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 powerful impetus from young people, who gave it a new turn in 1960 and today, as anonymous as infantrymen everywhere, form the first rank in a nonviolent but ferocious war against the old order.
It would be easy to romanticize them, but they are too young, too vulnerable, too humanly frail to fit the stereotype of heroes. They don’t match the storybook martyrs who face death with silent stoicism; the young fellows sometimes cry out when they are beaten; the girls may weep when abused in prison. Most often, however, they sing. This was true of the farmer and labor movements in this country, and of all the wars; but there has never been a singing movement like this one. Perhaps it is because most of them were brought up on the gospel songs and hymns of the Negro church in the South, perhaps also because they are young, probably most of all because what they are doing inspires song. They have created a new gospel music out of the old, made up of songs adapted or written in jail or on the picket line. Every battle station in the Deep South now has its Freedom Chorus, and the mass meetings there end with everyone standing, led by the youngsters of SNCC, linking arms, and singing “We Shall Overcome.”
The mood of these young people, which they convey to everyone around them in the midst of poverty, violence, terror, and centuries of bitter memories, is joy, confidence, the vision of victory: “We’ll walk hand in hand … we are not afraid.…” Occasionally there is sadness, as in “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned.” But most often there is an exuberant defiance: “Ain’t Gonna Let Chief Pritchett Turn Me Round.…” They are happy warriors, a refreshing contrast to the revolutionaries of old. They smile and wave while being taken off in paddy wagons; they laugh and sing behind bars.
Yet they are the most serious social force in the nation today. They are not playing; it is no casual act of defiance, no irresponsible whim of adolescence, when young people of sixteen or twenty or twenty-five turn away from school, job, family, all the tokens of success in modern America, to take up new lives, hungry and hunted, in the hinterland of the Deep South. Jim Forman was a teacher in Chicago before he joined the SNCC, and an aspiring novelist; Bob Moses was a graduate of Harvard, teaching in New York; Charles Sherrod was a divinity school graduate in Virginia; Mendy Samstein, a graduate of Brandeis University, was on the faculty of a Negro college, working for his Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago. Others found it easier—and harder—for they came right out of the Black Belt and, even though they tasted college, they had nowhere then to go but back towards danger and freedom: John Lewis, Sam Block, Willie Peacock, Lafayette Surney, MacArthur Cotton, Lawrence Guyot and too many more to name.
In his study Young Man Luther, the psychologist Erik Erikson ponders the “identity crisis” which young people face. “It occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood; he must detect some meaningful resemblance between what he has come to see in himself and what his sharpened awareness tells him others judge and expect him to be.” It would be hard to imagine a more startling contrast than that between the young Negro as the old South saw him (or rather half-saw him, blurred and not quite human) and the vision of himself he suddenly perceived in the glare of the 1960’s.
The entire nation, caught suddenly in the intersection of two images where it always thought there was only one, has begun slowly to refocus its own vision. So that what started as an identity crisis for Negroes turned out to be an identity crisis for the nation. And we are still resolving it. It is one of the conditions of effective psychotherapy that the patient must begin to see himself as he really is, and the United States, now forced by the young Negro to see itself through his eyes (an ironic reversal, for the Negro was always compelled to see himself through the eyes of the white man), is coming closer to a realistic appraisal of its national personality.
All young people, in their late teens or early twenties, face this “identity crisis” which Erik Erikson describes. As Erikson points out: “Some young individuals will succumb to this crisis in all manner of neurotic, psychotic, or delinquent behavior; others will resolve it through participation in ideological movements passionately concerned with religion or politics, nature or art.” We have seen the delinquent responses, or simply the responses of non-commitment, on the part of millions of young people of this generation who have not been able to find their way. Young Negroes were among these, were perhaps even the most delinquent, the most crisis-ridden of all. But today, by the handful, or the hundreds, or perhaps the thousands, they are making their way through this crisis with a firm grip on themselves, aided immeasurably by the fact that they are anchored to a great social movement.
We ought to note, however, that this “participation in ideological movements” today has a different quality than that of earlier American student movements—the radical movements of the thirties, for instance. The young people in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee have not become followers of any dogma, have not pledged themselves to any rigid ideological system. Unswerving as they are in moving towards certain basic goals, they wheel freely in their thinking about society and how it needs to be changed. Erikson writes of a very few young people who, making their way through their identity crisis, “eventually come to contribute an original bit to an emerging style of life; the very danger which they have sensed has forced them to mobilize capacities to see and say, to dream and plan, to design and construct, in new ways.” And this is true of those in the SNCC. They are radical, but not dogmatic; thoughtful, but not ideological. Their thinking is undisciplined; it is fresh, and it is new.
One must listen to Jane Stembridge speaking, a white girl from Virginia, part of that little band of black and white students who organized SNCC out of the turmoil of the 1960 sit-ins:
… finally it all boils down to human relationships. It has nothing to do finally with governments. It is the question of whether we … whether I shall go on living in isolation or whether there shall be a we. The student movement is not a cause… it is a collision between this one person and that one person. It is a I am going to sit beside you … Love alone is radical. Political statements are not; programs are not; even going to jail is not.…
These new abolitionists are different from the earlier ones. The movement of the 1830’s and 1840’s was led by white New Englanders, bombarding the South and the nation with words. The present movement is planted firmly in the deepest furrows of the Deep South, and it consists mostly of Negroes who make their pleas to the nation more by physical acts of sacrifice than by verbal declamation. Their task is made easier by modern mass communication, for the nation, indeed the whole world, can see them, on the television screen or in newspaper photos—marching, praying, singing, demonstrating their message. The white people of America, to whom Negroes were always a dark, amorphous mass, are forced to see them for the first time sharply etched as individuals, their features—both physical and moral—stark, clear, and troubling.
But in one important way these young people are very much like the abolitionists of old: they have a healthy disrespect for respectability; they are not ashamed of being agitators and trouble-makers; they see it as the essence of democracy. In defense of William Lloyd Garrison, against the accusation that he was too harsh, a friend replied that the nation was in a sleep so deep “nothing but a rude and almost ruffian-like shake could rouse her.” The same deliberate harshness lies behind the activities of James Forman, John Lewis, Bob Moses, and other leaders of SNCC. What Samuel May once said of Garrison and slavery might be said today of each of these people and segregation: “He will shake our nation to
