View source for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

{{Short description|Activist organization during the civil rights movement}}
{{redirect|SNCC}}
{{Infobox organization
| name                     = Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
| image                    = File:Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee logo.svg
| image_size               = 
| alt                      = <!-- see [[WP:ALT]] -->
| caption                  = 
| abbreviation             = SNCC
| motto                    = 
| predecessor              = 
| merged                   = <!-- Any other organizations with which the organization was merged -->
| successor                = 
| formation                = {{start date and age|1960}}
| founder                  = [[Ella Baker]]        <!-- or: | founders = -->
| dissolved                = <!-- or: | dissolved = --> {{end date and age|1970}}
| merger                   = <!-- Other organizations (if any) merged to constitute the organization -->
| type                     = <!-- e.g. [[Governmental organization]], [[Non-governmental organization|NGO]], etc -->
| status                   = <!-- Organization's legal status and/or description (company, charity, foundation, etc) -->
| purpose                  = [[Civil rights movement]]<br/>[[Participatory democracy]]<br/>[[Pacifism]]<br/>[[Black Power]]
| professional_title       = <!-- for professional associations -->
| headquarters             = [[Atlanta]], [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]], U.S.
| location                 = 
| coords                   = <!-- location's {{coord}}s -->
| region                   = <!-- or: | region_served = --> <!--Any particular region or regions associated with or served by the organization-->[[Deep South]] and [[Mid-Atlantic (United States)|Mid-Atlantic]]
| services                 = 
| membership               = <!-- Usually the number of members -->
| membership_year          = <!-- Year to which membership number/data apply -->
| language                 = <!-- or: | languages = --> <!--Any official language or languages used by the organization-->
| sec_gen                  = <!-- Name of the organization's Secretary General (if post exists) -->
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| board_of_directors       = 
| key_people               = 
| main_organ               = <!-- or: | publication = -->''The Student Voice'' (1960–1965)<br />''The Movement'' (1966–1970)<!--Organization's principal body (assembly, committee, board, etc) or publication-->
| parent_organization      = <!-- or: | parent_organisation = -->
| subsidiaries             = Friends of SNCC<br/>Poor People's Corporation
| secessions               = 
| affiliations             = {{Plainlist|
* [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]]
* [[Council of Federated Organizations]]
* [[Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party]]
* [[Lowndes County Freedom Organization]]
* [[Black Panther Party]]
* [[Third World Women's Alliance]]
}}
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| staff_year               = <!-- Year to which staff numbers/data apply -->
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| formerly                 = <!-- Any former names by which the organization known -->
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}}

The '''Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee''', and later, the '''Student National Coordinating Committee'''  ('''SNCC''', pronounced {{IPAc-en|s|n|ɪ|k}} {{respell|SNIK}}) was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the [[civil rights movement]] during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led [[Sit-in movement|sit-ins]] at segregated lunch counters in [[Greensboro sit-ins|Greensboro, North Carolina]], and [[Nashville Student Movement|Nashville, Tennessee]], the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic [[Racial segregation|segregation]] and political exclusion of [[African Americans]]. From 1962, with the support of the [[Voter Education Project]], SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the [[Deep South]]. Affiliates such as the [[Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party]] and the [[Lowndes County Freedom Organization]] in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.

By the mid-1960s the measured nature of the gains made, and the violence with which they were resisted, were generating dissent from the group's principles of [[nonviolence]], of white participation in the movement, and of field-driven, as opposed to national-office, leadership and direction. By this time many of SNCC's original organizers were working with the [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]] (SCLC), and others were being lost to a de-segregating [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democratic Party]] and to federally-funded anti-poverty programs. At the same time, the Committee took positions on international affairs that alienated establishment supporters: opposition to the [[Vietnam War]] and, in the wake of the [[Six-Day War|Six Day War]], criticism of Israel. Following an aborted merger with the [[Black Panther Party]] in 1968, SNCC effectively dissolved.

Because of the successes of its early years, SNCC is credited with breaking down barriers, both institutional and psychological, to the empowerment of African-American communities.

==1960: Emergence from the sit-in movement==
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in April 1960 at a conference at [[Shaw University]] in [[Raleigh, North Carolina]], attended by 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states, from 19 northern colleges, and from the [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]] (SCLC), the [[Congress of Racial Equality]] (CORE), the [[Fellowship of Reconciliation]] (FOR), the [[National Student Association]] (NSA), and [[Students for a Democratic Society (1960 organization)|Students for a Democratic Society]] (SDS).<ref name="ReferenceA">{{cite book|last1=Carson|first1=Clayborne|title=In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s|date=1981|publisher=Harvard University Press}}</ref><ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis60.htm#1960sncc Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founded] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref> Among those attending who were to emerge as strategists for the committee and its field projects were [[Fisk University]] student [[Diane Nash]], Tennessee State student [[Marion Barry]], and [[American Baptist Theological Seminary]] students [[James Bevel]],  [[John Lewis]], and [[Bernard Lafayette]], all involved in the [[Nashville Student Movement]]; their mentor at [[Vanderbilt University]], [[James Lawson (American activist)|James Lawson]]; [[Charles McDew|Charles F. McDew]], who led student protests at [[South Carolina State University]]; [[J. Charles Jones]], [[Johnson C. Smith University]], who organized 200 students to participate in sit-ins at whites-only department stores and service counters throughout [[Charlotte, North Carolina]]; [[Julian Bond]] from [[Morehouse College]], Atlanta;  and [[Stokely Carmichael]] from [[Howard University]], Washington, D.C.<ref>{{Cite web |last=sncclegacy |title=Founding Members |url=https://sncclegacyproject.org/about/founding-members/ |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=SNCC Legacy Project |date=26 March 2022 |language=en-US}}</ref>

The invitation had been issued by [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] on behalf of the SCLC, but the conference had been conceived and organized by then SCLC director [[Ella Baker]]. Baker was a critic of what she perceived as King's top-down leadership at the SCLC. "Strong people don't need strong leaders,"<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=B8k6btUYR68C&q=ella_baker%2C_martin_king Thomas F. Jackson, ''From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice''], Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, p. 104</ref> she told the young activists. Speaking to the students' own experience of protest organization, it was Baker's vision that appeared to prevail.<ref>{{Cite web |last=350.org |last2=Hunter |first2=Daniel |date=2024-04-15 |title=Building Movement Capacity and Structure: Ella Baker and the Civil Rights Movement |url=https://commonslibrary.org/building-movement-capacity-and-structure-ella-baker-and-sncc/ |access-date=2025-03-05 |website=The Commons Social Change Library |language=en-AU}}</ref>

SNCC did not constitute itself as the youth wing of SCLC. It steered an independent course that sought to channel the students' program through the organizers out in the field rather than through its national office in Atlanta<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ella-baker-and-the-politi_b_7702936|title=Ella Baker and the Politics of Hope – Lessons From the Civil Rights Movement|last=Boyte|first=Harry|date=2015-07-01|newspaper=[[HuffPost]]|language=en|access-date=2019-06-03}}</ref> ("small and rather dingy," located above a beauty parlor near the city's five Black colleges).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/sncc-national-office/|title=SNCC National Office|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> Under the constitution adopted, the SNCC comprised representatives from each of the affiliated "local protest groups", and these groups (and not the committee and its support staff) were to be recognized as "the primary expression of a protest in a given area."<ref>[https://www.crmvet.org/docs/sncc_constitution_62.pdf ''The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Constitution (as revised in Conference, April 29~ 1962)''].</ref>

Under the same general principle, that "the people who do the work should make the decisions", the students committed to a "[[participatory democracy]]" which, avoiding office hierarchy, sought to reach decisions by consensus.<ref name="auto2">{{Cite web|url=https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/womhist|title=Women and Social Movements in the United States,1600-2000 &#124; Alexander Street Documents|website=documents.alexanderstreet.com|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref><ref name="Casey Hayden 2015 p. 65">Casey Hayden (2015), "Only Love Is Radical." ''Inspiring Participatory Democracy: Student Movements from Port Huron to Today'', ed. Tom Hayden. New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 65.</ref> Group meetings were convened in which every participant could speak for as long as they wanted and the meeting would continue until everyone who was left was in agreement with the decision. Given the physical risks involved in many activities in which SNCC was to engage this was thought particularly important: "no one felt comfortable making a decision by majority rule that might cost somebody else's life."<ref>Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic (2008). ''Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History''. PM Press. p. 113.</ref>

Initially the SNCC continued the focus on sit-ins and [[boycott]]s targeting establishments (restaurants, retail stores, theaters) and public amenities maintaining whites-only or segregated facilities.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Moody|first1=Anne|title=Coming of Age in Mississippi|date=1970|publisher=New York: Dell Publishing Company}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Hine|first1=Darlene|title=Black Women in America|year=1993|url=https://archive.org/details/blackwomeninamer00hine|url-access=registration|publisher=New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993|isbn=9780926019614}}</ref> But it was to adopt a new tactic that helped galvanize the movement nationally. In February 1961, Diane Nash, [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson|Ruby Doris Smith]], Charles Sherrod, and J. Charles Jones joined the [[Rock Hill, South Carolina]] sit-in protests and followed the example of the [[Friendship Nine]] in enduring an extended jail time rather than post bail.<ref name="Black women">Clayborne Carson and Heidi Hess, [http://www.stanford.edu/~ccarson/articles/black_women_3.htm "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee"]. From [[Darlene Clark Hine]] (ed.), ''Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia'', New York: Carlson Publishing, 1993.</ref> The "Jail-no-Bail" stand was seen as a moral refusal to accept, and to effectively subsidize, a corrupted constitution-defiant police and judicial system—while at the same time saving the movement money it did not have.<ref>{{cite news |title='Jail, No Bail' Idea Stymied Cities' Profiting From Civil Rights Protesters |type=transcript |url=https://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues/jan-june11/jail_03-07.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110310004201/https://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/social_issues/jan-june11/jail_03-07.html |archive-date=2011-03-10 |work=The PBS NewsHour |access-date=21 October 2011}}"The 'Jail, No Bail' strategy became a new tactic in the fight for civil rights. Documentary produced by South Carolina ETV documenting the key moment in civil rights history." (Video and Audio)</ref>

As way to "dramatize that the church, the house of all people, fosters segregation more than any other institution," SNCC students also participated in "kneel-ins"—kneeling in prayer outside of Whites-only churches. Presbyterians churches, targeted because their "ministers lacked the protection and support of a church hierarchy," were not long indifferent. In August 1960, the 172nd General Assembly of the [[United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America|United Presbyterian Church]] wrote to SNCC: "Laws and customs requiring racial discrimination are, in our judgement, such serious violations of the law of God as to justify peaceful and orderly disobedience or disregard of these laws."<ref>{{Cite web |title=SNCC Project: A Year by Year History 1960-1970 - Mapping American Social Movements |url=https://depts.washington.edu/moves/SNCC_project.shtml |access-date=2023-10-17 |website=depts.washington.edu}}</ref>

