Then, too, one or two Atlanta college presidents cracked down on crusading students. One or two lost scholarships. Influential teachers were either fired or chased away. Some community leaders and institutions never really supported the movement or its methods, suspecting correctly that they were aiming at getting rid of black and white domination of Negroes.
But did the movement accomplish anything beside the surface gains of integration of some public accommodations?
It certainly did!
It developed among many Atlantans, most specifically those who had been voiceless until then, a feeling that they were able to act for themselves.
It made the so-called man in the street even more discontented with some of the city’s white and Negro politicians, and gave them a method and a willingness to dispose of them.
Finally, it created a climate in which the much-maligned masses of people, mostly Negro and mostly poor, felt that in them and them alone rests a chance for changing their own lives.
If it did nothing else, Atlanta’s short-lived student movement did this, and for this primarily it should be remembered.
SNCC: Alienated, Paranoid, and Near Collapse
Bond resigned from SNCC in September 1966, around the time of riots in the black communities of Vine City and Summerville in Atlanta. Through the years Bond identified a number of reasons for his resignation, including his decision to run for the Georgia state legislature in 1965, a move that shifted his focus away from SNCC and toward electoral politics.
In 1968 Bond claimed that he “had begun to feel the way a great many public relations people must feel . . . that I had to go and sort of snatch at the sleeves of newspapermen and say, ‘Look at this thing I’ve got! It’s good. Write something about it.’ I had to beg and plead and cajole them to get them to write what I considered the right things about SNCC. It was just an unsavory job.”33 And in later years, Bond also emphasized the discomfort he had felt with the major changes that SNCC was making. “A lot of new people had come in. I just, I felt uncomfortable with it. I didn’t like the direction it seemed to be taking.”34 The new direction resulted partly from the May 1966 election of Stokely Carmichael as SNCC’s new chair. Carmichael led SNCC to emphasize black racial identity, expel whites from the organization, and accept the use of force as a legitimate means of self-defense.
The changes at SNCC created internal and external pressures on the organization, and in 1967 Kenneth B. Clark—whose groundbreaking psychological studies of black children had helped Thurgood Marshall build his case in Brown v. Board of Education—asked Bond to write an analysis of the challenges faced by SNCC. Bond agreed to pen the report (see below), but was wary of having his name attached to it, as he explained in his cover letter: “Because of what may be interpreted as the highly volatile nature of this paper, I would urge and expect that it would be disclosed solely within MARC and, even there, treated as an administrative secret without specific identification to me as its author.”35 MARC, or the Metropolitan Applied Research Center, was a nonprofit organization headed by Clark, which focused on urban problems in the United States.
This paper concerns the past, present, and future employees, members, and followers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It also describes the condition of workers formerly and presently affiliated with other civil rights organizations active in the South. For that reason, I have referred to “the organization” instead of SNCC in particular; many of the forces that played upon SNCC members also affected some few others in other organizations, and the history of SNCC follows trends felt in other organizations.
The material herein comes from my own memory and my own observations as well as from conversations with past and present SNCC members, most in New York City.
BACKGROUND
The organization faces a bleak future. Finances are barely existent. New recruits cannot be fed; field programs are nearly nonexistent. The campus student action group base of 1960 and 1961 has long since eroded, although attempts are being made to revive it.
The present condition, however, is only a reflection of past crisis and internal debate over the nature and purpose of the organization as well as public reaction to the shifting position of the organization itself.
Present financial difficulties began after the summer of 1964, intensified in 1965 with the organization’s anti–Vietnam War stand, and have become nearly insurmountable with the election of two new chairmen (in 1966 and 1967) and the adoption of an anti-white policy in staffing the organization.
With this in mind, present conditions and attitudes date from the beginning of the massive effort of the summer of 1964 and hardened in the years following.
The organization’s present status and any possible future ought to be viewed from that perspective.
Prior to the summer of 1964, the organization’s staff numbered nearly 150, about one-quarter white. These young people—most under 25—came largely from the South and secondly from the East and West Coasts. . . .
By the fall of 1963, an increasingly large number of employees were recruits, indigenous to their project areas. Without exception, these new employees suffered under a lower level of literacy, verbal ability, and knowledge of national and international affairs.
Against this background, in 1963, plans were laid for the development of a three-month summer program for the state of Mississippi in 1964.
From intensive staff discussions following the adoption of this program emerged the very real fear, held largely by “indigenous” staff members, that a temporary “invasion” of their state by hundreds of white summer volunteers would be more harmful than helpful and that the summer’s activities, when concluded, would lead to bitter repressions against the local Negro population and permanent staff.
Additionally, there was veiled suspicion and envy of the summer invaders, based in this instance on the fear of having individual jobs and leadership “taken over” by the more articulate, better educated volunteers.
A strong move to reverse earlier decisions and to dissolve the summer project was quashed, although bitterly debated. Although no precise date can be placed on the beginning of overt anti-white hostilities, it is safe to place a beginning for some feelings here among those fearful for the summer and those defeated in their attempts to turn the summer’s programs away.
The summer’s programs were considered a success with an important exception: departing volunteers failed in nearly every case to leave their skills behind, and most failed to create a viable structure for continuing the summer’s programs, and while the expected repression failed to materialize, an additional sense of frustration and incompetence at making the summer a continued success must have developed among those, white and Negro, remaining at the summer’s end. A comparison might be made to pacification efforts by the United States in South Vietnam; in this instance, towns and areas which gave the appearance of “pacification” (in this case, of being “movement” towns) probably because of the intensity of the summer’s work, became “enemy strongholds” immediately after the summer soldiers departed.
Another blow dealt the organization came from the 1964 Democratic Convention and the challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP).
The refusal of the convention to summarily unseat the obviously illegal all-white delegation, the unfair “compromise” urged upon the FDP delegates, the dissolution under presidential pressures of civil rights, labor, liberal, and political support all served to remind the organization staff members and supporters that they operated at the mercy of the “system” and convinced many that reform of that system was impossible.
Despite initial widespread sympathy for the FDP, there began to appear the suggestion that organization staff members were “wreckers” (rather than “builders”) who should have urged compromise, who cynically “used” the unsophisticated