Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in 1960 by a group of black college students. SNCC used direct action to challenge racism in the South. SNCC participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides (which challenged segregation in restrooms, restaurants, and waiting rooms in interstate bus facilities), facing beatings and imprisonment. In 1961, SNCC began to focus on voter registration. SNCC helped to organize Freedom Summer in Mississippi, which brought 600 young people (many white college students) to the South. Three activists (two whites and one black) were murdered by the Klan in June of that year.

Two fundamental principles of SNCC's racial ideology were: “one, that Blacks and whites could stand together to oppose racism and support integration; and two, that such a project of integration depended upon Black leadership at every level of integration” (Thompson, 2001, p.42). Whites were held accountable to Blacks in SNCC; Black activists in SNCC interviewed and chose which white people they wanted to work with (Thompson, 2001). SNCC believed that by bringing whites to the South, media attention would follow. They believed that nothing would change until the country saw that there were whites in the civil rights movement, and that they were at risk for racist violence (Thompson, 2001).

In 1967, with the rise of Black Power, a vote was taken in SNCC to become an all black organization. SNCC became inactive in 1970.

References

Thompson, Becky. (2001). A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.