The store will not work correctly when cookies are disabled.
We use cookies to make your experience better.
To comply with the e-Privacy rules, we need to ask for your consent to use non-essential cookies (such as analytics and marketing). You can allow or decline these cookies. Essential cookies (for things like basket and checkout) will always be used. For more details, please see our Privacy Policy.
Strong People Don't Need Strong Leaders: The Story of the SNCC
Strong People Don't Need Strong Leaders: The Story of the SNCC
The Black student organisation at the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement...
The African American civil rights movement wasn’t all about Martin Luther King Jr.
It wasn’t the work of just one person or one organisation.
King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) worked alongside several other civil rights and liberation groups, secular and religious.
One of the most important of these was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created on this day in 1960.
We do love a personality, but sometimes our obsession with historical individuals can lead us to overlook other important activists and movements like the SNCC
SNCC was based on the Black student movement rather than the churches.
Younger, more diverse, and often more radical, SNCC attempted to institutionalise the political energy of the sit-in movement of 1960-61, when courageous Black students entered segregated public places in the South to challenge Jim Crow.
The conference where SNCC was founded, held at Shaw University in North Carolina, was the brainchild of Ella Baker (1903-86), a behind-the-scenes titan of the civil rights movement.
And Baker’s role was a sign of things to come: women like Diane Nash and Fanny Lou Hamer were key activists in SNCC.
In important ways, SNCC was imagined as a counterpoint to King and the SCLC.
Baker saw the need for a democratic, grassroots organisation as opposed to the model of charismatic male leadership associated with King’s group.
Baker’s belief was a simple one:
"Strong people don’t need strong leaders."
The Selma to Montgomery marches, organised by various groups including SNCC, were among the most iconic protests of the Civil Rights Movement
After its formation in 1960, SNCC was straight onto the frontlines of the Black freedom struggle.
Facing down the violence of white supremacy in the South, SNCC activists spearheaded the 1961 Freedom Rides and the 1962 voter registration campaign.
And despite the friction with King, SNCC often worked closely with him, including for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
SNCC was in the vanguard again during the ‘Freedom Summer’ of 1964, organising in Mississippi and the rest of the South to register Black voters.
In response to their efforts to build democracy in the South, SNCC activists faced deadly violence, perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan in collusion with local police.
By the end of the 1960s, several SNCC members had been assassinated and countless others beaten and tortured by defenders of white supremacy in America.
SNCC’s organising work in 1964-5 helped force President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
But the new legislation was offset by political defeats elsewhere.
Activist efforts to turn the Democratic Party into a reliable vehicle for the civil rights movement failed in 1964, when Johnson continued to admit all-white state parties from the South to the National Convention.
Even before Johnson, SNCC activists like the young John Lewis suspected JFK of trying to co-opt the civil rights struggle:
"The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it in the courts."
It was as a result of these frustrations about establishment liberal politics in the U.S. that SNCC became an important source of early Black Power politics from the mid-1960s.
With its pivot towards Black Power politics in the mid-1960s, prominent SNCC activists found they had more and more in common with militant activists like Malcolm X
Radicals like Stokely Carmichael, the future Black Panther known as Kwame Ture, started out in SNCC.
But the move towards Black Power was no screeching 180-degree turn from the politics of the civil rights mainstream.
The civil disobedience and Black Power wings of the struggle are often painted in sharp contrasts – as if it was MLK vs. Malcolm X. But there was as much continuity as difference, with SNCC as living proof.
SNCC’s embrace of armed self-defence in response to lethal reactionary violence by the KKK and its establishment allies wasn’t seen as a sacrilegious abandonment of non-violence.
In 1966, Martin Luther King himself agreed to the deployment of the Louisiana-based Deacons of Defense and Justice – an armed group of Black war veterans – to provide security for James Meredith’s ‘March Against Fear’.
And when SNCC came out against the war in Vietnam, making links between imperial violence in Southeast Asia and the oppression of African Americans at home, King did the same.
SNCC dissolved at the end of the 1960s, exhausted by external violence and internal tensions.
Many of its activists went on to careers in a range of organisations, from the Black Panthers to the Democratic Party.
But in the crucial decade of the 1960s, SNCC had been at once a vanguard of the civil rights movement and a bridge to new forms of Black politics.
The organisation may not be a household name like MLK is today. But as Ella Baker realised, strong people don’t need strong leaders – because they create strong movements.
Who were our radical ancestors? What's the legacy we're following? To understand the present, we have to look back at our past, and that's exactly what Pete's radical history emails and blog posts do.
With so many remarkable individuals, It's impossible for Pete to choose his favourite figure from radical history, but if he had to, he'd say Sylvia Pankhurst: "She always appreciated that the struggles for feminist, economic, and racial emancipation are linked together, and she did all of her politics with that truth in mind. Also, like me, she's a Mancunian!"
