“giving pointers” to the VSCRC activists.61 The young Virginians’ declaration that their “primary function” was to “meet the needs of the people as they see them,” owed much to SNCC’s belief in participatory democracy and group-centered leadership. Indeed, one activist recalled that “VSCRC workers were thoroughly imbued with what is known … as the ‘SNCC philosophy.’”62
“It’s very much like the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project in miniature—except that the accents of most of the workers are Southern,” began the Southern Patriot’s September 1965 article on the VSCRC.63 Anne Braden, a white southerner and civil rights stalwart, declared that “no civil rights project in the South has been more carefully prepared for than this one.”64 Twenty students, mostly Southerners, from seven Virginia colleges moved in to work in six Southside counties (Amelia, Brunswick, Dinwiddie, Lunenburg, Nottoway, and Powhatan).65 VSCRC headquarters were established in an old pool hall in Blackstone, Nottoway County, which had a population of 3,659.66
Believing, as Howard Romaine put it, that their job was “to find out what people want and need and help them organize themselves,” the VSCRC activists spent “a lot of time just listening.”67 Programs “varied sharply from county to county,” and depended largely on what local blacks requested or supported.68 Activities included voter registration, organizing black farmers, establishing selective buying campaigns, carrying out research, and publishing a newsletter. The VSCRC also worked at building up the local infrastructure by establishing community centers and forming sports teams.
At the end of the summer project, six students remained to continue working with the local black population. The activists’ decision to engage in full-time organizing reflected the fact that short-term commitment was of limited use. As Nolan explained, “with students in summer projects [there] is barely time to start a baseball team.”69 Instead the young activists would have to immerse themselves in the communities where they worked, and become what Bob Moses called “deep-sea divers.”70
Over the next six months or so, VSCRC continued much of the work that it had begun during the summer. In cooperation with the SCLC’s Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, more than 1,200 people were registered to vote. The largest increase took place in Lunenburg County, where the number of registered African American voters doubled. The VSCRC also helped to organize marches and rallies, which resulted in the electoral boards in Lunenburg and Dinwiddie Counties granting additional registration days. Crop allotments were a major local issue, with African Americans often suffering from discrimination. The group attempted to educate black farmers about relevant federal farm programs, and organized mass meetings. VSCRC reported that “in each of the magisterial districts of three counties farmers nominated and had placed on the ballot candidates for the county Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation committees.” This was the “first time, in counties where Negroes comprise a majority or near-majority of farmers, that Negroes have been represented on the farm ballot.”71 VSCRC activists also organized local blacks to take advantage of the war on poverty programs, and worked to improve local schools.72
During late 1965 and early 1966 the war in Vietnam began to have an impact on the VSCRC. At a January 1966 staff meeting, the Georgia legislature’s refusal to seat Julian Bond because of his stand against the war was discussed. The following month, the VSCRC staff agreed that “discussion of peace” should form part of the program for a planned statewide student conference. At a staff meeting in March, David Nolan expressed his opposition to the war and the draft.73 Indeed, Nolan was particularly enthusiastic about opposing the war. In July, for example, he argued that Vietnam and the black freedom struggle were inextricably linked. Nolan believed that the war presented a “moral test of the civil rights movement. It forces us to examine all the ideals we have claimed to be fighting for. Are we indeed working for everybody’s freedom, or are we merely out for our own selfish ends.” Nolan considered it “inconceivable that one who supports the ideals of the civil rights movement could also support what is being done by the United States to the people of Vietnam.”74
The activists’ opposition to the war could sometimes have a personal dimension. Rives Foster was classified 1-A for almost a year, and confessed that he did not know what he would have done if he had been drafted.75 At a staff meeting on July 18, the VSCRC decided to sponsor a peace demonstration on August 6. Reflecting his mounting interest in the war, Nolan was “delegated to make further plans … and to report back.”76
Opposition to the war, though, was not always an issue that commanded broad support among the local black population. As David Nolan explained, the white workers tended to have views “on such subjects as … Vietnam that don’t jibe with those of local people.” Nolan recognized that most blacks “had a single interest in civil rights and proclaimed themselves ‘100% with LBJ.’”77 The potential of Vietnam to divide movement activists from those whom they were trying to organize had parallels within SDS. By 1965 its attempt to mobilize the poor through ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project) was already struggling but, as James Miller has argued, Vietnam was the “last straw.” The escalation of the war, and the desire of many SDSers to oppose it, introduced a volatile and destabilizing element into the relationship between community organizer and community. Many poor people, believing that America fought only just wars, were hostile to the growing antiwar movement.78 VSCRC activist Rives Foster acknowledged that Vietnam helped to push the Virginia civil rights movement off course—“at first anti-war efforts … seemed to be hurting the movement,” and “the result of the war was the drifting along of projects and problems.”79
Venturing outside the field of civil rights also threatened to damage relations with the group’s white supporters, some of whom were offended by its tentative opposition to Vietnam. After the VSCRC decided to sponsor an antiwar demonstration, a Charlottesville doctor who had contributed money to the group wrote to ask “how much time we were going to spend on Vietnam, so he could reduce his contributions accordingly.” Another financial supporter wrote that “we were not really civil rights workers, but rather draft-card burners, anarchists and subversives, and he wanted his money back.”80
Antiwar activity in Virginia’s Southside seems to have generated very little enthusiasm. Fewer than fifty people, described as a “disgustingly low turn-out,” attended a daylong peace seminar on April 23.81 Moreover, the peace demonstration planned for 6 August had to be canceled because of a lack of support.82 As David Nolan explained, “at the last staff meeting we voted not to have the demonstration, after people began finking out right and left, getting county fever, deciding that one day of voter registration work was worth more than trying to do something about the war.”83 It is interesting to note Nolan’s implication that Vietnam was more important than civil rights.
The VSCRC’s increasing interest in Vietnam, which coincided with the rise of separatist tendencies within the freedom movement as a whole, pushed the white volunteers away from their organizing work among Virginia’s black population and onto the college campuses. Black Power had always been a factor within the VSCRC. John “Coolie” Washington “came on the project a black nationalist,” and believed that “if there was a war between all the whites and Negroes … the Negroes would win,” while the group’s black chairman, Ben Montgomery, was “influenced by SNCC workers who came through singing the praises of Malcolm X.”84
The VSCRC’s white activists increasingly accepted that organizing African Americans was a job best done by blacks themselves. Within the grass-roots civil rights movement, whites were increasingly seen by their black counterparts as perpetuating a culture of dependency among poor African Americans and reinforcing racial stereotypes. In 1965, for example, CORE’s Bill Bradley outlined some of the problems caused by white activists—“the general experience expressed by project leaders … was that white workers generally found it difficult to accept Black
