SNCC: The New Abolitionists - Howard Boone's Zinn

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       SNCC

       The New Abolitionists

      Howard Zinn

      Copyright © 1964, 1965, and 2002 by Howard Zinn.

      Any properly footnoted quotation of up to 500 sequential words may be used without permission, as long as the total number of words quoted does not exceed 2,000.

       To Ella Baker

       Contents

      4. Mississippi I: McComb

      5. Mississippi II: Greenwood

      6. Mississippi III: Hattiesburg

      7. Southwest Georgia: The Outsider as Insider

      8. Alabama: Freedom Day in Selma

      9. The White Man in the Movement

      10. “I Want To Know: Which Side Is the Federal Government On?”

      11. The Revolution Beyond Race

      12. An Independent Radicalism

      Index

       Preface

      In the years 1956 to 1963, I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, teaching at Spelman College, a college for African-American women. I became involved, along with my students, in the movement against racial segregation that built up slowly to 1960 and then exploded throughout the South with sit-ins, Freedom Rides, mass demonstrations. When student veterans of the sit-ins formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), they asked me to become a member of their Executive Board. I became both a participant and a chronicler of activities in Atlanta and other cities. When Beacon Press in Boston asked me to write a book on the role of the NAACP, I suggested that instead I would write about the young people in SNCC, who were the leading edge of the movement in the deep South. The result was not a comprehensive scholarly book on SNCC, but a work of on-the-spot reportage, based on time spent in southwest Georgia, Selma, Alabama, Hattiesburg, and Mississippi, and in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

       1. The New Abolitionists

      For the first time in our history a major social movement, shaking the nation to its bones, is being led by youngsters. This is not to deny the inspirational leadership of a handful of adults (Martin Luther King and James Farmer), the organizational direction by veterans in the struggle (Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph), or the participation of hundreds of thousands of older people in the current Negro revolt. But that revolt, a long time marching out of the American past, its way suddenly lit up by the Supreme Court decision, and beginning to rumble in earnest when thousands of people took to the streets of Montgomery in the bus boycott, first flared into a national excitement with the sit-ins by college students that started the decade of the 1960’s.

      And since then, those same youngsters, hardened by countless jailings and beatings, now out of school and living in ramshackle headquarters all over the Deep South, have been striking the sparks, again and again, for that fire of change spreading through the South and searing the whole country.

      These young rebels call themselves the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, but they are more a movement than an organization, for no bureaucratized structure can contain their spirit, no printed program capture the fierce and elusive quality of their thinking. And while they have no famous leaders, very little money, no inner access to the seats of national authority, they are clearly the front line of the Negro assault on the moral comfort of white America.

      To be with them, walking a picket line in the rain in Hattiesburg, Mississippi or sleeping on a cot in a cramped “office” in Greenville, Mississippi; to watch them walk out of the stone jailhouse in Albany, Georgia; to see them jabbed by electric prod poles and flung into paddy wagons in Selma, Alabama, or link arms and sing at the close of a church meeting in the Delta—is to feel the presence of greatness. It is a greatness that comes from their relationship to history, and it does not diminish when they are discovered to be human: to make mistakes or feel fear, to act with envy, or hostility or even violence.

      All Americans owe them a debt for—if nothing else—releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect. Theirs was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they renounced comfort and security to fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt.

      Princeton philosopher Walter Kaufmann, writing in The Faith of a Heretic, called the young people born during World War II the “uncommitted generation.” He said: “What distinguishes them is that they are not committed to any cause.” But this was written in 1960. And in that year, out of that same generation which Kaufmann described, there emerged the first rebels of the decade. They came out of unexpected places: they were mostly black and therefore unseen until they suddenly became the most visible people in America; they came out of Greensboro, North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee and Rock Hill, South Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. And they were committed. To the point of jail, which is a large commitment. And to the point of death, which hovers always near a heretic in a police state and which turns to stare a Deep South Negro directly in the face at that moment when he utters that word so long taboo for Negroes in America, “No.”

      How do you measure commitment? Is it the willingness to take a day out of life and sacrifice it to history, to plunge for one morning or one afternoon into the unknown, to engage in one solitary act of defiance against all the arrayed power of established society? Then tens of thousands of young people, mostly black, some white, have committed themselves these past four years, by the simple act of joining a demonstration. Is commitment more than that—the willingness to wrench yourself out of your environment and begin anew, almost alone, in a social jungle which the most powerful forces in the nation have not dared to penetrate? Then the number is reduced to sixteen: those sixteen college youngsters who, in the fall of 1961, decided to drop everything—school and family and approved ambition—and move into the Deep South to become the first guerrilla fighters of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

      By early 1964, the number was up to 150. In the most heated days of abolitionism before the Civil War, there were never that many dedicated people who turned their backs on ordinary pursuits and gave their lives wholly to the movement. There were William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips and Theodore Weld and Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and a handful of others, and there were hundreds of part-time abolitionists and thousands of followers. But for 150 youngsters today to turn on their pasts, to decide to live and work twenty-four hours a day in the most dangerous region of the United States, is cause for wonder. And wherever they have come from—the Negro colleges of the South, the Ivy League universities of the North, the small and medium colleges all over the country—they have left ripples of astonishment behind. This college generation as a whole is not committed, by any means. But it has been shaken.

      These 150—who next year will be 250 or more, because the excitement grows daily on the college campuses—are the new abolitionists. It is not fanciful to invest them with a name that has the ring of history; we are always shy about recognizing the historic worth of events when they take place before our eyes, about recognizing heroes when they are still flesh and blood and not yet transfixed in marble. But there is no doubt about it: we have in this country today a movement which will take its place alongside that of the abolitionists, the Populists, the Progressives—and may outdo them all.

      Their youth makes us hesitant to recognize their depth. But the great social upsurge of post-war America is the Negro revolt, and this revolt has gotten its most

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