Conversations with ex-members over the last two weeks have confirmed a general disappointment with the present organization, a feeling of helplessness at redirection of the group intact, and a comparable feeling of helplessness at diverting individual members away from the present course.
The alternatives listed earlier might succeed in the best of worlds; in this year’s changing and fast-moving racial scene, all alternatives seem dim.
At best, the organization may wither away, its workers absorbed into other, viable groups or general society. At worst, it will remain an active irritant, engaged in useless sloganeering, in petty demagoguery, in self-destructive upheavals and losing jousts with both the conservative and liberal forces in America today. Its public positions increasingly approach fascism; its internal mental state, to an untrained, layman’s eye, seems in a constant state of paranoia and hysteria.
The organization seems doomed to continue, its former activities consigned to the past, its future chaotic.
Those who wish otherwise can try to exert pressures from outside or simply watch until the end.
ADDENDUM
. . . After completing the paper, drawing conclusions and summing up a collection of conversations with SNCC and SNCC-connected people, I cannot help but believe that reform, redirection, and reemphasis for the total group are nearly impossible.
The standard phrases, alienation and isolation, do not appear to have strength enough to describe the organization’s present views.
The few individuals susceptible to change represent a minority whose susceptibility is directly related to organizational willingness to release them.
A perhaps relevant incident from this week will illustrate the group’s physical condition. One member needed whole blood for an operation. Five staff workers applied at the local Red Cross to donate blood, and all five were rejected because of anemia.
The hope that these young people, all capable of lending their talents to the general movement in various ways and capacities, will begin to do so is perhaps a vain one.
An attempt ought to be made, however, to salvage these lives before they are physically or mentally destroyed. MARC may be the agency that could perform this task, particularly with the group’s individual members.
I hope this paper can further existing consideration of that notion.
SNCC’s Legacy
By the end of the 1960s, SNCC had effectively dissolved. In 2000, sixty years after SNCC first emerged as a formidable player in the black civil rights movement, Bond wrote the following about the student organization’s demise and legacy.
There are many reasons for the demise of this important organization. The current of nationalism, ever-present in black America, widened at the end of the 1960s to become a rushing torrent which swept away the hopeful notion of black and white together that the decade’s beginning had promised.
SNCC’s white staff members were asked to leave the organization and devote their energies to organizing in white communities; some agreed, but most believed this action repudiated the movement’s hopeful call to “Americans all, side by equal side.”
For many on the staff, both white and black, nearly a decade’s worth of hard work at irregular, subsistence-level pay, under an atmosphere of constant tension, interrupted by jailings, beatings, and official and private terror, proved too much.
When measured by the legislative accomplishments of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Right Acts, SNCC’s efforts were successful. But the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to gain recognition at Atlantic City predicted the coming collapse of support from liberals. The murders of four schoolgirls in Birmingham and Medgar Evans in Jackson in 1963, of civil rights workers and others in Mississippi in 1964, and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 argued that nonviolence was no antidote to a violent society. The outbreak of urban violence at the decade’s end further produced a sense of frustration and alienation in many SNCC veterans.
Throughout its brief history, SNCC insisted on group-centered leadership and community-based politics. It made clear the connection between economic power and racial oppression. It refused to define racism as solely southern, to describe racial inequality as caused by irrational prejudice alone, or to limit its struggle solely to guaranteeing legal equality. It challenged American imperialism while mainstream civil rights organizations were silent or curried favor with President Johnson, condemning SNCC’s linkage of domestic poverty and racism with overseas adventurism. SNCC refused to apply political tests to its membership or supporters, opposing the red-baiting which other organizations and leaders endorsed or condoned. It created an atmosphere of expectation and anticipation among the people with whom it worked, trusting them to make decisions about their own lives.
SNCC widened the definition of politics beyond campaigns and elections; for SNCC, politics encompassed not only electoral races but also organizing political parties, labor unions, producer cooperatives, and alternative schools.
It initially sought to liberalize southern politics by organizing and enfranchising blacks. One proof of its success was the increase in black elected officials in the southern states from 7 in 1965 to 388 in 1968.
But SNCC also sought to liberalize the ends of political participation, by enlarging the issues of political debate to include the economic and foreign policy concerns of American blacks.
SNCC’s articulation and advocacy of Black Power redefined the relationship between black Americans and white power. No longer would political equity be considered a privilege; it had become a right.
One SNCC legacy is the destruction of the psychological shackles which had kept black southerners in physical and mental peonage; the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee helped to break those chains forever.
It demonstrated that ordinary women and men, young and old, could perform extraordinary tasks; they did then and can do so again.
CHAPTER TWO
Vietnam and the Politics of Dissent
The Right to Dissent
In 1964 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims that state legislative districts must be relatively equal in population. The ruling shifted power away from disproportionately represented rural areas, and in Georgia the reapportionment entailed the creation of new urban districts, one of which was the 136th District in Atlanta, whose population was mostly black. Because the district was new, it had no incumbent. Bond’s friends, including John Lewis and Ivanhoe Donaldson, were well aware of his popularity, appeal, and pro-SNCC politics, and they urged him to run. His friend Ben Brown, who was running for a nearby state house seat, was arguably the most persistent. In his own telling, Bond was reluctant at first and even unsure about which party to represent. “But I thought to myself, ‘He’s doing it,’” Bond later recalled, referring to Brown. “‘He and I are the same age, and I have had the same experiences. If he can do it, I can do it.’ So I did it.”36
With modest funding from his Republican father, Bond ran as a Democrat and enlisted the support of a strong team of SNCC volunteers for a door-to-door campaign that tapped into the organization’s strength in grassroots organizing. “We’d get a case of Coke and give it to someone, and they’d invite their neighbors over . . . and I’d make a speech,” Bond recalled. “Then I’d say, ‘If I do get elected, what is it you want me to do?’ They would say. Then I would make that into my platform. The more and more of these parties that we had, the more refined the platform became. So I could honestly say that I was a people’s candidate.”37 Bond’s platform called for increasing the minimum wage, repealing right-to-work laws, and ending literacy tests for voters.
On June 16, 1965, Bond won 82 percent of the votes in his district. He and Alice left for