Civil Rights in America: SNCC’s 50th Anniversary
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) celebrated its 50th reunion last weekend. SNCC played a major role in the sit-ins, freedom rides, voter registration drives and marches that defined the American Civil Rights movement.
Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Taylor Branch says SNCC’s role in shaping America is as essential as that of the Founding Fathers. He reports from the conference.
interviewed by Susan Lehman
Susan Lehman: John Lewis, Julian Bond, Charles Cobb, Ruby Sales, Dave Dennis and other SNCC veterans gathered at Shaw University last weekend. What most surprised you about the 50th Anniversary conference?
Taylor Branch: What was most surprising was how many people showed up. SNCC people are notoriously argumentative. They are dying out. They are scattered all over the place. And yet, I don’t know the precise number, but it seemed to me there were more than a thousand people there.
SL: How do you explain the big turnout?
TB: There is a hunger for what is fundamental. A lot of people think our national politics is out of whack. SNCC addressed problems that no one thought could be solved, and risked their lives doing it. They know they deserve credit for this. And I think they are alarmed about what is happening in the country. Apart from all this, there was probably a sense that for a lot of them, this is their last shot to get together with people they were bosom buddies with 50 years ago. If it’s a 50th, and you miss it, you can’t plausibly say, “Hmm, I’ll skip this one and go to the 60th!
SL: How would you characterize SNCC’s legacy?
TB: SNCC played a far larger and more positive role in American history than is commonly appreciated. Correctly viewed -- and historically viewed -- the SNCC people shoved into motion an awful lot of freedoms that changed the country in fundamental ways we take for granted today. This extends far beyond eliminating segregation.
SNCC helped end -- literally -- the spirit of terror in a whole region of the country where people were afraid in a meeting room or a living room, or a downtown place that had any mixed presence. Doing so made people’s hands sweat. Because violence was ever present. People were getting beaten up, killed and insulted and there was a lot of hatred running through the land. SNCC’s witness eliminated this and also changed the partisan structure of politics in the whole country.
By winning the right to vote for black people, SNCC helped create the two-party South. It also helped create – or stimulate – prosperity in the South, which was impossible while the South was gnarled up enforcing segregation. The region was not fit for major-league sports teams, then, as soon as segregation was eliminated, sports teams – the Atlanta Braves and Miami Dolphins teams sprouted up, and the Sun Belt was born. There were all kinds of blessings for lots of people. And not just black and white people, but for women and the disabled. The women’s movement and a whole host of movements that followed came out of a fundamental struggle over questions about what equal citizenship means, what the role of politics is, and the responsibility of every student.
Properly viewed – and history will one day see it this way – the Civil Rights movement in general, and SNCC people as the young shock troops, playing the same role as the Founding Fathers did. They confronted systems of hierarchy and oppression, and set into motion a new politics of equal citizenship that benefited everybody.
On the uses of nonviolence
SL: What can be learned from SNCC’s successes in eliminating racial desegregation?
TB: The overwhelming lesson is that they grounded themselves in nonviolence and in the notion that people will respond to the moral values of equal citizenship and democracy and basic religious morality, if it’s dramatized sufficiently. And they discovered a kind of nuclear energy in nonviolent witness from the sit-ins to the voting rights era. That’s a pretty big discovery.
SL: Is there anything in contemporary American political life that suggests nonviolence could be as powerful a force now as it was during the Civil Rights Movement?
TB: All political agitation is a form of nonviolence and political debate will win out in the end. But I don’t see any contagious movements of nonviolence. One of my biggest complaints when I got to universities is that no one is studying nonviolence. Here you had a movement that came out from the weakest and most invisible segment of society in civil rights; it was a movement that adopted nonviolence and really shoved society -- against its own will -- in a direction of profound and beneficial reform. Yet nonviolence isn’t studied. It’s a travesty that you can go on university campuses in the politics department and find people writing dissertations on minor attack ads in a campaign but not studying something as sweeping as the changes eight-year-old girls wrought on the national psyche by walking in front of dogs and fire hoses. This is a pretty remarkable thing. We are the oldest experimental democracy, and whole idea of democracy is to settle disagreements by vote instead of the sword. The vote -- as Dr. King used to say -- is an act of nonviolence. It’s not a totally marginal issue.
SL: Speaking of voting and marginalization -- If patterns of felony disenfranchisement persist, we’ll have a higher level of disenfranchisement among African Americans in a few years, than we did at the time the Voting Rights Act passed.
TB: This is a political issue that needs to be addressed. Certainly the direction of American history from the inception has been to widen the franchise, not to narrow it. If we are actually narrowing it in a significant or politically important way, that is a turn backwards in history and we should be very skeptical and watchful about that.
SL: Attorney General Eric Holder delivered the keynote address at the SNCC conference. What role did government play in SNCC’s understanding of the path to justice?
