Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

• Author: Jeffrey Lehman, Shirelle Phelps

Page 377

As a focal point for student activism in the 1960s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, popularly called Snick) spearheaded major initiatives in the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT. At the forefront of INTEGRATION efforts, SNCC volunteers gained early recognition for their lunch counter sit-ins at whites-only businesses and later for their participation in historic demonstrations that helped pave the way for the passage of landmark federal CIVIL RIGHTS legislation in 1964 and 1965. SNCC made significant gains in voter registration for blacks in the South, where it also ran schools and health clinics. Later adopting a more radical agenda, it ultimately became identified with the BLACK POWER MOVEMENT and distanced itself from traditional civil rights leaders, before disbanding in 1970.

SNCC grew out of the SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE (SCLC), led by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. On Easter 1960, SCLC executive director, ELLA J. BAKER, organized a meeting at Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the goal of increasing student participation in the civil rights movement. Students were already taking action on their own: in February, they had staged a sit-in at a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, refusing to leave the whites-only lunch counter. One hundred and forty students met with Baker and representatives of other civil rights organizations at the Easter conference, where SNCC was conceived and founded. SNCC soon set up offices in Atlanta. Among its earliest members were JOHN LEWIS, a divinity student; Marion S. Barry Jr., a future mayor of Washington, D.C.; and JULIAN BOND, a future Georgia state senator and liberal activist leader.

In its statement of purpose, dated April 1960, SNCC embraced a philosophy of nonviolence:

We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of non-violence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action?. By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.

One method of non-violent protest adopted by SNCC was the sit-in. Used to integrate businesses in northern and border states as early as 1943, this tactic was a risky undertaking in the segregated South of 1960. What SNCC met at lunch counter sit-ins was far from a spirit of reconciliation: whites...