==1961 Freedom Rides==
Organized by the [[Congress of Racial Equality]] (CORE) to dramatize the southern states' disregard of the Supreme Court rulings ([[Morgan v. Virginia|''Morgan v. Virginia'', 1946]] and [[Boynton v. Virginia|''Boynton v. Virginia'', 1960]]) outlawing segregation in interstate transportation, in May 1961, the first [[Freedom Rides|Freedom Riders]] (seven black, six white, led by CORE director [[James Farmer]]) travelled together on interstate buses. In [[Anniston, Alabama]], they were brutally attacked by mobs of [[Ku Klux Klan]]smen. Local police stood by. After they were assaulted again in [[Birmingham, Alabama]], and under pressure from the [[Presidency of John F. Kennedy|Kennedy Administration]], CORE announced it was discontinuing the action. Undeterred, [[Diane Nash]] called for new riders. [[Oretha Castle Haley]], Jean C. Thompson, Rudy Lombard, [[James Bevel]], [[Marion Barry]], Angeline Butler, [[Stokely Carmichael]], and [[Joan Trumpauer Mulholland]] joined [[John Lewis]] and [[Hank Thomas]], the two young SNCC members of the original Ride. They traveled on to a savage beating in [[Montgomery, Alabama]], to arrest in [[Jackson, Mississippi]], and to confinement in the Maximum Security (Death Row) Unit of the infamous [[Mississippi State Penitentiary]]--"Parchman Farm".<ref>{{cite web |title=Freedom Riders |url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/freedomriders/ |date=2011 |publisher=[[American Experience]], [[Public Broadcasting Service|PBS]] |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170107073734/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/roster/ |archive-date=2017-01-07}}</ref>

Recognizing SNCC's determination, CORE and the SCLC rejected the Administration's call for a "cooling off" period and joined with the students in a Freedom Riders Coordinating Committee to keep the Rides rolling through June and into September. During those months, more than 60 different Freedom Rides criss-crossed the South,<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/riders/frmap.htm Freedom Ride Map] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080205112129/http://www.crmvet.org/riders/frmap.htm |date=2008-02-05}}. Retrieved February 1, 2010.</ref> most of them converging on Jackson, where every Rider was arrested, more than 300 in total. An unknown number were arrested in other Southern towns, and many were beaten including, in [[Monroe, North Carolina]], SNCC's Executive Secretary [[James Forman]]. It is estimated that almost 450 people, black and white in equal number, participated.<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.htm#1961frides Freedom Rides] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref>

With CORE, SNCC had been making plans for a mass demonstration in Washington when Attorney General [[Robert F. Kennedy]] finally prevailed on the [[Interstate Commerce Commission]] (ICC) to issue rules giving force to the repudiation of the "[[separate but equal]]" doctrine. After the new ICC rules took effect on November 1, 1961, passengers were permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains; "white" and "colored" signs were to be removed from the terminals (lunch counters, drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms) serving interstate customers.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Arsenault |first=Raymond |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GpAzYZnAqcoC |title=Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice |date=2011 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-979296-2 |pages=271 |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Sharp |first=Anne Wallace |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7IhmDwAAQBAJ |title=The Freedom Rides |date=2012 |publisher=Greenhaven Publishing LLC |isbn=978-1-4205-0732-4 |pages=86–88 |language=en}}</ref>

To test the ICC ruling and in the hope of mobilizing the local black community in a broader campaign, in October 1961 SNCC members [[Charles Sherrod]] and [[Cordell Reagon]] led a sit-in at the bus terminal in [[Albany, Georgia]]. By mid-December, having drawn in the [[NAACP]] and a number of other organizations, the [[Albany Movement]] had more than 500 protesters in jail.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Albany Movement |url=https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/albany-movement/ |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=New Georgia Encyclopedia |language=en-US}}</ref> There they were joined briefly by [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] and by [[Ralph Abernathy]]. King sought advantage in the national media attention his arrest had drawn. In return for the city's commitment to comply with the ICC ruling and to release those protesters willing to post bail, he agreed to leave town. The city reneged, however, so protests and subsequent arrests continued into 1962.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/albany-movement|title=Albany Movement|date=Apr 24, 2017|website=The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref>

News reports across the country portrayed the Albany debacle as "one of the most stunning defeats" in King's career.<ref>David Miller, "A Loss for Dr. King—New Negro Roundup: They Yield," ''New York Herald Tribune'', 19 December 1961.</ref> What they also reported was conflict with SNCC. The ''[[New York Times]]'' noted that King's SCLC had taken steps "that seemed to indicate they were assuming control" of the movement in Albany, and that the student group had "moved immediately to recapture its dominant position on the scene." If the differences between the organizations were not resolved, the paper predicted "tragic consequences".<ref>Claude Sitton, "Rivalries Beset Integration Campaigns," ''New York Times'', 24 December 1961.</ref>

==1962 voter registration campaigns==
As a result of meetings brokered by the Kennedy Administration with large liberal foundations, the [[Voter Education Project]] (VEP) was formed in early 1962 to channel funds into voter drives in the eleven Southern states. Inducted by sit-in campaigns and hardened in the Freedom Rides, many student activists saw VEP as a government attempt to co-opt their movement. [[Lonnie C. King Jr.]], a student from Morehouse College in Atlanta, felt that "by rechanneling its energies" what the Kennedys were "trying to do was kill the Movement."<ref name="Voter Education Project launches">{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/events/voter-education-project-launches/|title=Voter Education Project launches|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> But others were already convinced that obtaining the right to vote was the key to unlocking political power for Black Americans. Older Black southerners had been pressing SNCC to move in this direction for some time. Mississippi NAACP leader [[Amzie Moore]] had tabled a voter registration drive at the SNCC's second conference in October 1960.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/events/amzie-moore-puts-voter-registration-on-table/|title=Amzie Moore puts voter registration on table at SNCC Atlanta conference|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

A split over the priority to be accorded voter registration was avoided by Ella Baker's intervention. She suggested that the organization create two distinct wings: one for direct action (which Diane Nash was to lead) and the other for voter registration. But the white violence visited in the summer of 1961 on the first registration efforts (under the direction of [[Bob Moses (activist)|Bob Moses]]) in [[McComb, Mississippi]], including the murder of activist [[Herbert Lee (activist)|Herbert Lee]], persuaded many that in the Deep South voter registration was as direct a challenge to [[white supremacy]] as anything they had been doing before. "If you went into Mississippi and talked about voter registration they're going to hit you on the side of the head and that," Reggie Robinson, one of the SNCC's first field secretaries, quipped is "as direct as you can get."<ref name="Voter Education Project launches"/>

In 1962, Bob Moses garnered further support for SNCC's efforts by forging a coalition, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), with, among other groups, the NAACP and the National Council of Churches.<ref>{{Cite encyclopedia |url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/council-federated-organizations-cofo|title=Council of Federated Organizations |encyclopedia=King Encyclopedia |date=27 April 2017 |publisher=[[Stanford University#Research centers and institutes|Stanford University {{!}} Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute]] |access-date=2019-12-04 }}</ref> With VEP and COFO funding SNCC was able to expand its voter registration efforts into the [[Mississippi Delta]] around [[Greenwood, Mississippi|Greenwood]], Southwest [[Georgia (U.S. state)|Georgia]] around [[Albany, Georgia|Albany]], and the Alabama [[Black Belt (region of Alabama)|Black Belt]] around [[Selma, Alabama|Selma]]. All of these projects endured police harassment and arrests; KKK violence including shootings, bombings, and assassinations; and economic sanctions against those blacks who dared to try to register.<ref>{{Cite web |title=A SNCC Activist Describes Police Intimidation in the Voter Registration Campaign · SHEC: Resources for Teachers |url=https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/982 |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=shec.ashp.cuny.edu}}</ref>

== 1963 Washington and the Leesburg Stockade ==
===March on Washington===
[[File:Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (Leaders of the march) - NARA - 542056.jpg|thumb|[[John Lewis]] representing SNCC at the [[Civil Rights March on Washington]] in 1963]]
{{see also|Civil Rights March on Washington}}
Although it is an event largely remembered for King's delivery of his "I Have a Dream" speech, SNCC had a significant role in the 1963 [[March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom]]. But it was at odds with the other sponsoring civil rights, labor, and religious organizations, all of whom were prepared to applaud the Kennedy Administration for its Civil Rights Bill (the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]]).

In the version of his speech leaked to the press [[John Lewis]] remarked that those marching for jobs and freedom "have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here—for they have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages...or no wages at all." He went on to announce:
<blockquote>In good conscience, we cannot support the administration's civil rights bill. This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses when engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges like those in Americus, Georgia, where four young men are in jail, facing a death penalty, for engaging in peaceful protest. I want to know, which side is the federal government on? The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts. Listen Mr. Kennedy, the black masses are on the march for jobs and for freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won't be a "cooling-off period".<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim63b.htm#1963mow March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive. (N.B.: This text must be from a different source; at least three versions of the speech were written, and this is the earliest of those three, before "we cannot support" was changed to "we cannot wholeheartedly support" and then later "we support with reservations". See James Forman, ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries'' (1971; 1997), pp. 334–37.)</ref></blockquote>

Under pressure from the other groups, changes were made. "We cannot support" the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964#1963 Kennedy civil rights bill|1963 Kennedy Civil Rights Bill]] was re-scripted as "we support with reservations". In the view of the then SNCC executive secretary, [[James Forman]], those who had pushed the change were selling out to the cautious liberal politics of labor-movement leadership and the Catholic and Protestant church hierarchy. "If people had known they had come to Washington to aid the Kennedy administration, they would not have come in the numbers they did."<ref>Forman (1971). p. 335.</ref>

=== Sidelining of women ===
A feature of the march itself, was that men and women were directed to proceed separately and that only male speakers were scheduled to address the [[Lincoln Memorial]] rally. Together with [[Coretta Scott King]] and other the wives of civil  leaders<ref name=":8">{{Cite magazine |last=Scanlon |first=Jennifer |date=2016-03-16 |title=Where Were the Women in the March on Washington? |magazine=The New Republic |url=https://newrepublic.com/article/131587/women-march-washington |access-date=2023-10-12 |issn=0028-6583}}</ref> SNCC staffer and Ella Baker protégé [[Casey Hayden]] found herself walking up Independence Avenue while the media recorded the men marching down Constitution Avenue.<ref>Harold Smith (2015). "Casey Hayden: Gender and the Origins of SNCC, SDS, and the Women's Liberation Movement". In Turner, Elizabeth Hayes; Cole, Stephanie; Sharpless, Rebecca (eds.). ''Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives''. University of Georgia Press. pp. 359–384. {{ISBN|9780820347905}}. p. 374</ref> 

Despite protesting behind the scenes with [[Anna Hedgeman]] (who was to go on to co-found the [[National Organization for Women]]), women were to be featured as singers, but not as speakers.<ref name=":8" /> In the event, a few women were allowed to sit on the [[Lincoln Memorial]] platform and the NAACP's  [[Daisy Bates (activist)|Daisy Bates]], who had been instrumental in the integration of [[Little Rock Central High School]], was permitted a brief tribute to "Negro Women Fighters for Freedom".<ref>{{Cite web |last=Engel |first=Keri Lynn |date=2022 |title=The Role of Women In the 1963 March on Washington |url=https://amazingwomeninhistory.com/women-in-the-march-on-washington/ |access-date=2023-10-12 |website=amazingwomeninhistory.com |language=en-US}}</ref>  From their "bitterly humiliating" experience in Washington, [[Pauli Murray]], who later coined the term "Jane Crow" to describe the double handicap of race and sex, concluded that black women "can no longer postpone or subordinate the fight against discrimination because of sex to the civil rights struggle but must carry on both fights simultaneously."<ref name=":8" />

