By George E. Curry

Brave activists who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the group’s founding Thursday through Sunday in Raleigh, N.C.

When they return to the city of their birth, they will undoubtedly regale one another with tales from the civil rights battlefields. They will recount the many times SNCC workers came frighteningly close to being murdered while living in the homes of local residents and existing on $10-a-week salaries.

They will recall how SNCC successfully empowered African-Americans in small, rural communities such as Lowndes County, Alabama and McComb, Mississippi. Organizers will detail the rise of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the seating of the state’s all-White delegation to the party’s national convention. And no SNCC gathering would be complete without reflecting on Freedom Summer, the 1964 campaign to establish Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Delta and deploy northern college students, most of them White, throughout the state to register African-Americans to vote; at 6.7 percent, the Magnolia State had the lowest Black voter registration rate in the nation.

Many of the movement rebels went on to become household names: Former SNCC Chairman John Lewis and field organizer Eleanor Holmes Norton are members of Congress. Marion Barry, the first chairman of SNCC, would later become mayor of Washington, D.C., Julian Bond, who crafted the group’s message as communications director, would later serve as board chairman of the NAACP.

Other alumni would also distinguish themselves. Cleveland Sellers is president of Voorhees College in Denmark, S.C. Joyce Ladner is a noted sociologist. Charles Cobb, Jr., a key field secretary, is a well-respected writer and activist. Bob Moses, the director of the Mississippi Summer Project, has improved math literacy in more than 200 schools across the nation through his Algebra Project.

Though the old SNCC hands have since taken different routes to success, they began as young, idealistic organizers in the 1960s, a period that ushered in lunch counter sit-ins to break the back of racial segregation, Freedom Rides throughout the South to desegregate interstate transportation and featured traditional civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, that at the time focused more on integration than independent grassroots political and economic empowerment.

“SNCC was committed to organizing from the bottom up in the rural Black Belt South, thus transferring the power and authority of the southern freedom movement from national headquarters above the Mason-Dixon Line [the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that separated free states from slave-holding states and is still used as a marker to distinguish the North from the South] to areas where people had traditionally been spoken for by others found their own voices and began speaking for themselves, ” Charles Cobb explained.

That did not mean SNCC, which was seeking fundamental structural changes in America, was in direct competition with older civil rights organizations. In fact, the conference of student activists, from which SNCC emerged in 1960,was convened by Ella Baker, a legendary civil rights activist, on the behalf of SCLC.

“As black students became more involved in the lunch counter sit-in movement that began in 1960, they acquired new perspectives for viewing American society and its prevailing cultural and political values,” Clayborne Carson wrote in his book, In the Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, “…Because SNCC so clearly reflected the emergent values of an expanding social struggle, it became a gathering point for idealistic young people, who saw in it a unique outlet for expressing their resentment of racial injustice.”

Julian Bond put it this way: “SNCC captured the energy and passion of young people and turned them toward a missing link in the ‘60s movement – community organizing. It went against the conventional wisdom held by other civil rights organizations – that segregation in the Deep South could not be attacked from within but had to be attacked from the outside. SNCC went to the heart of the beast and prevailed.”

James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC, was a decade older than those around him and helped bring organizational structure to the upstart organization.

“When it comes to SNCC there are two important things to understand: the convergence of young people with old veterans of the civil rights struggle who were willing to share their experiences and open up to us network*s*they had developed years before we came on the scene,” Charles Cobb explained. “And secondly, what you see in SNCC is young people challenge each other to do something.”

A key to SNCC’s success was its trust in local residents — and their trust in the young Turks. Black southerners had grown up in an era of fear and knew that by participating in the movement, they were risking their jobs, their homes and indeed their lives. SNCC organizers worked to strengthen their voices, not usurp them.

More than any other civil rights organization, SNCC field secretaries lived with the people they were striving to serve. According to Bond, the NAACP had one field secretary each in South Carolina, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi as well as a regional office in Atlanta. SNCC, on the other hand, had 60 field secretaries, including 11 in Southwest Georgia in the spring of 1962, another 20 staffers working out of six offices in Mississippi and field secretaries in Selma, Ala., Danville, Va., and Pine Bluff, Ark. There were 12 workers in the Atlanta headquarters. It also had 121 full-time volunteers.

“SNCC organizers spent their first weeks in a new community meeting local leadership, formulating with them an action plan for more aggressive [voter] registration efforts, and recruiting new activists through informal conversation, painstaking house-to-house canvassing and regular mass meetings,” Bond said in one speech.

One historian observed, “SCLC has to adopt a strategy of ‘hit and run,’ striking one target at a time. SCLC’s willingness to run as well as hit provoked consistent criticism from SNCC which organized the same communities for years rather than months or weeks.”

In addition to living with and empowering local leaders, SNCC moved into the international arena faster than the more established civil rights groups, all of whom had been repeatedly warned to stick to domestic issues. It expressed unqualified support for the African liberation struggle, made formal presentations before the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and in 1966 issued strong statements opposing the war in Vietnam; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not oppose the war until the following year.

The organization also grew more militant under Kwame Ture, the SNCC chairman, then-known as Stokely Carmichael, and his successor, H. Rap Brown, who later changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin. Ture popularized the phrase, “Black Power,” which was coined by SNCC organizer Willie Ricks. Whites were kicked out of the organization and urged to organize their own communities.

Ture, who advocated self-defense instead of nonviolence, left the organization to join the more militant Black Panther Party. Rap Brown advocated using violence in certain cases, saying it was as American as apple pie.

The organization disbanded a decade after its founding, partly because it became a victim of its own success. SNCC, SCLC, the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) can all take credit for helping pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

SNCC also broke up because of a deep split over the direction in which the organization was moving. Along the way, no one viewed SNCC as a pushover.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who grew up in one of the most anti-Black regions of the state, told Mary E. King, a former SNCC activist whom Carter appointed to a top post in the Peace Corps, “If you wanted to scare white people in Southwest Georgia, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) wouldn’t do it. You only had to say one word – SNCC.”

In Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Dr. King and SCLC, author David J. Garrow recounted a meeting between President John F. Kennedy and White business leaders in the wake of the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham that killed four little girls. According to Garrow, President Kennedy told the Birmingham leaders that they should be thankful that Dr. King was leading demonstrations instead of SNCC. He said, “ SNCC has an investment in violence. They’re sons of bitches.”

Surveying the landscape today, SNCC veterans say the civil rights movement would benefit from the formation of a new youth-oriented group that would be viewed as SOBs.

“I realized, as we all did, that if the other organizations were doing what we thought needed to be done, we wouldn’t need a new organization,” Bond said. “They weren’t, and therefore we needed to do something new.”

Bond said something new is needed today for young activists. He stated, “There badly needs to be an organization that does the essential organizing so necessary for social change.”

Perhaps this week’s SNCC reunion might provide the catalyst for establishing for such an organization.

George E. Curry served as a SNCC student volunteer during the summer of 1966. He is the former editor-in-chief of Emerge magazine and the NNPA News Service, a keynote speaker, moderator, and media coach. Curry can be reached through his web site, or followed on Twitter.