new experience for the Riders, but the Freedom Riders were definitely a new experience for Mississippi jails.”
The students from Nashville, Atlanta, Washington, and other places who came out of jail as Freedom Riders in July and August of 1961 sought one another out, wondering what they would do next. There was the SNCC office in Atlanta which had linked them all loosely, uncertainly. A volunteer SNCC worker named Bob Moses, just down from the North, was setting up voter registration schools around McComb, Mississippi. Two other SNCC people, Reggie Robinson from Baltimore and John Hardy from Nashville, had joined him.
Through the summer of 1961, fifteen or twenty people on the Coordinating Committee were meeting every month: at Louisville in June, at Baltimore in July, at the Highlander Folk School, Tennessee, in August. Tim Jenkins, a slim, energetic, bright young Negro who was vice-president of the National Student Association, came to the June meeting with a proposal that SNCC make the registration of Negro voters in the South its main activity. That started a controversy which simmered, unsettled, throughout the summer. It came to a boil at the Highlander meeting in August, where the issue was posed sharply: would SNCC concentrate on a methodical, grinding campaign to register Negro voters in the Black Belt? Or would it conduct more sensational direct-action campaigns—sit-ins, kneel-ins, wade-ins, picket lines, boycotts, etc.—to desegregate public facilities?
Even before the Freedom Rides began, Jenkins had been attending a series of meetings in which representatives of several foundations, including the Taconic and the Field Foundations, discussed the raising of substantial funds to support a large-scale voter registration effort in the South. Present at these meetings were Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division, and Harris Wofford, special assistant to President Kennedy on civil rights. Jenkins was asked by the Foundation people to broach the idea to his friends in SNCC.
The Negro students who had gone through the sit-ins and Freedom Rides were somewhat distrustful of white liberals with money and of the national government. The fact that both these elements were behind the idea of concentrating on voter registration, on top of Robert Kennedy’s call for a “cooling-off” period during the Freedom Rides, reinforced the suspicion that an attempt was being made to cool the militancy of the student movement and divert the youngsters to slower, safer activity. Led by Diane Nash and Marion Barry, many of the SNCC people at the Highlander meeting held to the idea that “direct action” should continue to be the primary policy.
Tim Jenkins was also aware of the interest of the Justice Department in moderating the temper of the student movement. He knew that the Department’s conservative interpretation of civil rights law led it to argue that only in connection with voter registration activities could it go into federal court for injunctive relief against local and state governments in the South which tried to suppress the civil rights movement. But he felt that voter registration was the crucial lever which could set progress in motion in the South, and if white liberals and the government were willing to help, why not take advantage of this? Over the summer, he convinced a number of people in SNCC that he was right.
At the Highlander meeting, it seemed for a while that an impasse had been reached between the “direct action” people and the “voter registration” people, and that SNCC might even split into two groups. Ella Baker, advisor to SNCC since it was founded at Raleigh in 1960, helped reconcile the opposing viewpoints. The result was a compromise. Two arms of SNCC were created: Diane Nash was put in charge of direct action projects. Charles Jones (from Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Rock Hill jail-in), fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and self-assured, was put in charge of voter registration work.
In McComb, Mississippi, Bob Moses was already beginning voter registration schools when this decision was made, and about the middle of August, 1961, SNCC people began to converge on McComb. Moses recalls: “I became a member of the staff during a hectic hiring session in McComb in August, when staff hired staff or some such nonsense.”
Money raised by Harry Belafonte began to come through now, and a number of people decided not to return to school in the fall but to go to work full-time for SNCC: Diane Nash, Charles Jones, James Bevel, Charles Sherrod, and others. With Ed King leaving the Atlanta office to go to law school (Jane Stembridge had returned to school earlier), the organization desperately needed an Executive Secretary. Diane Nash telephoned James Forman in Chicago and asked him to come to work for SNCC.
Forman, a thirty-three-year-old teacher, was born in Chicago but spent part of his childhood in Mississippi. He served four years in the Air Force, received a degree from Roosevelt College in Chicago, did graduate work on Africa at Boston University, studied French at Middlebury College, and somewhere inbetween wrote a novel (unpublished). Forman also spent a year working with sharecroppers in Fayette County, and made occasional trips to Nashville, where he met Diane Nash and talked with her about the future of SNCC. She had been impressed by him, and so called on him now.
Forman was just back from Monroe, North Carolina, where he had participated in demonstrations and been badly beaten. In Chicago, he was teaching school and thinking of doing some more writing; Diane Nash, James Bevel and Paul Brooks asked him to come to direct the SNCC office in Atlanta for sixty dollars a week. Forman (strongly built, handsome, with a big shock of curly hair, brown skin, an easy smile, and the features of an Indian) agreed to start working for SNCC in October.
Thus, in August of 1961, SNCC was ready to move. The sit-ins and Freedom Rides had been successful in the Upper South. They had ground to a bloody halt in the Deep South, leaving the participants wounded but determined, the opposition unsettled, the nation expectant. The excitement of the Rides was still in the atmosphere. The students and ex-students in SNCC had a staff, a new Executive Secretary, and a vague idea of general strategy. Now, with their characteristic instinct for both challenge and danger, they turned towards the state of Mississippi.
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