=== Leesburg Stockade ===
{{see also|Leesburg Stockade}}

The previous month, July 1963, SNCC was involved in another march that eventually made headlines. With the NAACP in [[Americus, Georgia]], SNCC organized a protest march on a segregated movie theater that concluded with the arrest of upwards of 33 high-school girls. The "Stolen Girls" were imprisoned 45 days without charge in brutal conditions in the Lee County Public Works building, the [[Leesburg Stockade]].<ref name="walb">{{citation|title=Stolen Girls remember 1963 in Leesburg|date=July 24, 2006|publisher=WALB|url=http://www.walb.com/story/5190050/stolen-girls-remember-1963-in-leesburg}}.</ref><ref name="gpb">{{citation|url=http://gpbnews.org/post/girls-leesburg-stockade|title=The Girls Of The Leesburg Stockade|first1=Bradley|last1=George|first2=Grant|last2=Blankenship|date=July 19, 2016|work=GPB News|publisher=[[NPR]]|access-date=December 17, 2019|archive-date=June 16, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200616151447/http://gpbnews.org/post/girls-leesburg-stockade|url-status=dead}}.</ref> It took SNCC photographer [[Danny Lyon]] smuggling himself into the Stockade to publicize the case nationally<ref name="gpb"/><ref name="walb"/><ref name="seeger">{{citation|title=Everybody Says Freedom: A history of the Civil Rights Movement in songs and pictures|first1=Pete|last1=Seeger|author1-link=Pete Seeger|first2=Bob|last2=Reiser|publisher=W. W. Norton & Company|year=1989|isbn=9780393306040|page=97|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IgWcpONqgGgC&pg=PA97}}.</ref>

==1964 Freedom Summer==
In the fall of 1963, with the assistance of 100 northern volunteers SNCC conducted the [[1963 Freedom Ballot|Freedom Ballot]], a mock gubernatorial election in which over 80,000 black Mississippians demonstrated their willingness to exercise the constitutional right to vote that state law and violent intimidation had denied them since [[Reconstruction era|Reconstruction]].<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim63b.htm#1963msballot Freedom Ballot in MS] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref> (Only 6.7 per cent of the black voting age population of Mississippi was registered, compared to 70.2 per cent of the white voting age population).<ref>John Lewis, Archie E. Allen (1972) "Black Voter Registration Efforts in the South." ''Notre Dame Law Review''. Vol. 48:1. p. 112</ref> In coordination with CORE, the SNCC followed up on the ballot with the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, also known as [[Freedom Summer]]. This brought over 700 white Northern students to the South, where they volunteered as teachers and organizers.<ref>{{Cite web |date=2021-04-16 |title=Freedom Summer - Definition, Murders & Results |url=https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/freedom-summer |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=HISTORY |language=en}}</ref>

According to [[Julian Bond]], their presence can be credited to freelance social activist [[Allard Lowenstein]]: white students, he had proposed, would not only "provide needed manpower", "their white skins might provoke interest from the news media that black skins could not produce."<ref name=":7">Julian Bond, [http://www.crmvet.org/comm/bond14.htm "Address to Freedom Summer 50th Commemoration"], Jackson, MS. June 28, 2014.</ref>  With the murder of two of their number, [[Andrew Goodman (activist)|Andrew Goodman]] and [[Michael Schwerner]], alongside local activist (Freedom Rider and voter educator) [[James Chaney]], this indeed was to be the effect. Freedom Summer attracted international attention.<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm#1964fs Mississippi Summer Project] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref>

For SNCC the focus of summer project became the organization, through the [[Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party]] (MFDP), of a parallel state Democratic Party [[Partisan primary|primary]]. The MFDP would send an integrated slate of delegates to the [[1964 Democratic National Convention]] in Atlantic City and there contest the credentials of the all-white Mississippi regulars.

As part of this project SNCC's [[Charles E. Cobb Jr.|Charlie Cobb]] proposed summer field schools. Encouraging youth "to articulate their own desires, demands, and questions," the schools would help ensure a movement for social change in the state that would continue to be led by Mississippians. This was, he suggested, what organizing for voter registration was all about – "challenging people in various ways to take control of their own lives."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/charlie-cobb/|title=Charlie Cobb|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> Over the course of Freedom Summer (and with assistance in developing the curriculum from, among others, [[Howard Zinn]]),<ref name="Martin Duberman 2012 99–100">{{cite book |author=Martin Duberman |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VCqmA95DdNkC&pg=PA199 |title=Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left |publisher=New Press |year=2012 |isbn=9781595588401 |pages=99–100}}</ref> COFO set up more than 40 [[Freedom Schools]] in African-American communities across Mississippi. More than 3,000 students attended, many of whom participated in registration efforts.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm|title=Civil Rights Movement -- History & Timeline, 1964 (Freedom Summer)|website=www.crmvet.org|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref>

With the encouragement of SNCC field secretary [[Frank Smith (D.C. Council)|Frank Smith]], a meeting of cotton pickers at a Freedom School in [[Shaw, Mississippi]], gave birth to the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union. At its peak, in the summer of 1965 the MFLU had 1,350 members and about 350 on strike.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/events/mississippi-freedom-labor-union-founded/|title=June 1965: Mississippi Freedom Labor Union founded|website=snccdigital|language=en|access-date=2019-11-03|last3=Gateway|first3=SNCC Digital}}</ref>

On August 4, 1964, before the state MFDP convention, the bodies of [[Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner|Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner]] were discovered buried in an earthen dam. Missing for weeks since disappearing after investigating a church burning in June 1964, they were subjects of a massive manhunt that involved the FBI and United States sailors from a nearby base. In the course of the search the corpses of several black Mississippians were uncovered whose disappearances had not previously attracted attention outside the Delta.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/mississippi-burning|title=Mississippi Burning|website=Federal Bureau of Investigation|language=en-us|access-date=2019-05-01}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/freedom-summer|title=Freedom Summer|author=<!--Not stated--> |date=2017-06-29|website=The Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University |language=en|access-date=2019-05-01}}</ref>
[[File:Fannie Lou Hamer 1964-08-22.jpg|alt=Fannie, an African American woman in a floral dress, sits at a table and is mid-speech. The photo is in Black and White|thumb|left|Fannie Lou Hamer (1964) speaks at a Democratic Convention regarding the plight of sharecroppers.  ]]
Notwithstanding the national outrage generated by the murders, the [[Presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson|Johnson Administration]] was determined to deflect the MDFP effort. With the presidential election approaching the priority was to protect the Democrats' "Solid South" against inroads being made by Republican [[Barry Goldwater]]'s campaign and to minimise support for [[George Wallace]]'s third-party challenge.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/mississippi-freedom-democratic-party-mfdp|title=Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)|author=<!--Not stated--> |date=2017-06-02|website=The Martin Luther King Jr., Research and Education Institute, Stanford University |language=en|access-date=2019-05-01}}</ref> The MFDP nonetheless got to the National Democratic Convention in [[Atlantic City]] at the end of August.

The proceedings of the convention's credentials committee were televised, giving a national and international audience to the testimony of SNCC field secretary [[Fannie Lou Hamer]]: to her portrayal of the brutalities of a sharecropper's life, and of the obstruction and violence encountered by an African American in the exercise her constitutional rights. (Hamer still bore the marks of beatings meted to her, her father and other SNCC workers by police in [[Winona, Mississippi]], just a year before).<ref>{{Cite book|title=A Voice that Could Stir an Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Black Freedom Movement|last=Parker Brooks|first=Maegan|publisher=University Press of Mississippi|year=2014|isbn=9781628460056|location=Jackson|pages=102, 272}}</ref> But with the all-white delegations of other southern states threatening to walk out, Johnson engineered a "compromise" in which the national Democratic Party offered the 68 MFDP delegates two at-large seats from where they could watch the floor proceedings but not take part. Fannie Lou Hamer led her delegates out of the convention:<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/tim//tim64b.htm#1964atlantic MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref> "We didn't come all this way for no two seats when all of us is tired."<ref>{{cite book|last=Dittmer|first=John|author-link=John Dittmer|year=1993|chapter=Mississippi Movement|editor1=Dittmer, John|editor2=Wright, George C.|editor3=Dulaney, W. Marvin|title=Essays on the American Civil Rights Movement|publisher=Texas A&M University Press|isbn=978-0-89096-540-5 |page=20}}</ref><ref name="atlantic">{{cite news | url=http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/atlantic-city_pleasantville_brigantine/black-mississippians-create-legacy/article_9811ec34-2bdd-11e4-92f4-0019bb2963f4.html | title=Black Mississippians create legacy | work=Press of Atlantic City | date=August 24, 2014 | access-date=March 4, 2015 | author=Lemongello, Steven | url-status=live | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304043502/http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/communities/atlantic-city_pleasantville_brigantine/black-mississippians-create-legacy/article_9811ec34-2bdd-11e4-92f4-0019bb2963f4.html | archive-date=March 4, 2016 | df=mdy-all }}</ref>

Activists, Hayden suggests, were staggered to find the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner": "the core of SNCC's work, voter registration, was [now] open to question."<ref>[https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc45.htm Casey Hayden (2014) (to Elaine DeLott Baker, 11 September 2014). Introduction. Document 45. Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason)], "Memorandum on Structure," Waveland, Mississippi, [6-12 November 1964], Elaine DeLott Baker Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University]</ref> In the wake of Atlantic City, Elaine DeLott Baker recalls the desolation of project offices "that had only recently been hives of activity and energy" and the shutting down of Freedom Schools and community centers.<ref name=":5">{{Cite book|last=Baker|first=Elaine DeLott|url=https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1006932395|title=The "Freedom High" and "Harliner" Factions of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: a Reexamination. Preliminary Draft|year=1994|pages=4}}</ref>

In September 1964, at a COFO conference in New York, Bob Moses had to see off two challenges to SNCC's future role in Mississippi. First, he had to defend the SNCC's anti-"[[Red-baiting]]" insistence on "free association": the NAACP had threatened to pull out of COFO if SNCC continued to engage the services of the [[Communist Party USA|Communist Party]] associated [[National Lawyers Guild]]. Second, he had deflect a proposal from Lowenstein and Democratic Party operative [[Barney Frank]] that in a future summer program decision-making be removed from organizers in the field to a new office in New York City responsible directly to liberal-foundation and church funders. [[Dorothy Zellner]] (a white radical SNCC staffer) remarked that, "What they [Lowenstein and Frank] want is to let the Negro into the existing society, not to change it."<ref name=":7" />

==1965: Differences over "structure" and direction==
At the end of 1964, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. Yet to many the movement seemed to be at a loss.