TB: This was an issue of tension between SNCC and Dr. King. Dr. King always tried to knit together the pressure from the movement with results through politics. He was always looking for way to outlaw segregation and secure voting rights, legally. The legal part mattered. King tried to keep the movement together, and, at the same time, he negotiated with all three branches of government to move towards a voting rights law. For King, the whole purpose of movement was to gain some footholds in law. SNCC started that way, but was so disillusioned by the slow performance of the federal government -- and the fact that the federal government that had been so slow to move on Civil Rights was that it was starting the war in Vietnam -- that they disregarded the legal aspect. As an historical matter, I think this is why King lasted longer. SNCC came apart when it scorned the delicate task of keeping movement going and getting a political response.
SL: Was SNCC a racially-mixed organization?
TB: It was almost entirely black from 1960 – 1964. Those were important years. But then when they made the enormously controversial and philosophically fraught decision to bring 600 white college students down for freedom summer, a lot of them stayed on, and to a large degree threatened to swamp SNCC in inter-racialism. It was not smooth. Part of the inner struggle of SNCC to this day was they professed to be above the race issue, but in the crucible of risk and trying to work together across unfamiliar cultures, there was a lot of friction. It was controversial at this reunion to use the symbol of white and black hands clasped, which was SNCC’s original symbol. The symbol was anachronistic. In the end, SNCC ended up being an all-black organization. The reunion was about 90% black.
SL: You have written about the way history and myth-making impede progress. Could you say a bit about how this happens?
TB: Race is a powerful engine of dangerous myth in American history. To some degree, it is today: a lot of the Tea Party animus is undigested 1960’s resentment that people are called upon to act outside their comfort level with people from different backgrounds and races, and that government is forcing them to do this. And this is why they don’t like the government. And because it is subliminal and emotional, it’s not ever said directly. A fantasy is being fed to them: that if it weren’t for the government, they could be totally comfortable, would be wealthy and not have problems. It has a lot of a success-church mythology sprinkled with an awful lot of federal-government-is-the-instrument-of-scary-minorities-and-foreigners, and to that degree that kind of mythology. Some of those same people are totally blind to all the benefits – even to the white southerners – that the Civil Rights movement brought to them.
The Future
SL: Harry Belafonte said, during the speech he gave at the conference, that "no one should leave without a passionate idea about what to do now." What ideas or issues galvanized most passion?
TB: The issue of education and non-functional schools, particularly in cities was a big issue. Bob Moses, one of the most powerful forces in SNCC, has been working on education issues for years. There was a lot of interest in prisons and the burgeoning prison population. There are two million people in jail; reasons for this has something do with sentencing disparities of sentencing, and the effect of the drug war in imprisoning people for nonviolent crime. The two issues of prison and youth education dovetailed with some people who were upset about fact that younger and younger kids, particularly black kids, are incarcerated right out of school. A lot of people were interested in peace issues and in the question of why we are continually fighting wars, and, the question of whether there is a correlation between our having government’s tilt towards increased executive power and the national security state, and the fact that not only have we been involved in more long-standing wars, but also that we are losing them.
When I saw Eric Holder, I felt badly that people like myself and SNCC didn’t applaud him and step up to offer support when he announced plans to try 9/11 people in civilian courts. This was to me, in a SNCC way that has to do with questions about what fundamental democracy is, a courageous step. Essentially Holder was saying: “We are not afraid to test our values in the open by putting our case there and allowing defense to have its case, and that is what the American system is about. And to fear that this might fail or be dangerous is a step backward from our values and a surrender to those who equate democracy with militarization.”
SL: The Attorney General hasn’t officially retreated from his announced decision to try the 9/11 case in civilian court. So it’s not too late to stand up and voice support.
TB: You’re right. I came out of the Holder speech thinking that if SNCC wanted to write him a letter I’d do what I could, and if anyone announced a march in support of that decision, I will try to attend.
SL: After four days what do you think was the ratio, amongst conference-goers, of hope to hopelessness or just fatigue?
TB: I didn’t sense a lot of hopelessness. I sensed something more like determination and sprit. There were a lot of people who said, “When we started SNCC, there wasn’t a lot of conscious talk about how that this was going to change the South. The first thought was we couldn’t put up with it any more and that we simply wanted to do something that would show we disagreed. And not necessarily because we predicted it would lead to the kind of change it did.” People started this because they wanted to make a witness or because something welled up in them. That’s what a movement is. It wasn’t calculated. Something reminiscent of that spirit was present over the weekend.
SL: Last question: you used your panel to talk about how SNCC doesn’t take sufficient credit for the profound changes it brought. What difference does it make if SNCC -- and its accomplishments -- are fully understood?
TB: SNCC doesn’t claim the breadth of its impact. And this hurts not only SNCC’s own reputation, but contemporary politics as well. It leaves a gap. People should be a lot more optimistic about what you can achieve in politics than they are today. The Pew organization just released a study that says a huge percentage of people disparage government and say it is worthless and you can’t do anything about it. If everyone had a true appreciation of breadth of changes spawned by the Civil Rights movement in general -- and by SNCC in particular -- it would be hard to justify that level of cynicism and opposition.
Taylor Branch is the author of, among many other books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters.
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