly connected the student movement with the struggle against communism and added that if blacks were given equal educational opportunities in the South, “maybe some day a Negro will invent one of our missiles.”¹⁰

Even as the scope of protest expanded to include targets other than lunch counters, students continued to justify their actions by appealing to dominant political values. Thus, shortly before launching a protest, Atlanta University students cited “the overriding supremacy of the Federal Law” and asserted their willingness “to use every legal and non-violent means” available “to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great Democracy of ours.” During the summer, when representatives of the student movement appeared before the platform committee of the Democratic National Convention, they insisted that all Americans must “enjoy the full promise of our democratic heritage” in order to ensure that the nation fulfill “its responsibility to the free world.”¹¹

The students, who sincerely believed that the changes they demanded would benefit the nation, succeeded in presenting a positive image of their movement. The use of nonviolent tactics allowed black students to picture themselves as patient agents of progress pitted against obstinate, unreasoning whites. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked on March 16 whether the “Gandhi-like” protests of the students were “manifestations of moral courage,” he refused to endorse their sit-in tactics but nevertheless stated that he was “deeply sympathetic with the efforts of any group to enjoy the rights . . . guaranteed by the Constitution.” Even James Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader and a conservative white southerner, commented on the contrasting appearance of black students “in coats, white shirts, ties” and young white hecklers—“a ragtail rabble, slack-jawed, black jacketed, grinning fit to kill, and some of them . . . waving the proud and honored flag of the Southern states in the last war fought by gentlemen. Eheu!”¹²

The sit-ins, rather than emerging from radical intellectual ferment, reflected the students’ general acceptance of the direction of racial reform in the United States. Although the lunch counter protests and the social struggles that followed would ultimately stimulate revolutionary ferment, initially most student protesters aspired to middle-class status and did not basically object to American society or its dominant political institutions. They protested against the pace rather than the direction of change. Few student protesters in 1960 belonged to political or civil rights organizations; of those who did, the largest number were members of youth groups affiliated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Black nationalist groups, such as the Nation of Islam, had made few inroads into the South and almost none on black campuses prior to 1960. With the exception of a few demonstrations about cafeteria food and student regulations, no significant protest movement had taken place on black campuses since the 1920s.

Although the student sit-ins of 1960 marked the beginning of a reemergence of moribund Afro-American traditions of racial separatism and radicalism, they at first reflected the almost unchallenged dominance within Afro-American political life of leaders who concentrated on eliminating overt southern racism by portraying it as anachronistic and irrational, contrary to the American creed, and damaging to the interests of the nation. Highly publicized Supreme Court decisions, most notably Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, reinforced the domination of moderate civil rights leaders as did the Eisenhower administration’s attempts to back court orders with federal troops in such cases as the Little Rock crisis of 1957. The ascendancy of the moderates was also a result of the persecution during the 1950s of leftist black leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, and Benjamin Davis, as well as of the general suppression during that period of vigorous political dissent.

At a more basic level, the narrowing of the range of political alternatives available...