In Mississippi [[Casey Hayden]] recalls everyone "reeling from the violence" (3 project workers killed; 4 people critically wounded; 80 beaten, 1,000 arrests; 35 shooting incidents, 37 churches bombed or burned; and 30 black businesses or homes burned),<ref name=":7" /> and also from "the new racial imbalance" following the summer influx of white student volunteers.  The local black staff, "the backbone" of the projects were frustrated, even resentful, at having to deal "with a lot of young white people who were intellectual and moneyed," "ignorant" of realities on the ground, and who, with their greater visibility, brought additional risks. But most of all SNCC activists were "staggered" by the debacle in Atlantic City. Being confronted by the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner" had thrown "the core of SNCC's work", voter registration, into question.<ref name="auto">{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc45.htm|title=[Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason)], "Memorandum on Structure," November 1964|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

Notwithstanding passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment and private education, and the equally broad [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], faith in the Johnson Administration and its liberal allies was ebbing, and a gulf had opened between SNCC and other civil rights organizations. In Atlantic City Fannie Lou Hamer confessed she "lost hope in American society."<ref>Mary E. King. Notes; SNCC meeting; Fall, 1965, p. 87. [http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/26004 Mary E. King papers, 1962–1999]; Archives Main Stacks, Z: Accessions M82-445, Box 3, Folder 2, Freedom Summer Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society.</ref>

Questions of strategic direction were also questions of "structure". What Stokely Carmichael described as "not an organization but a lot of people all doing what they think needs to be done,"<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/26004|title=p. 45|website=content.wisconsinhistory.org|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> was for Hayden the very realization of her mentor's vision. Such was "the participatory, town-hall, consensus-forming nature" of the operation Ella Baker had helped set in motion that Hayden could feel herself to be "at the center of the organization" without having, "in any public way", to be "a leader".<ref name="crmvet.org">{{Cite web|url=https://www.crmvet.org/comm/hayden.htm|title=Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement – In the Attics of My Mind|website=www.crmvet.org|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

Yet when Elaine DeLott Baker joined Hayden in Mississippi in May 1964 she found "a hierarchy in place". Based "on considerations of race, the amount of time spent in the struggle, dangers suffered, and finally, of gender," this was not a hierarchy office, but "an unspoken understanding of who should speak up at meetings, who should propose ideas in public places, and who should remain silent." Black men were at the top, "then black women, followed by white men, and at the bottom, white women." Field staff, among them "women, black and white," still retained "an enormous amount of operational freedom, they were indeed the ones that were keeping things moving." But from those leading the debate on new directions for the movement DeLott Baker saw "little recognition of that reality,"<ref name="Document98">{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc98.htm|title=Document 98: Elaine DeLott Baker, excerpts from Francesca Polletta and Elaine DeLott Baker, "The 1964 Waveland Memo and the Rise of Second-Wave Feminism," Organization of American Historians, Annual Meeting, Seattle, 26–29 March 2009, Elaine DeLott Baker Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University|website=Alexander Street}}</ref>  and the ground was shifting.<blockquote>The violence and emotional stresses of four years had eroded the focus and spirits of many veteran field staffers who appeared to central office staff as increasingly unpredictable and unreliable. Communication between core staff and field staff was poor and getting worse. To field staff, the Atlanta office was out of touch and becoming more and more irrelevant. Meanwhile, there were no central strategies. Resources were dwindling and tensions over the allocation of resources were mounting <ref name=":5" /></blockquote>As an opportunity to take stock, to critique and reevaluate the movement, a retreat in [[Waveland, Mississippi]], was organized for November 1964. Like Ella Baker, in criticizing King's "messianic" leadership of the SCLC, Executive Secretary [[James Forman]] saw himself as championing popularly accountable, grassroots organization.  Believing it "would detract from, rather than intensify" the focus on ordinary people's involvement in the movement, he had not appreciated King's appearance in Albany in December 1961.<ref>James Forman (1972). ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries''. University of Washington Press, p. 255.</ref> When on March 9, 1965, King, seemingly on his own authority, was able to turn the second [[Selma to Montgomery march]] back at the [[Edmund Pettus Bridge]] where two days before ("Bloody Sunday") the first had been brutally charged and batoned, Forman was appalled.<ref>[http://crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965m2mtial1 "1965-Students March in Montgomery; Confrontation at Dexter Church"], Civil Rights Movement Archive History and Timeline</ref> Yet within SNCC itself Forman increasingly was concerned by the lack of "internal cohesion".<ref>Meta Mendel-Reyes (2013), ''Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory'', Routledge. pp. 46–47.</ref>

At Waveland Forman proposed that the staff (some twenty), who under the original constitution had had "a voice but no vote," constitute "themselves as the Coordinating Committee" and elect a new Executive. It was time to recognize that SNCC no longer had a "student base" (with the move to voter registration, the original campus protest groups had largely evaporated) and that the staff, "the people who do the most work," were the organization's real "nucleus".  But the "many problems and many strains within the organization" caused by the "freedom" allowed to organizers in the field were also reason, he argued, to "change and alter" the structure of decision making. Given the "external pressures" the requirement now was for "unity".<ref>[https://www.crmvet.org/info/6411_sncc_forman-waveland.pdf Text of speech delivered at the staff retreat of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] at Waveland, Mississippi, November 6, 1964, by James Forman, Executive Secretary.</ref>

Bob Moses opposed. The role of SNCC was to stimulate social struggles, not to provide an institutionalized leadership.<ref>Clayborne Carson (1995). ''In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s''. Harvard University Press. p. 303</ref> "Leadership," Moses believed, "will emerge from the movement that emerges." <blockquote>Leadership is there in the people. You don't have to worry about where your leaders are, how are you going to get some leaders. ... If you go out and work with your people leadership will emerge. ... We don't know who they are now: and we don't need to know.<ref>quoted in Meta Mendel-Reyes (2013). p. 36</ref></blockquote> 
"To get us through the impasse," Casey Hayden tried to attach to Forman's proposal various sub-committees and provisos to ensure that "leadership for all our programs" would continue to be driven from the field, and not from central office "which makes many program areas responsible to one person rather than to all of us." For Forman this still suggested too loose, too confederal a structure for an organization whose challenge, without the manpower and publicity of white volunteers, was to mount and coordinate a Southwide Freedom Summer<ref name="auto"/> and "build a [[Black Belt (geological formation)|Black Belt]] political party."<ref name="auto1"/>

At her last Committee meeting in the fall of 1965, Hayden told both Forman and Chairman John Lewis that the "imbalance of power within SNCC" was such that, if the movement was to remain "radically democratic", they would need to step down.<ref name="auto1"/> Forman and Lewis did step down in their own time, in the spring, but with questions of structure and direction for the organization unresolved.

==1966: Black Power Movement==
===Carmichael and the Vine Street Project Statement===
[[File:Kwame Ture at a 1966 Mississippi press conference.jpg|thumb|240x240px|Stokely Carmichael 1966 Mississippi press conference]]
In May 1966 Forman was replaced by [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson]], who was determined "to keep the SNCC together."<ref>Harry G. Lefever (2005). ''Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957/1967''. Mercer University Press. p, 216</ref> But Forman recalls male leaders fighting "her attempts as executive secretary to impose a sense of organizational responsibility and self-discipline," and "trying to justify themselves by the fact that their critic was a woman"<ref>Paula Giddings (1984). ''When and Where I Enter''. New York: Bantam. pp. 314–315</ref> In October 1967 Smith-Robinson died, aged just 25, "of exhaustion" according to one of her co-workers, "destroyed by the movement."<ref>Cynthia Fleming (1998). ''Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson''. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. {{ISBN|978-0847689729}}</ref>

Replacing John Lewis as chairman in May 1966 was the 24-year old [[Stokely Carmichael]] (the future Kwame Ture). When on the night of June 16, 1966, following protests at the shooting of solo freedom marcher [[James Meredith]], Carmichael walked out of jail (his 27th arrest) and into Broad Street Park in [[Greenwood, Mississippi]], he asked the waiting crowd "What do you want?." They roared back "Black Power! Black Power!"<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00x6mb9|title=BBC Two – Witness, Civil Rights, USA, Stokely Carmichael and 'Black Power'|date=10 August 2012 |publisher=BBC|language=en-GB|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

For Carmichael Black Power was a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."<ref>{{Cite web  |date=2009 |title=Stokely Carmichael |url=https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/stokely-carmichael |access-date=2 April 2023 |website=www.history.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last1=Hamilton |first1=Charles V. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Eu2Ez9K8cQEC |title=Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America |last2=Ture |first2=Kwame |date=2011|orig-date=1967 |publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |isbn=978-0-307-79527-4 |pages=44 |language=en}}</ref><blockquote>We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/black-power-speech-28-july-1966-stokely-carmichael|title="Black Power" Speech (28 July 1966, by Stokely Carmichael) {{!}} Encyclopedia.com|website=www.encyclopedia.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref></blockquote>
A new direction SNCC was evident in the [[Atlanta, Georgia]], "Vine City" Project, SNCC's first effort at urban organizing. Co-directed by William "Bill" Ware and [[Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons]] (Robinson), it took up the challenge of the Georgia State Legislature's refusal to seat [[Julian Bond]] because of SNCC opposition to the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=Bond, Horace Julian {{!}} The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute |url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/bond-horace-julian |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=kinginstitute.stanford.edu |language=en}}</ref>

Ware, who had been greatly affected by his experience of newly independent [[Ghana]], emphasized racial solidarity. Black people, he argued, needed to work "without the guidance and/or direction and control of non-Blacks". Without control over their affairs, he warned, "Black people will know no freedom, but only more subtle forms of slavery."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/bill-ware/|title=Bill Ware|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> A Vine Street Project position paper on Black Power,<ref name=":9">{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/atlanta-project-statement/|title=Atlanta Project Statement|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> which Simmons helped write, suggested that: 
<blockquote>Negroes in this country have never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference. As a result of this, the stereotype has been reinforced that Blacks cannot organize themselves. The white psychology that Blacks have to be watched, also reinforces this stereotype. Blacks, in fact, feel intimidated by the presence of whites, because of their knowledge of the power that whites have over their lives. One white person can come into a meeting of Black people and change the complexion of that meeting ... People would immediately start talking about "brotherhood", "love", etc.; race would not be discussed.</blockquote>

This was "not to say that whites have not had an important role in the Movement." If people now had "the right to picket, the right to give out leaflets, the right to vote, the right to demonstrate, the right to print," the Vine City paper allowed that it was "mainly because of the entrance of white people into Mississippi, in the summer of '64." But their "role is now over and it should be," for what would it mean "if Black people, once having the right to organize, are not allowed to organize themselves? It means that Blacks' ideas about inferiority are being reinforced."

