What Was SNCC?

It’s an important, neglected question. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was the sharp edge of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. My friend Professor Martin Oppenheimer provides a compact history. SNCC leaders included former Congressman John Lewis, Julian Bond, and Stokely Carmichael.

In popular media, civil rights agitation is reduced to a series of stark, heroic, moral choices. In point of fact, civil rights activists were operators. They schemed about how to engage U.S. politics in pursuit of limited, positive objectives. This was politics rising from the street.

I’ve said some nasty things about Stokely. His role was decisively destructive on the Left. I’ll get to that in a second. But the book makes clear that he put himself into a lot of very dangerous places. Oppenheimer reports that something like 200 civil rights workers, people engaged in voter registration and peaceful protest, were murdered. Black churches were bombed. The terrorism of Reconstruction following the Civil War, one hundred years earlier, continued. It’s starting to loom over us again today.

Cutting right to the chase, SNCC began as an integrated organization heavily weighted with college students, in contrast to the preacher-dominated Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Martin Luther King Jr. Under pressure from vicious attacks by Southern segregationists and police throughout the country, internal racial tensions bubbled up.

The apparent infeasibility of peaceful revolution, as John F. Kennedy once said, made violent revolution seem the only logical alternative. SNCC evolved into a revolutionary organization and under the leadership of Carmichael, assumed a black nationalist identity, both of which just increased its political isolation.

Simply put, there is no revolution or socialism without the working class, and there is no revolutionary working class without white folks. If you can’t fix that, or worse, if you explicitly reject it as a basic strategic tenet, you’re not going to make any revolution. In fact, you’re not going anywhere. How to solve this problem? Damned if I know. If I did, you would have heard about it by now.

SNCC was a generation before me, so the gaps that this book fills are edifying. I didn’t know, for instance, that H. Rap Brown was a SNCC leader, not just a street corner demagogue. My only recollection from that era was his fame derived from urging an audience to “get you some guns,” a good example of how popular media distort radical personalities.

The employment of armed self-defense in the civil rights era is a fascinating story. The most famous angle was the role of “Deacons for Defense” and others in defending civil rights organizing in the south from mobs of homicidal racists. At a later date SNCC went there too. SNCC activist Marion Barry, eventually mayor of Washington D.C., used to pack heat.

Of course this evolved from practical necessity to a performative fetish with the Black Panther Party. Some of these performances became wild gun battles with black nationalists or police. The Panthers were not opposed to working with white radicals. In fact, they tried to cultivate them. But their grip on class politics was weak. I recall a story in their paper, which I followed avidly, when auto workers were busting out a big strike. The headline was “General Motors Corporation Must Be Destroyed.” Unclear on the concept, I thought at the time and ever since.

In considering reasons for the collapse of SNCC, I have a different take. I wasn't there. It was all a generation before me. I avidly followed the Panthers and later, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, but the glories of the civil rights movement were mostly before my time.

As any rate, Marty’s cited causes of SNCC’s collapse, which became a fait accompli around 1971, include state repression, the alienating rhetoric of black nationalism (both inside the organization and in our broader politics), and bold positions on Vietnam.

On the last point, I would say from a larger frame, Vietnam blew up the Democratic Party (very much as the Palestine issue is doing now), leaving SNCC with more in common sociologically with party constituencies less interested in Vietnam (its former base among disenfranchised black Southerners), and more in common ideologically with an ultra-left anti-imperialist grass roots with no political place to go. So SNCC had no place to go.

The social-democratic path was cut off early on, not least in my view due to Michael Harrington's failure to deal early and constructively with Students for a Democratic Society. SDS had social-democratic roots in the labor movement and didn’t go Marxist-Leninist, or worse, until the end of the 60s. It did blaze an early trail in opposing U.S. prosecution of the Vietnam War, a posture that repelled some of the oldest social-democrats. Harrington took some time to reconcile himself to it, but by then it was too late. SDS was in Leninist la-la land.

State repression is part of the territory of insurgent politics and just something you always have to cope with, made more difficult by needs for armed self-defense against police and right-wing terrorism. So that is not a good explanation for the failure of any radical tendency.

As I said, the real deal-breaker was the rejection of class politics for race. There is no socialism without the working class, and there is no mobilized working class without white folks. Maybe someone can concoct a scenario for progress without a mobilized working class. I’d like to see it. Green politics isn’t doing it. By the time climate change convinces absolutely everyone of the necessity of green transformation, it will probably be too late. In the meanwhile, climate-induced migration is causing politics in Europe and the U.S. to swirl around the toilet bowl.

It’s important to end with the fact that although SNCC did not last, its accomplishments did. Integration and voting rights were boosted, while Southern racist terrorism was attenuated. That’s still important. Those who see everything in binary, moralistic terms should take note. It would be nice if progress could easily be made with giant steps. The smaller steps are more feasible and can accumulate.