Wesley Hogan’s “Many Minds, One Heart” (Duke University Dissertation, 2000) stands as the freshest work on the Civil Rights Movement since Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. Hogan’s dissertation is both a painstaking piece of scholarship and an urgent message to the grassroots.
A natural democrat, Hogan identifies with everyday people in motion. Feeling her way forward, she fully comprehends the personal transformations at the “base” of SNCC’s peak political achievements. But Hogan also dares to explore why SNCC went down slow. Pressing beyond more superficial explanations that have focused, for example, on racial tensions within the organization, she tells an intense story of how a “structural” problem became moral one. “Many Minds, One Heart” is a historical narrative that’s right on time for anyone concerned with the future of democratic practice in America (or Iraq! or Cuba!).
We thank Wesley Hogan for allowing us to print the introduction to “Many Minds, One Heart” below along with a slightly adapted excerpt from her dissertation’s penultimate chapter on SNCC’s demise.
Sweat beaded on twenty-one year old Charles McLaurin’s head as he opened the car door and got out. His stomach felt weak, his knees unsure. What he called “the fear” was upon him. He stood up as the three elderly women got out of the back seat and started toward the courthouse on a hot August day in 1962, “as if this was the long walk that led to the Golden Gate of Heaven, their heads held high.” He stood behind them, watching the “pride with which they walked. The strong convictions that they held.” The women had told stories of the years gone by in the car while McLaurin sat “with knees shaking, mouth closed tightly so as to not let them hear the fear in my voice.” When they drove through Sunflower, Mississippi, one of the women said, “Won’t be long now.” McLaurin’s heart jumped, and then seemed to stop: “fear, so much fear, realizing what danger could lie ahead for us, especially me.” The women, whose ages ranged from 65 to 85, “knew the white man and his ways, they knew him because they had lived, worked for him.” At the courthouse in Indianola, McLaurin stayed by the car as each woman walked up to the white registrar and said, “I want to vote.”
McLaurin spent the next four years “registrating.” That is to say, in the majority-black Mississippi delta, he encouraged African Americans to exercise their right to vote. Eventually, those who registered and those who were stopped from registering combined forces to invent something entirely new in American politics – a party structure made up of “legal” and “illegal” voters. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, they would introduce their creation to the nation: the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Yet nothing in 1964 or later was the high point for McLaurin. Nor was any event later in the decade. His peak moment occurred when these three black elderly ladies had given him “the spirit to continue.” So instructed on that day in 1962, he fixed in his mind how to live.[1]
For subsequent observers, Charles McLaurin becomes an exemplar of where the movement stood at a critical juncture during 1965-66. He was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Inside SNCC between 1960 and 1966, people learned to identify the specific nature of their grievances, and to act in a way that verified their own dignity. The young people of SNCC often felt like pioneers – “in a strange place and an unknown land,” as McLaurin put it. They tried to provide “light,” or follow a light, or perhaps even be a light that illuminated a New World of political activity. Drawing upon American traditions and Gandhian sources, they imagined and then put into practice fresh models of resistance – the sit-ins of 1960, and the freedom rides of 1961. Such dramatic innovations were not appreciated by the relevant authorities. Nevertheless, these activists managed to achieve a series of victories through their creative – and electrifying – protests. SNCC’s assertions of independence from America’s racial caste system – and the high drama of their efforts at self-definition – carried a recruiting power of its own. The movement’s early philosophy and tactics were sympathetically greeted, if not fully grasped, by large number of young white Americans who adapted and experimented with the SNCC folkway of “acting as if you were free to act.” The result was the “counterculture” of the 1960s.
The totality of these cultural transformations, both real and attempted, had the effect of generating inside SNCC an unstable combination of rising expectations and accelerating tensions. One of the great strengths of the civil rights movement had been the utter unpredictability that grew out of its experimental approach to inherited tradition. Within SNCC, this presence necessarily depended upon a genuine tolerance of error. Indeed, it was SNCC’s faith in the lessons derived from experience (from failure), its seemingly effortless capacity for improvisation, that most dramatically stamped its style and also its appeal. If SNCC had anything to say about it, the new desegregated America would be generous.
Yet the acceleration of political resistance and police repression began to widen the gap between the political perceptions of the larger society and those of people in the movement. Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in November 1964 did not resonate among either of the contending parties in the Mississippi delta – the hard-line segregationists anchored in the White Citizen’s Councils or movement activists like Charles McLaurin who had built the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Despite some concessions by the President, the movement felt rejected by the regular Democrats. By the time Johnson settled into his new term of office at the beginning of l965, SNCC was no longer riding some burgeoning tide of popular understanding and support. Quite the contrary. The movement turned inward, focused on internal recriminations and, in a remarkably brief time, lost its hard-won momentum.
