When SNCC leader Gloria Richardson in Cambridge, Maryland, refused, under a rain of criticism, to subject the issue of segregation to popular vote, one was reminded of the words of Wendell Phillips, explaining the apparent strange behavior of the abolitionists: “The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense…. He neither expects, nor is overanxious for immediate success.” Phillips contrasted the reformer with the politician, who “dwells in an everlasting now.…” In a similar mood, poet James Russell Lowell wrote: “The Reformer must expect comparative isolation, and he must be strong enough to bear it.”
Yet the staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee can never be isolated as was the New England abolitionist of the 1830’s, who was far from slave territory, and surrounded by whites unconcerned for the slave. The SNCC youngster is in the midst of his people, surrounded by them, protected by them. To be cut off, by harsh criticism of his “extremism,” from Northern white intellectuals or from those in national political power is a minor blow, cushioned by a popularity based on the poor and the powerless, but perhaps even more comforting because of that.
Oddly enough—or perhaps naturally enough—the student movement has left the campuses where it began in those sit-ins of early 1960. The sit-in leaders have either graduated from or left college, and the fact that they call themselves the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is primarily a reflection of their backgrounds, their youth, and perhaps their hope to return one day and bring a new dynamism to college education. Some go back to college after a year or two with the movement; others find a less formal but more genuine intellectual satisfaction in the movement. All live in a state of tension: there is the recognition that academic life is too far removed from the social struggle, alongside the frustration that exists for any intellectually aroused youngster separated from books and concentrated learning. At the same time, having exchanged college attire and the tree-lined campus for overalls and the dusty back roads of the rural South, they are getting the kind of education that no one else in the nation is getting.
There is another striking contrast to Garrison and Phillips, Lewis Tappan and Theodore Weld: these young people are not middle-class reformers who became somehow concerned about others. They come themselves from the ranks of the victims, not just because they are mostly Negroes, but because for the most part their fathers are janitors and laborers, their mothers maids and factory workers.
In late 1963 I checked the backgrounds of forty-one field workers for SNCC in Mississippi (roughly one-third of the total SNCC force in the Deep South). Thirty-five of them were Negro, and twenty-five of them came from the Deep South. Of the six white staff members two were from the Deep South. The white youngsters and most of the Northern Negroes came from middle-class homes; their fathers were ministers or teachers or civil service workers. All of the Southern Negroes, and some of the Northern Negroes (twenty-one out of thirty-five) came from homes where the mothers were maids or domestics, the fathers factory workers, truck drivers, farmers, bricklayers, carpenters. Twenty-nine (about three-fourths) of the total SNCC Mississippi staff were between fifteen and twenty-two years old. There were twelve between twenty-two and twenty-nine, and one person each in his thirties, forties, and fifties. Twenty-six, or about two-thirds, of the Mississippi SNCC staff were either college graduates or had some college education. Ten had finished high school or had some high school education and two had no more than part of an elementary school education. If one were to generalize roughly about the SNCC staff in the Deep South, one would say they are young, they are Negro, they come from the South, their families are poor and of the working class, but they have been to college. Northern middle-class whites and Negroes are a minority.
As of mid-1964, about 150 people worked full-time for SNCC, roughly 80 percent of them Negro. Of the whites, most were Northerners, but the few white Southerners played important roles (Jane Stembridge, the first office secretary in Atlanta; Bob Zellner and Sam Shirah, assigned to white college campuses; Sandra Hayden, in the Jackson, Mississippi office). Of the Negro staff people, most were Southern born; more and more, young Negroes were being recruited out of Deep South towns to become SNCC field secretaries right there at home.
By 1963, the annual budget of SNCC was about $250,000, almost all of this coming from the contributions of individuals and organizations (churches, colleges, foundations). About one-fourth of this income was being used to pay the salaries of field secretaries, $10 a week for most of them, with a few married people in the Atlanta office receiving $50 or $60 a week. Most of the remaining income went to pay for field operations in Mississippi, southwest Georgia, and the other areas of concentration.
The two chief officers of SNCC are the Chairman (John Lewis) and the Executive Secretary (James Forman). One of the field secretaries in each major geographical area is known as a Project Director. An Executive Committee of twenty-one members, including two older “advisors,” is the top policymaking body, and is elected at an annual conference in the spring.
Where do the 150 or so SNCC workers operate? Perhaps a dozen man the central office in Atlanta, a buzzing jumble of rooms above a tailor shop in the Negro section of Atlanta, not far from the Negro college campuses. Long-distance phone connections keep Jim Forman and John Lewis, the two top officers of SNCC, in day-to-day, sometimes hour-to-hour touch with crisis situations in those parts of the Deep South where SNCC maintains headquarters and “field secretaries” (as its staff members are called).
One of the two main areas of concentration is Mississippi, where SNCC’s first penetration of the Deep South was made by Bob Moses and a few Negro youngsters from the Delta. A half-dozen spots in Mississippi have had varying degrees of attention: Greenwood, Hattiesburg, Jackson, Liberty, Greenville, Clarksdale. The other major focus of activity is southwest Georgia, where Charles Sherrod, a divinity school student from Virginia, came in the fall of 1961 and stayed to become a legend. Albany has been the center there, and, radiating from it, SNCC workers have moved into the terror-ridden towns of the old Cotton Kingdom: Americus, Dawson, Camilla, Sasser. Outside of Mississippi and Southwest Georgia, SNCC groups function in Selma, Alabama; Danville, Virginia; Cambridge, Maryland; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; and other places; they register voters, distribute food and clothing, lead demonstrations, conduct classes, vitalize long-dormant communities.
To visit SNCC field headquarters in these rural outposts of the Deep South is like visiting a combat station in wartime. Living conditions are crude. Sometimes there is a “Freedom House,” an old frame dwelling with cots and blankets for the field secretaries and whoever else is staying over for the night. At other times, field people stay in homes in the Negro community. It may take weeks or months to dispel the initial fear on the part of local Negroes now aware of impending change and trouble. Negro women in town often become mothers to the SNCC youngsters far from home and family; they put them up, make meals for them, tend them when they are sick, go out on the line with them in demonstrations. One thinks of Mrs. Boynton in Selma, Mrs. Woods in Hattiesburg, and Mrs. Daniels in Dawson. (Sheriff Jim Clark in Selma, hoping to arrest SNCC leader Prathia Hall, went straight to the home of Mrs. Boynton to find her.)
Over every one of these headquarters in the field, whether a “Freedom House” rented by SNCC, or a home or office donated by a local supporter, there hangs the constant threat of violence. The first SNCC headquarters in Selma was burned down; in Greenwood, two SNCC workers found themselves under siege by a mob of armed men and had to make their way over rooftops to safety; in Danville, police simply marched into the SNCC office and arrested everyone in sight.
“These are beautiful people down here,” Sandra Hayden wrote to me from Mississippi shortly after she arrived there to work for SNCC. She was speaking about the Negroes of the Delta, aroused to take their first steps out of the past—but she was not speaking of color or of that ordered set of physical characteristics which American society has characterized as “beauty.” She was speaking of the souls of black folk—and of white folk too. She was speaking of a beauty of spirit, of a courage beyond comprehension, which pervades the ranks of the new abolitionists in the Deep South.