What was needed now for "people to free themselves" was an "all-Black project" and this had to "exist from the beginning." Future cooperation with whites had to be a matter of "coalition". But there could be "no talk of 'hooking up' unless Black people organize Blacks and white people organize whites." Those "white people who desire change" should go "where the problem (of racism) is most manifest," in their own communities where power has been created "for the express purpose of denying Blacks human dignity and self-determination."<ref name=":9" />

Even without embracing an explicitly separatist agenda, many veteran project directors accepted the case that the presence of white organizers undermined black self-confidence.<ref>Carson (1995). p. 299</ref> (Although overridden, on that basis [[Oretha Castle Haley]] already in 1962 had suspended whites from the [[Congress of Racial Equality|CORE]] chapter in [[New Orleans]]).<ref>{{Cite book|title=Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times|last1=Allured|first1=Janet|last2=Gentry|first2=Judith|publisher=University of Georgia Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0-8203-2946-8|location=Athens, GA|pages=303–323}}</ref> [[Julian Bond]] later reflected:<ref>Bond (2014)</ref>
<blockquote>...the successes Freedom Summer achieved resulted from its embrace of a paradox — it tried to fight bigotry by appealing to people more concerned about whites, not blacks. Appealing to the nation's racism accepted white supremacy. By acknowledging its dependence on whites to popularize the civil rights struggle in the South, SNCC contradicted its rhetorical belief in the equal worth of all races, and undermined its insistence that indigenous blacks were best prepared to lead the struggle for their deliverance from white dominance.
</blockquote>

Yet like Forman (now urging the study of [[Marxism]]),<ref name="Christopher M. Richardson 2014 p. 181">Christopher M. Richardson, Ralph E. Luker (2014). ''Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement''. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 181</ref> Carmichael hesitated to accept the implication that whites should be excluded from the movement. It was in December that he led the SNCC national executive in a narrow decision (19 in favor, 18 against and 24 abstentions) to ask white co-workers and volunteers to leave.<ref>{{cite web|title=Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Actions 1960–1970|url=https://depts.washington.edu/moves/SNCC_map-events.shtml|website=Mapping American Social Movements}}</ref> In May 1967 the Coordinating Committee formally asked its non-black staff to resign.<ref>Kristin Anderson-Bricker (1992). ''From Beloved Community to Triple Jeopardy: Ideological Change and the Evolution of Feminism Among Black and White Women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960–1975''. Syracuse University. p. 56</ref> Whites should concentrate on organizing poor white communities and leave SNCC to promote African-American self-reliance.<ref name=forman>James Forman, [https://books.google.com/books?id=Y2RIhBEy7dEC&dq=sncc+expulsion+of+whites&pg=PP16 ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries''], pp. xvi–xv (2nd edn 1997). Accessed March 17, 2007.</ref>

===Lowndes County===
Carmichael had been working with a voter registration project in Alabama that had taken what, at the time, may have seemed an equally momentous step. In the face of murderous Klan violence, organizers for the [[Lowndes County Freedom Organization]] openly carried arms.<ref name="LowndesCounty - Encyclopedia">[http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1781 "Lowndes County Freedom Organization"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130813072422/http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1781 |date=2013-08-13 }}, Encyclopedia of Alabama.</ref> Participating in the Selma to Montgomery march, Carmichael had stopped off in the county in March 1965.<ref name=lcfogenesis>{{cite web|url=https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/selma-montgomery-march/#:~:text=On_March_23,_1965,_the,County_Freedom_Party_(LCFP).|title=March 23, 1965: Selma to Montgomery March Continues|publisher=Zinn Education|access-date=August 3, 2020}}</ref>  Local registration efforts were being led by [[John Hulett]] who that month, with John C. Lawson, a preacher, became the first two black voters in Lowndes County in more than six decades.<ref>{{ Cite book|last=Greenshaw|first=Wayne|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bI1rzKFsBl4C|title=Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama|publisher=Chicago Review Press|year=2011|isbn=9781569768259|pages=[https://books.google.com/books?d=bI1rzKFsBl4C&pg=PA214 214]}}</ref>

Carmichael gained the confidence of local residents when, handing out voter registration material at a local school, he refused to be intimidated by local police: they were either to arrest him or leave. With SNCC workers then "swarmed" by young people, Carmichael took the initiative to help form the LCFO with Hulett, its first chair. The organization would not only register voters but, as a party, run candidates for office—its symbol, a rampant black panther, representing black "strength and dignity".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jeffries |first1=Hasan Kwame |title=Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt |date=2009 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=9780814743065 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XFWVLK4_PCoC}}</ref>

Hulett warned the state of Alabama that it had a last chance to peacefully grant African Americans their rights: "We're out to take power legally, but if we're stopped by the government from doing it legally, we're going to take it the way everyone else took it, including the way the Americans took it in the [[American Revolution]]." Certain the federal government was not going to protect him and his fellow LCFO members, Hulett told a federal registrar, "if one of our candidates gets touched, we're going to take care of the murderer ourselves."<ref>[http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Lowndes_Co/513.LowndesCO.bpp.6.1966.pdf ''The Black Panther Party''] (pamphlet), Merrit Publishers, June 1966.</ref>

===Interracial coalition===
While other white SNCC activists in the Broad Street Park, Greenwood, crowd that affirmed Carmichael's call for Black Power were bewildered, Peggy Terry recalls "there was never any rift in my mind or my heart. I just felt Black people were doing what they should be doing. We reached a period in the civil rights movement when Black people felt they weren't being given the respect they should have, and I agreed. White liberals ran everything."<ref>Amy Sony, James Tracy (2011), ''Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times''. Brooklyn, Melville House. p. 53</ref> The message to white activists, "organize your own", was one that Terry took home with her to uptown, "Hillbilly Harlem", Chicago. This was the neighborhood in which, having taken the prompt the year before, [[Casey Hayden]] had already been working, organizing welfare mothers into a union. She was "on loan" from SNCC to [[Students for a Democratic Society]] (SDS). Like other new left groups, SDS did not view a self-consciously black SNCC as separatist. Rather it was seen as the vanguard of a prospective "interracial movement of the poor". Accepting the Vine Street challenge, the goal was no longer integration but what Chicago [[Black Panther Party|Black Panther]] leader [[Fred Hampton]] was to project as the "rainbow coalition".<ref>{{cite journal|first=Manfred|last=McDowell|year=2013|title=A Step into America: the New Left Organizes the Neighborhood|journal=[[New Politics (magazine)|New Politics]]|volume=XIV|issue=2 |pages=133–141}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://newpol.org/review/step-america/|title=A Step into America – New Politics|date=10 February 2013 |language=en-US|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

In the South, as SNCC began turning them away white volunteers moved over to the New Orleans–based [[Southern Conference Education Fund]] with which Ella Baker had been working since the 1950s.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/scef/|title=Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF)|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> There, in effort to advance a coalition agenda, they joined [[Bob Zellner]], the SNCC's first white field organizer and son of a former Klansman, in working with [[Carl Braden|Carl]] and [[Anne Braden]] to organize white students and poor whites.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-zellner/|title=Bob Zellner|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref><ref>Bob Zellner (2008). ''The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement''. Montgomery, AL., New south Books.</ref>

===Opposition to the Vietnam War===
The Meredith shooting in June 1966 had been preceded in January by the killing of [[Sammy Younge Jr.]], the first black college student to be killed as a result of his involvement in the civil rights movement, and by the acquittal of his killer. SNCC took the occasion to denounce the [[Vietnam War]], the first statement of its kind by a major civil rights organization.<ref>[http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1669 "Samuel Younge Jr."] Encyclopedia of Alabama.</ref>

"The murder of Samuel Young in [[Tuskegee, Alabama]]," SNCC proposed, "is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths." In the face of a government that "has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders," where," it asked, "is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States." It could longer countenance the "hypocrisy" of a call upon "negroes ... to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a 'democracy' which does not exist for them at home."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/vietnam/|title=Vietnam|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

At an SDS-organized conference at [[UC Berkeley]] in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in the August 1965 [[Watts Riots|Watts Uprising]] and in the ghetto rebellions that followed had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC had first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and [[Waldo Martin]], SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power [and] emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appear to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"<ref>Joshua Bloom and [[Waldo Martin|Waldo E. Martin]], ''Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party'' (University of California Press, 2013), pp. 29, 41–42, 102–103, 128–130.</ref>

=== Criticism of Israel ===
In what [[Ralph Featherstone]], program head at the Atlanta office, presented as a contribution to a "third-world alliance" of the "oppressed", the June-July 1967 SNCC Newsletter published an article by the Committee's communications director, [[Ethel Minor]], embracing the Arab cause in the [[Six-Day War]].<ref name=":10">{{Cite news |last=Times |first=Gene Roberts Special To the New York |date=1967-08-15 |title=S.N.C.C. CHARGES ISRAEL ATROCITIES; Black Power Group Attacks Zionism as Conquering Arabs by 'Massacre' |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1967/08/15/archives/sncc-charges-israel-atrocities-black-power-group-attacks-zionism-as.html |access-date=2025-05-20 |work=The New York Times |language=en-US |issn=0362-4331}}</ref> Drawing heavily on a pamphlet published by the [[Palestine Research Center]], it asserted that [[Zionism|Zionists]] had conquered Arab land through "terror, force, and massacres" (a purported photograph of executions in 1956 carried the caption: "this is the [[Gaza Strip]], Palestine, not [[Dachau concentration camp|Dachau]], Germany"); that "Israel segregates those few Arabs who remained in their homeland . . . under martial law"; that "dark-skinned Jews from North Africa and the Middle East are also second class citizens"; and that the resulting state is "tool and foothold for American and British exploitation" in the region.<ref name=":10" /><ref name=":11">{{Cite book |last=Carson |first=Clayborne |url=https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/In_Struggle/Fm9v7KKj_UQC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq |title=In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=1981 |isbn=978-0674447271 |location=Cambridge MA |pages=266-269}}</ref> 

Anticipating swift condemnation from white liberals, the office head, Johnny Wilson, called a press conference to announce that the article did not represent SNCC’s official position. But a subsequent statement from the office in August, “The Middle-East Crisis”, broadly endorsed Minor's analysis while conceding the horrors of the [[The Holocaust|Holocaust]], and noting that were also Jewish voices critical of Zionism and Israeli policy.<ref name=":11" />

[[Seymour Martin Lipset]] was among the prominent Jewish friends of the movement outraged. Having heard King rebuke a student who echoed the SNCC line on “Zionists”, he suggested that, in contrast to SNCC, the SCLC leader “grasped the identity between anti-Israel politics and antisemitic ranting”.<ref>Martin Kramer (2016), [https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinkramer/files/words_of_martin_luther_king.pdf "In the Words of Martin Luther King,"] in Martin Kramer, ''The War on Error: Israel, Islam, and the Middle East.'' New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction (253-67) 263..</ref> For the historian, [[Clayborne Carson]], the controversy was further evidence that Carmichael and staff members in Atlanta were moving toward "racial separatist positions that discounted the possibility of future black-white coalitions".<ref name=":11" />

==1967–1968: Northern strategy and the split with Carmichael and the Panthers==
By early 1967, SNCC was approaching [[bankruptcy]]. The call for Black Power and the departure of white activists did not go down well with the liberal foundations and churches in the North. This was at a time when SNCC organizers were themselves heading North to the "ghettoes" where, as the urban riots of the mid-1960s had demonstrated, victories at lunch counters and ballot boxes in the South counted for little. Julian Bond recounts projects being:<ref name="what we did">Julian Bond (2000). [http://sncclegacyproject.org/we-were-sncc/what-we-did : What we did] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200123163926/http://www.sncclegacyproject.org/we-were-sncc/what-we-did |date=2020-01-23 }}.</ref><blockquote>...established in Washington, D.C., to fight for home rule; in Columbus, Ohio, where a community foundation was organized; in New York City's [[Harlem]], where SNCC workers organized early efforts at community control of public schools; in Los Angeles, where SNCC helped monitor local police and joined an effort at creating a 'Freedom City' in black neighborhoods; and in Chicago, where SNCC workers began to build an independent political party and demonstrated against segregated schools.</blockquote>As part of this northern community-organizing strategy, SNCC seriously considered an alliance with [[Saul Alinsky]]'s mainstream-church supported [[Industrial Areas Foundation]].<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/docs/alinsky.htm "Excerpt From SNCC Central Committee Meeting Regarding Forging a Relation With Saul Alinsky January, 1967"'], January 20, 1967.</ref> But Alinsky had little patience or understanding for SNCC's new rhetoric. On stage with Carmichael in Detroit, Alinsky was scathing when, pressed for an example of "Black Power", the SNCC leader cited the IAF's-mentored FIGHT community organization in [[Rochester, New York]]. The example was proof that Carmichael and his friends needed to stop "going round yelling 'Black Power!'" and "really go down and organize." It is simple, according to Alinsky: it's "called...community power, and if the community is black, it's black power."<ref>Sanford Horwitt (1989) ''Let Them Call Me Rebel: The Life and Legacy of Saul Alinsky''. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 508</ref>

