The birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.)

In the wake of the early sit-ins at lunch counters closed to blacks, which started in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth made a phone call to Ella Baker, who was the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C.),. As founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and an organizer of S.C.L.C., Shuttlesworth recognized the potential and a new opportunity to organize young protesters, which gave Ella Baker an idea for a movement.

With an eight hundred dollar grant donated from S.C.L.C., Baker invited student leaders to meet at Shaw University in Raleigh. On April 17th, 1960, that conference gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C.). The theme of the conference was called "Sacrifice for Dignity" and out of the one hundred students that were invited, roughly three hundred attended. The numbers of the students that attended exhibited a passion for a new movement that would not be bound to an older hierarchy, nor did they wish to be a younger division of the N.A.A.C.P. or S.C.L.C.

With this new organization under her leadership and tutelage, Ella Baker nurtured S.N.C.C. to express their own identity. She was concerned that S.C.L.C., led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was out of touch with younger blacks who wanted the movement to make faster progress. Baker encouraged the members of S.N.C.C. to look beyond integration to broader social change and to view King’s principle of nonviolence more as a political tactic than as a way of life.

The new group played a large part in the Freedom Rides aimed at desegregating buses and in the marches organized by King and S.C.L.C. Under the new leadership of James Forman, Bob Moses, and Marion Barry, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee also directed much of the black voter registration drives in the South. Three of its members died at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Events such as these heightened divisions between King and S.N.C.C. The latter objected to compromises at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, where the party refused to replace the all-white Mississippi delegation with the integrated Freedom Democrats.

In 1966, Stokely Carmichael was elected head of S.N.C.C. and popularized the term black power to characterize the new tactics and goals–including black self-reliance and the use of violence as a legitimate means of self-defense. He also drew attention to the plight of blacks in the inner cities. Carmichael’s successor, H. Rap Brown, went further, saying “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” But the fires and disorders that followed in the summer of 1967 led to Brown’s arrest for incitement to riot, and S.N.C.C. disbanded shortly thereafter as the civil rights movement itself splintered. However, from S.N.C.C. emerged other powerful voices such as Julian Bond, Diane Nash, and John Lewis.