In May 1967, Carmichael relinquished the SNCC chairmanship and speaking out against U.S. policy traveled to [[Cuba]], [[China]], [[North Vietnam]], and finally to [[Ahmed Sékou Touré]]'s [[Guinea]]. Returning to the United States in January 1968 he accepted an invitation to become honorary Prime Minister of the [[Black Panther Party]] for Self Defense. Inspired by John Hulet's stand and borrowing the [[Lowndes County Freedom Organization|LCFO]]'s black panther moniker, the party had been formed by [[Bobby Seale]] and [[Huey P. Newton|Huey Newton]] in [[Oakland, California]], in October 1966.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America|last=Joseph|first=Peniel|author-link=Peniel E. Joseph|publisher=Henry Holt|year=2006|page=219}}</ref> For Carmichael the goal was a nation-wide Black United Front.<ref>Span, Paula (April 8, 1998). "The Undying Revolutionary: As Stokely Carmichael, He Fought for Black Power. Now Kwame Ture's Fighting For His Life". ''The Washington Post''. p. D01.</ref>

Carmichael's replacement, [[H. Rap Brown]] (later known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) tried to hold what he now called the Student ''National'' Coordinating Committee to an alliance with the Panthers. Like Carmichael, Rap Brown had come to view nonviolence as a tactic rather than as a foundational principle. Violence, he famously quipped, was "as American as cherry pie".<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip_80-74qjqrq1|title=Comm; CBS Library of Contemporary Quotations; H. Rap Brown|website=American Archive of Public Broadcasting|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

In June 1968 the SNCC national executive emphatically rejected the association with the Black Panthers. This was followed in July by a "violent confrontation" in New York City with [[James Forman]], who had resigned as the Panther's Minister of Foreign Affairs and was then heading up the city's SNCC operation. In the course of a "heated discussion" Panthers accompanying Carmichael and [[Eldridge Cleaver]], the Panthers' Minister of Information,<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://nyage.net/forman_embodied_a_range_of_str.HTM|title=James Forman Tribute|date=2006-02-16|access-date=2019-12-17|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20060216221203/http://nyage.net/forman_embodied_a_range_of_str.HTM|archive-date=2006-02-16}}</ref> reportedly thrust a pistol into Forman's mouth.<ref name="Fraser">{{cite news |last1=Fraser |first1=C. Gerald |title=S.N.C.C. in decline after 8 years in the lead |url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/10/07/issue.html |access-date=10 January 2021 |work=[[The New York Times]] |date=October 7, 1968}}</ref> For Forman and SNCC this was "the last straw". Carmichael was expelled ("engaging in a power struggle" that "threatened the existence of the organization")<ref>Carson (1995). p. 292</ref>—and "Forman wound up first in hospital, and later in Puerto Rico, suffering from a nervous breakdown".<ref>[https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19680926&id=HcIwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KFwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6199,3660800 "SNCC Crippled by Defection of Carmichael"], ''Washington Post'' news service (''St. Petersburgh Times''), September 26, 1968.</ref><ref name="Fraser" />

The ''New York Times'' reported that it was the "opinion of most people in the movement" that the SNCC Carmichael had left was "pre-Watts", while the Panthers were "post-Watts". The 1965 [[Watts riots]] in Los Angeles, they believed, had marked  "the end of the middle-class-oriented civil right movement".<ref name="Fraser" />

Rap Brown himself resigned as SNCC chairman after being indicted for inciting to riot in [[Cambridge, Maryland]], in 1967. On March 9, 1970, two SNCC workers, [[Ralph Featherstone]] and William ("Che") Payne, died on a road approaching [[Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland|Bel Air, Maryland]], when a bomb on the front floorboard of their car exploded. The bomb's origin is disputed: some say the bomb was planted in an assassination attempt, and others say Payne was intentionally carrying it to the courthouse where Brown was to be tried.<ref>{{cite magazine |first=Todd |last=Holden |title=Bombing: A Way of Protest and Death |magazine=Time |date=1970-03-23 |url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943178-1,00.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110604114354/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,943178-1,00.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=June 4, 2011 |access-date=2010-02-14}}</ref>

==1969–1970: Dissolution==
{| style="font-size: 90%; border: 1px solid #a2a9b1; padding:0.2em; color: black; background-color: #f8f9fa; float:right;" 
|+ style="font-size: 1.25em;" |'''Chairmen of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee'''
|-
| [[Marion Barry]]
| 1960–61
|-
| [[Charles McDew|Charles F. McDew]]
| 1961–63
|-
| [[John Lewis]]
| 1963–66
|-
| [[Stokely Carmichael]]
| 1966–67
|-
| [[H. Rap Brown]] 
| 1967–68
|-
| Phil Hutchings 
| 1968–69
|-
|}
Ella Baker said that "SNCC came North at a time when the North was in a ferment that led to various interpretations on what was needed to be done. With its own frustrations, it could not take the pace-setter role it took in the South."<ref>C. Gerald Fraser, [https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19681008&id=WNhVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=H-EDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6905,1709713 "SNCC Has Lost Much of Its Power to Black Panthers"], ''New York Times'' news service (''Eugene Register-Guard''), October 9, 1968.</ref>

These "frustrations" may in part have been fed by undercover agents. Like other potentially "subversive" groups, SNCC had become a target of the Counterintelligence Program ([[COINTELPRO]]) of the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation]] (FBI).<ref name="mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu">[https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/student-nonviolent-coordinating-committee-sncc "Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee"], ''King Encyclopedia'', Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.</ref><ref>[https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/federal-bureau-investigation-fbi "Federal Bureau of Investigation"], ''King Encyclopedia'', Martin Luther King Jr Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.</ref><ref>{{Cite journal |last=Tyson |first=Pearline Marie |date=2010 |title=Fbi Paranoia: The Fbi's War Against Core & Sncc, 1956-1971 |url=https://mdsoar.org/handle/11603/10604 |language=en |doi=10.13016/M2XK84T29 |website=Maryland Shared Open Access Repository |access-date=July 23, 2024}}</ref> FBI Director [[J. Edgar Hoover]]'s general COINTELPRO directive was for agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities and leadership of the movements they infiltrated.<ref name="WRH">{{cite web |url=http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/COINTELPRO-FBI.docs.html |title=COINTELPRO Revisited – Spying & Disruption – In Black & White: The F.B.I. Papers |website=What Really Happened |access-date=2008-06-23 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080516220059/http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/COINTELPRO-FBI.docs.html |archive-date=2008-05-16 |url-status=live }}</ref>

By the beginning of 1970, surveillance had everywhere effectively ceased for lack of SNCC activity—save in New York City from where the last FBI report was filed in December 1973.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.roosevelt.nl/sites/zl-roosevelt/files/fbi_file_on_sncc.pdf|title=Guide to the Microfilm Edition of the FBI File on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A Microfilm Publication by SR: Scholarly Resources Inc. Wilmington. Accessed January 05, 2020|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023|archive-date=January 25, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125114436/https://www.roosevelt.nl/sites/zl-roosevelt/files/fbi_file_on_sncc.pdf|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=FBI File on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee |url=https://library.truman.edu/microforms/fbi_file_SNCC.asp |access-date=2022-05-16 |website=library.truman.edu |archive-date=2015-09-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150918221401/http://library.truman.edu/microforms/fbi_file_SNCC.asp |url-status=dead }}</ref>

Experienced organizers and staff had moved on. For many the years of "hard work at irregular, subsistence-level pay, in an atmosphere of constant tension" had been as much as they could bear.<ref name="what we did" /> Some went over to the Black Panthers. Others were to follow Forman into the Black Economic Development Council (whose key demand was [[Reparations for slavery debate in the United States|reparations]] for the nation's history of racial exploitation).<ref name="Christopher M. Richardson 2014 p. 181"/> A greater loss had been to the Democrats (it was after merging with the Alabama Democratic Party in 1970 that LCFO candidates began winning public offices, Hulett becoming county Sheriff)<ref name=":1">{{Cite web|url=http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1781|title=Lowndes County Freedom Organization|website=Encyclopedia of Alabama|language=en|access-date=August 3, 2020}}</ref> and to [[Lyndon Johnson]]'s [[War on Poverty]]. [[Charles E. Cobb Jr.|Charlie Cobb]] recalls:<ref>Rakim Brooks and Charles E. Cobb Jr.[http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/black-politics-and-the-establishment-an-interview-with-charles-e-cobb-jr "Black Politics and the Establishment"], ''Dissent: A Quarterly of Politics and Culture'', February 15, 2012.</ref> <blockquote>After we got the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964|Civil Rights Act in 1964]] and [[Voting Rights Act of 1965|Voting Rights Act in 1965]], a lot of groups that we had cultivated were absorbed into the Democratic Party ... a lot more money came into the states we were working in. A lot of the people we were working with became a part of [[Head Start program|Head Start]] and various kinds of poverty programs. We were too young to really know how to respond effectively. How could we tell poor [[sharecropper]]s or maids making a few dollars a day to walk away from poverty program salaries or stipends?</blockquote>

As their numbers diminished, SNCC veteran [[Clayborne Carson]] found staff cultivating the skills for "organizational infighting" rather than "those that had enabled SNCC to inspire thousands of people outside the group during its years of greatest influence." Attempting to gain the trust of beleaguered communities, "develop indigenous leadership, and build strong local institutions," was no longer regarded as sufficiently "revolutionary".<ref>Clayborne Carson (1995). ''In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s''. Harvard University Press. p. 287</ref>

The judgement of [[Charles McDew]], SNCC's second chairman (1961–1963), is that the organization was not designed to last beyond its mission of winning civil rights for blacks, and that at the founding meetings most participants expected it to last no more than five years:<ref>Kwame Ture and Michael Thelwell, [https://books.google.com/books?id=LpW9QV0MKC4C&q=First%2C_we_felt_if_we_go_more_than_five_years&pg=PA298 ''Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael''], Scribner, 2003, p. 297–298.</ref> 
<blockquote>First, we felt if we go more than five years without the understanding that the organization would be disbanded, we run the risk of becoming institutionalized or being more concerned with trying to perpetuate the organization and in doing so, giving up the freedom to act and to do. ... The other thing is that by the end of that time you'd either be dead or crazy …</blockquote>

By the time of its dissolution, many of the controversial ideas that once had defined SNCC's radicalism had become widely accepted among African Americans:<ref name="mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu" />

{{blockquote|A final SNCC legacy is the destruction of the psychological shackles which had kept black southerners in physical and mental peonage; SNCC helped break those chains forever. It demonstrated that ordinary women and men, young and old, could perform extraordinary tasks.|[[Julian Bond]]<ref name="Bond 2000">{{Cite news |last=Bond |first=Julian |title=SNCC: What We Did |newspaper=Monthly Review |date=October 2000 |url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_5_52/ai_66937932/print?tag=artBody;col1 |page=legacy}}</ref>}}

==Women in the SNCC==
[[File:Anne Moody.jpg|thumb|Anne Moody in the 1970s]]

In impressing upon the young student activists the principle "those who do the work, make the decisions," [[Ella Baker]] had hoped the SNCC would avoid the SCLC's reproduction of the organization and experience of the church: women form the working body and men assume the headship.<ref name="abu-jamal">[[Mumia Abu-Jamal|Abu-Jamal, Mumia]]. ''We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party''. [[South End Press]]: Cambridge, 2004. p. 159</ref> In SNCC black women did emerge as among the movement's most dynamic and courageous organizers and thinkers.

In addition to [[Diane Nash]], [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson|Ruby Doris Smith Robinson]], [[Fannie Lou Hamer]], [[Oretha Castle Haley]], and others already mentioned, these women included Tuskegee student-body president, [[Gwen Patton]]; Mississippi Delta field secretary, Cynthia Washington; [[Sammy Younge]]'s teacher, Jean Wiley; head of COFO's Mississippi operations, [[Muriel Tillinghast]]; [[Natchez, Mississippi]], project director [[Dorie Ladner]], and her sister [[Joyce Ladner|Joyce]] who, in the violence of Mississippi (and having worked with [[Medgar Evers]]), regarded their own arrests as "about the least harmful thing" that could occur;<ref>Joyce Ladner interviewed, [https://web.archive.org/web/20010112164100/http://www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/filmandmore/transcript3.html "Show Transcripts – Episode 3: Photography Transformed (1960–1999), Civil Rights"]. ''American Photography: A Century of Images''. PBS. Retrieved July 11, 2013.</ref> Annie Pearl Avery, who when organizing in Natchez carried a gun;<ref>{{Cite web |title=Annie Pearl Avery |url=https://snccdigital.org/people/annie-pearl-avery/ |website=Digital SNCC Gateway}}</ref> MDFP state-senate candidate [[Victoria Gray Adams|Victoria Gray]]; MFDP delegate [[Unita Blackwell]]; leader of the [[Cambridge Movement (civil rights)|Cambridge Movement]] [[Gloria Richardson]]; [[Bernice Johnson Reagon|Bernice Reagon]] of the [[Albany Movement]]'s [[Freedom Singers]]; womanist theologian [[Prathia Hall]]; LCFO veteran and ''[[Eyes on the Prize]]'' associate producer [[Judy Richardson]]; [[Ruby Sales]], for whom [[Jonathan Daniels]] took a fatal shot-gun blast in Hayneville, Alabama; [[Fay Bellamy]], who ran the Selma, Alabama office; the singer [[Bettie Mae Fikes]] ("the Voice of Selma"); playwright [[Endesha Ida Mae Holland]]; [[Eleanor Holmes Norton]], first chair of the [[Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]]; and [[sharecropper]]s' daughter and author (''[[Coming of Age in Mississippi]]'') [[Anne Moody]].

Anne Moody recalls it was the women did the work: young black women college students and teachers were the mainstay of voter registration and of the summer [[Freedom Schools]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Moody|first1=Anne|title=Coming of Age in Mississippi|date=1968|publisher=Bantam Dell|location=New York}}</ref> Women were also the expectation when looking for local leadership. "There was always a 'mama'," one SNCC activist recalled,"usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding and willing to catch hell."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Countryman |first1=Matthew |title=Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia |date=2006 |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |isbn=9780812220025 |location=Philadelphia |page=183}}</ref>

From the outset white students, veterans of college-town sit-ins, had been active in the movement. Among them were Ella Baker's [[YWCA]] proteges [[Casey Hayden]] and [[Mary King (professor)|Mary King]]. As a Southerner (as were the other white women first drawn to SNCC),<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Browning |first=Joan |date=2017-12-31 |title=White Women in the 1960s Freedom Movement, From Memory to History: The writing of "Shiloh Witness," a chapter in Deep in Our Hearts (2000) |url=https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/9993?lang=en |journal=Transatlantica. Revue d'études américaines. American Studies Journal |language=en |issue=2 |doi=10.4000/transatlantica.9993 |issn=1765-2766|doi-access=free }}</ref> Hayden regarded the "Freedom Movement Against Segregation" as much hers as "anyone else's"—"It was my freedom." But when working full-time in the black community, she was nonetheless conscious of being "a guest." (For this reason it was important to Hayden that an opportunity in 1963 to work alongside [[Doris Derby]] in starting a literacy project at [[Tougaloo College]], Mississippi, had come to her "specifically" because she had the educational qualifications).<ref name="Casey Hayden 2015 p. 65"/> Having dropped out of [[Duke University]], Freedom Rider [[Joan Trumpauer Mulholland]] graduated from Tougaloo, the first white student to do so. The majority of white women drawn to the movement, however, would have been those from the north who responded to the call for volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Among the few that might have had obvious qualifications was [[Susan Brownmiller]], then a journalist. She had worked on a voter registration drive in [[East Harlem]] and organized with [[Congress of Racial Equality|CORE]].<ref>[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brownmiller-time.html Susan Brownmiller (1999) ''In Our Time Memoir of a Revolution'' Dail Books. "The Founders"]. Excerpt in ''The New York Times''.</ref>

==="Sex and Caste"===
Among the Position Papers circulated at Waveland conference in 1964, number 24 ("name withheld by request") opened with the observation that the "large committee" formed to present "crucial constitutional revisions" to the staff "was all men." After cataloguing a number of other instances in which women appear to have been sidelined, it went on to suggest that "assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro."<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc43.htm|title=Document 43, Position Paper #24, (women in the movement), November 1964, Waveland, Mississippi|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

This paper was not the first time women had raised questions about their roles in SNCC.  In the spring of 1964, a group of black and white SNCC staffers had sat-in at James Forman's office in Atlanta to protest at being burdened, and stymied in their contributions, by the assumption that it was they, the women, who would see to minute taking and other mundane office, and housekeeping, tasks: "No More Minutes Until Freedom Comes to the Atlanta Office" was [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson]]'s placard. Like Mary King,<ref>Lynne Olson (2001). ''Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970''. Simon & Schuster. p. 334</ref> [[Judy Richardson]] recalls the protest as being "half playful (Forman actually appearing supportive), although "the other thing was, we're not going to do this anymore."<ref name=":6">{{Cite web|url=https://scalar.usc.edu/works/sex-and-caste-at-50/1964-sncc-position-paper-on-women-in-the-movement|title=Sex and Caste at 50: 1964 SNCC Position Paper on Women in the Movement|website=Sex and Caste at 50|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> The same might be said of the Waveland paper itself. With so many women themselves "insensitive" to the "day-to-day discriminations" (who is asked to take minutes, who gets to clean Freedom House), the paper concluded that, "amidst the laughter," further discussion might be the best that could be hoped for.<ref name=":6" />

At the time, and in "the Waveland setting," [[Casey Hayden]], who with Mary King was soon outed as one of the authors, regarded the paper as "definitely an aside".<ref>{{Cite web|last=Hayden|first=Casey|author-link=Casey Hayden|date=2010|title=In the Attics of My Mind|url=https://www.crmvet.org/comm/hayden.htm |access-date=2020-12-29|website=[[Civil Rights Movement Archive]]|type=Written for ''Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC''}}</ref> But in the course of 1965, while working on leave for the SDS organizing women in Chicago, Hayden was to reconsider. Seeking to further "dialogue within the movement," Hayden circulated an extended version of the "memo" among 29 SNCC women veterans and, with King, had it published in the [[War Resisters League]] magazine ''Liberation'' under the title "Sex and Caste". Employing the movement's own rhetoric of race relations, the article suggested that, like African Americans, women can find themselves "caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/revisiting.htm|title=Revisiting "A Kind of Memo" from Casey Hayden and Mary King (1965)|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc86A.htm|title=Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason) and Mary King, "Sex and Caste," 18 November 1965|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> Viewed as a bridge between civil rights and women's liberation, "Sex and Caste" has since been regarded as a "key text of [[second-wave feminism]]."<ref>Jacobs, E (2007), ' Revisiting the Second Wave: In Conversation with Mary King ' ''Meridians'', vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 102–116 .</ref><ref name="Document98"/>

===Black Women's Liberation===
The two other women subsequently identified as having direct authorship of the original position paper on women  (which has sometimes been mistakenly attributed to Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson),<ref>Yates, Gayle Graham (1975). ''What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-674-95079-5}}. pp. 6–7</ref> Elaine Delott Baker and Emmie Schrader Adams, were also white. This, it has been suggested, was the reflection of a movement culture that gave Black women greater opportunity "to protest directly".<ref name="auto2"/> That white women chose an anonymous paper was testimony, in effect, to the "unspoken understanding of who should speak up at meetings" that Delott Baker had identified when she joined Hayden in Mississippi in 1964.<ref name=Document98 /> But many black women were to dispute the degree and significance of male-domination within the SNCC, denying that it had excluded them from leadership roles.<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/disc/women1.htm Women & Men in the Freedom Movement] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref>  Joyce Ladner's recollection of organizing [[Freedom Summer]] is of "women's full participation,"<ref>Joyce Ladner (2014), [https://www.crmvet.org/comm/ladner14.htm "Mississippi Movement Set Example for Female Leaders"]. Originally published in ''Jackson Clarion Ledger'', June 29, 2014.</ref> and [[Jean Smith Young|Jean Wheeler Smith's]] of doing in SNCC "anything I was big enough to do."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/jean-wheeler/|title=Jean Wheeler|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref>

Historian [[Barbara Ransby]] dismisses, in particular, the suggestion that in its concluding Black Power period SNCC diminished the profile of women within the movement. She points out that [[Stokely Carmichael]] appointed several women to posts as project directors during his tenure as chairman, and that in the latter half of the 1960s, more women were in charge of SNCC projects than during the early years.<ref>Barbara Ransby, ''Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision'' (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 310–11.</ref> On the other hand, Hayden, in the position paper she presented under her own name at Waveland, "On Structure", had seen herself defending [[Ella Baker]]'s original participatory vision in which women's voices are heard precisely because decision making is not dependent on formal rank position but rather on actual work and commitment,<ref>Smith, Harold L. (2015). "Casey Hayden: Gender and the Origins of SNCC, SDS, and the Women's Liberation Movement". In Turner, Elizabeth Hayes; Cole, Stephanie; Sharpless, Rebecca (eds.). Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. University of Georgia Press. pp. 295–318. {{ISBN|9780820347905}}</ref> and a movement culture that she recalls as "womanist, nurturing, and familial."<ref>Casey Hayden (2010). "In the Attics of My Mind."</ref>

[[Frances M. Beal]] (who worked with SNCC's International Affairs Commission and its [[National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union]]) is in no doubt that as the SNCC moved away from "sustained community organizing toward Black Power propagandizing that was accompanied by increasing male dominance."<ref>{{Cite book|title=Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia|editor-last=Hine |editor-first=Darlene Clark |others=Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, associate editors |publisher=Carlson Pub|year=1993|isbn=978-0926019614|location=Brooklyn, New York |url=https://archive.org/details/blackwomeninamer00hine |url-access=registration}}</ref> (Beal and others objected to the [[James Forman]]'s initial enthusiasm for the [[Black Panther Party]], judging [[Eldridge Cleaver]]'s [[Soul on Ice (book)|''Soul on Ice'']], which he brought back to the office, to be the work of a "thug" and a rapist).<ref>Frances Beal interview (May 6, 2015). [http://www.thestreetspirit.org/frances-beal-a-voice-for-peace-racial-justice-and-the-rights-of-women/ "Frances Beal: A Voice for Peace, Racial Justice and the Rights of Women".]</ref> "You're talking about liberation and freedom half the night on the racial side," she recalls of her time in the SNCC, "and then all of a sudden men are going to turn around and start talking about putting you in your place. So in 1968 we founded the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee to take up some of these issues."<ref name=":3">{{cite web|url=http://www.shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com/the-film/|title=The Film — She's Beautiful When She's Angry|publisher=Shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com|access-date=2017-04-28}}</ref>

With the SNCC's breakup, the Black Women's Liberation Committee became first the Black Women's Alliance and then, following an approach by revolutionary Puerto-Rican women activists, the [[Third World Women's Alliance]] in 1970.<ref name=":3" /><ref name=":4">{{Cite book|title=The Movements of the New Left, 1950–1975: A Brief History with Documents|last=Gosse |first=Van|publisher=Bedford/St. Martin's|year=2005|isbn=978-1403968043|location=Boston|pages=131–133}}</ref> Active for another decade, the TWWA was one of the earliest groups advocating an [[intersectional]] approach to women's oppression—"the triple oppression of race, class and gender."<ref name="Springer1999b">{{cite book|first=Kimberly|last=Springer|title=Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African American Women's Activism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Jq-gCmP1CQsC&pg=PT113|year=1999|publisher=NYU Press|isbn=978-0-8147-8124-1|page=113}}</ref>

[[Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons|Gwendolyn Delores Robinson/Zoharah Simmons]], who co-authored the Vine Street Project paper on Black Power, was struck by the contrast between the SNCC and her subsequent experience of the [[Nation of Islam]]: "there was really no place for a woman to exercise what I considered real leadership as it had been in SNCC." Breaking with the NOI's strict gendered hierarchy, she went on to identify, teach and write as an "Islamic feminist".<ref name=":2">{{Cite book|title=Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West|date=2006|publisher=University of Texas Press|editor-last=Nieuwkerk |editor-first=Karin van |isbn=9780292712737|edition=1st |location=Austin|oclc=614535522}}</ref>

On top of seeking to increase African-American access to land through a pioneer [[Freedom Farm Cooperative]], in 1971 [[Fannie Lou Hamer]] co-founded the [[National Women's Political Caucus]]. She emphasized the power women might have acting as a voting majority in the country regardless of race or ethnicity: "A white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is they haven't had as many problems. But we cry the same tears."<ref>Mills, Kay (April 2007). [https://web.archive.org/web/20150311160112/http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/51/fannie-lou-hamer-civil-rights-activist "Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Activist"]. Mississippi History Now. Mississippi Historical Society. Archived from the original on March 11, 2015. Retrieved January 1, 2020.</ref> The NWPC continues to recruit, train and support "women candidates for elected and appointed offices at all levels of government" who are "[[pro-choice]]" and who support a federal [[Equal Rights Amendment]] (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.<ref>[https://www.nwpc.org/politicalaction/ National Women's Political Action Caucus]. Retrieved January 1, 2020.</ref>

==References==
{{Reflist}}

==Further reading==
===Archives===
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20050411231413/http://www.lib.usm.edu/~archives/m323.htm Ellin (Joseph and Nancy) Freedom Summer Collection]. Collection Number: M323. Dates: 1963 – 1988. Volume: 1.7&nbsp;ft³ (48 L) 
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20050308164554/http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/index.php The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections]. Retrieved May 2, 2005.
*[https://depts.washington.edu/moves/SNCC_intro.shtml SNCC History and Geography] from the Mapping American Social Movements Project at the University of Washington.
*[https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/cointel-pro-black-extremists FBI COINTELPRO Black Extremist Records], a series of archival documents from the FBI that explicitly target SNCC and Stokely Carmichael for suppression.

===Books===
*Carmichael, Stokely, and [[Michael Thelwell]]. ''Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)''. Scribner, 2005. 848 pages. {{ISBN|0-684-85004-4}}
*Carson, Claybourne. ''In Struggle, SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s''. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981. {{ISBN|0-674-44727-1}}
*Forman, James. ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries'', 1985 and 1997, Open Hand Publishing, Washington D.C. {{ISBN|0-295-97659-4}} and {{ISBN|0-940880-10-5}}
*Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. ''A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC''. Rutgers University Press, 1998. 274 pages. {{ISBN|0-8135-2477-6}}
*Halberstam, David. ''The Children'', Ballantine Books, 1999. {{ISBN|0-449-00439-2}}
* Hamer, Fannie Lou, [https://books.google.com/books?id=yHD3UlfZAFMC ''The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell it Like it is''], University Press of Mississippi, 2011. {{ISBN|9781604738230}}.
*''Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement'', University of Georgia Press, 2002. {{ISBN|0-8203-2419-1}}
* Holsaert, Faith; [[Martha Prescod Norman Noonan]], Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, [http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/54yed3wd9780252035579.html ''Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC'']. University of Illinois Press, 2010. {{ISBN|978-0-252-03557-9}}.
*Hogan, Wesley C. ''How Democracy travels: SNCC, Swarthmore students, and the growth of the student movement in the North, 1961–1964''.
*Hogan, Wesley C. ''Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America,'' University of North Carolina Press. 2007.
*King, Mary. "Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement". 1987.
*[[John Lewis|Lewis, John]]. ''Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement''. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1998.
*[[w:Elizabeth Martínez|Martínez, Elizabeth]]. ''Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers and Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer''. Zephyr Press.
*Pardun, Robert. ''Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties''. California: Shire Press. 2001. 376 pages. {{ISBN|0-918828-20-1}}
*Ransby, Barbara. ''[http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=270 Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151222131710/http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=270 |date=2015-12-22 }}.'' University of North Carolina Press. 2003.
*Salas, Mario Marcel. Masters Thesis: "Patterns of Persistence: Paternal Colonialist Structures and the Radical Opposition in the African American Community in San Antonio, Texas, 1937–2001", University of Texas at San Antonio, John Peace Library 6900 Loop 1604, San Antonio, Texas, 2002. Other SNCC material located in historical records at the Institute of Texan Cultures, University of Texas at San Antonio as part of the Mario Marcel Salas historical record.
*[[Cleveland Sellers|Sellers, Cleveland]], and Robert Terrell. ''The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC''. University Press of Mississippi; 1990 reprint. 289 pages. {{ISBN|0-87805-474-X}}
*[[Howard Zinn|Zinn, Howard]]. ''[[SNCC: The New Abolitionists]]''. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. {{ISBN|0-89608-679-8}}
*[[Charles M. Payne|Payne, Charles M.]] ''[[I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle]]'', 2nd edition. {{ISBN|0-52025-176-8}}

===Video===
*[http://newsreel.org/video/SNCC-50TH-ANNIVERSARY SNCC 50th Anniversary Conference] 38 DVD collection documenting the formal addresses, panel discussions and programs that took place at the 50th anniversary conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8ayZYDGWrg Eighth Annual Forum on Women in Leadership Then and Now: Women in the Civil Rights Leadership], Joyce Ladner is one of the panelists and shares many stories about SNCC

===Interviews===
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20010228005259/http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/oh/shaw.htm Transcript: ''An Oral History with Terri Shaw'']. SNCC member and Freedom Summer participant. [https://web.archive.org/web/20050308164554/http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/index.php The University of Southern Mississippi Libraries Special Collections]. Retrieved May 2, 2005.
*''Interviews with civil rights workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)''. Stanford University Project South oral history collection. Microfilming Corp. of America. 1975. {{ISBN|0-88455-990-4}}.
* [https://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/ ''Who Speaks for the Negro'' Vanderbilt documentary website]

===Publications and documents===
*[http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SNCC_founding.html Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founding Statement].
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20090107192812/http://anna.lib.usm.edu/%7Espcol/crda/ellin/ellin062.html ''Memorandum: on the SNCC Mississippi Summer Project'' Transcript]. Oxford, Ohio: General Materials (c. June 1964). Retrieved May 2, 2005.

==Gallery==
<gallery class="center">
File:Sncc one man one vote.png| [[One man, one vote]] button which was probably worn at an SNCC event 
File:1000 students wanted for the SNCC Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (26276560142).jpg
File:Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons.jpg| Photograph of [[Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons]], taken during 2011 oral history interview. 
File:March-on-washington-jobs-freedom-program.jpg
File:Timothy Lionel Jenkins.jpg
File:Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. (Leaders of the march) - NARA - 542056.jpg|[[John Lewis]] representing SNCC at the [[Civil Rights March on Washington]] in 1963
</gallery>

=== H. Rap Brown ===
{{main|H. Rap Brown}}

<gallery class="center">
 File:D011778h.gif
 H. Rap Brown, SNCC (i.e., Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), news conf(erence) (LOC) (15356484161).jpg
</gallery>

=== Unita Blackwell ===
{{main|Unita Blackwell}}

<gallery class="center">
 Mrs. Unita Blackwell (26343047306).jpg
 Unita Blackwell.jpg
</gallery>

==External links==
{{Commonscat}}
{{Wikiquote}}
*[http://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/resources/scpc-cdg-a-student_nonviolent_coordinating_committ Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Collected Records], [[Swarthmore College]] Peace Collection 
*[https://snccdigital.org The SNCC Digital Gateway]
*[https://depts.washington.edu/moves/SNCC_project.shtml The SNCC Project: A Year by Year History 1960–1970]
*[https://depts.washington.edu/moves/SNCC_intro.shtml SNCC Actions 1960–1970] (map)
*[http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/index.html SNCC 1960 – 1966: Six years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. Retrieved May 2, 2005.
*[https://www.crmvet.org crmvet.org] - the official website for the [[Civil Rights Movement Archive]]
*[http://www.crmvet.org/docs/orgsdocs.htm#docssncc SNCC Documents] Online collection of original SNCC documents ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.
*[http://crdl.usg.edu/events/americus_movement/ Americus Movement], Civil Rights Digital Library.
*[https://www.sncclegacyproject.org/projects/one-person-one-vote The Story of SNCC] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200920161202/http://www.sncclegacyproject.org/projects/one-person-one-vote |date=2020-09-20 }}, ''One Person, One Vote'' Project
*[https://rose.library.emory.edu/ Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library], Emory University: [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/f7f3p Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee collection 1964–1989]
*[http://www.zinnedproject.org/news/teaching-about-sncc Teaching in Dangerous Times: Lessons from SNCC] (w/ Courtland Cox, Jennifer Lawson, and Judy Richardson), from the Teach the Black Freedom Struggle online series


{{Sit-in movement}}
{{Civil rights movement}}
{{African American topics}}
{{Authority control}}

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