By the late summer of 1965, McLaurin found the Greenwood project staff “divided and about to kill one another and the project not doing a thing.” He soon got it back on track, determined to keep on “until more than 10,000 Negroes are registered to vote in LeFlore County.”[2] One of many who tried to deflect dissention in the name of preserving the movement’s focus on organizing in the towns and hamlets of the South, he found the barriers to grassroots empowerment too imposing. The movement’s cutting edge, its McLaurins working at the base of society, had been blunted. Things began to disintegrate. By the end of the following year, 1966, SNCC had ceased, in any programmatic sense, to exist.
Precisely how this happened has remained, for almost four decades, something of a puzzle. It is as if the civil rights movement became sacred ground, occupying terrain beyond reach, beyond interpretation, beyond analysis. A kind of sanctified mist hovers over this landscape. Doubting any movement pieties appears akin to correcting the grammar of the Gettysburg Address. [3]
The result is profoundly destructive: the act of raising people to sainthood dehumanizes them. As the late historian Herbert Gutman vividly noted, it is not possible to honor people by romanticizing them. Today, forty years after the fact, young people are quietly skeptical of the idealized narrative they are often handed on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, or by Hollywood. Discussion of the movement is seen as just “old folks talking.” Even those who don’t know or care much about the inaugural dramas of the sit-ins and the apocalyptic freedom rides, or the tension and grandeur of the Selma March, can’t grope their way to any sort of genuine historical understanding because they are, like everyone else, trapped within the aura of sainthood.
This is not to say that this book constitutes a dramatic break with tradition, because, simply enough, it begins and lives on this sanctified terrain. It must – and for a very elemental reason: In the 1950s, the rituals of a racial caste system rooted in three hundred years of lived experience persisted in the cities, towns and countryside of America. A scant ten years later those rituals lay shattered. The social relations of black and white Americans fashioned over the better part of three centuries had been consigned to historical oblivion. The ten year achievement was profound; the cost for many people was severe; the long-term meaning still to be acted out on the stages of the nation’s history. Nothing is settled. While segregation had been dismantled, the culture of white supremacy endures. Nevertheless, the Movement’s rise and fall remains one of the pivotal sequences of American history.4 Riven with agonizing contradictions, this moment is too rich in tragedy and rebirth to be sanded off, polished and then domesticated under a cacophony of churchly hymns.
What follows, then, proceeds from an undeniable premise: fallible human beings gave this epochal decade the shape it came to have. They did so with resolve, with imagination and while in thrall to grand dreams. They also, on occasion, proceeded in error. At their best moments, it appears they were ahead of where we are today.
It may be time to acknowledge that we cannot go much further up the road until we find a way to be precise about what they knew and what they had not yet learned…
WHAT DO YOU MEAN REVOLUTION?
In the weeks following the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s betrayal and defeat in Atlantic City, SNCC staff struggled with the realization that the movement had gotten itself bogged down in some sort of impasse – at the very least a setback and perhaps something much broader and deeper, something approaching a crisis. SNCC was perceived to have “structural problems.”
The answer offered by SNCC’s Atlanta-based executive director, Jim Forman, was to put aside the movement’s experimental style. He made very clear his view that the organization’s decentralized structure was the causative factor in the aimlessness and confusion that beset the organization. SNCC needed to “alter the over-all decision-making body within the organization, for the organization has been in limbo, because of the unresolved nature of this question.” SNCC was much too leaderless and people continued to shy away from power, he said. SNCC needed a strong centralized executive structure. It was the only way to maintain internal cohesion and unity.[5]
Yet Forman’s proposed alteration of the movement’s trajectory contrasted too markedly with SNCC’s own traditions. [6] From the very outset, the organizers deeply engaged in SNCC’s most developed local projects did not support Forman’s approach. Most prominent among them were Bob Moses and Charles Sherrod. Many other well known local organizers, like Charles McLaurin and Hollis Watkins among them, also listened respectfully but did not rally to the views of SNCC’s executive secretary. Nonetheless, Forman proved tenacious. Participants discovered that we was doing more than floating a trial balloon; when his sought-after support failed to materialize, he tried again. And he kept trying.
This impasse among the most compelling veterans of SNCC created what can perhaps best be described as a problem in manners. No one wanted to be seen participating in a public rebuke of Jim Forman. He was a committed son of the movement. Yet his very unwillingness to acknowledge the absence of support created an awkward gridlock…
Before the Waveland staff meeting – which, in retrospect, proved to be one of the critical junctures of the movements of the 1960s – Forman had tried to address the vacuum of power he perceived within SNCC by introducing a Black Belt Program. He proposed that SNCC recruit black students to fan out from Virginia to Texas, registering voters over the following summer. For Forman, the Black Belt Summer Project could “serve to capitalize on the momentum of the Mississippi Project, but with our errors in Mississippi corrected, and [serve] to consolidate bases in regional structure with national potential.”[7] There was no questioning Forman’s personal courage or dedication. Over the past five years, he had faced down lynch mobs from Monroe, North Carolina to McComb, Mississippi, and many places in between. To provide administrative support to those in the field, he had made countless drives on lonely country roads, always wondering if nearing headlights signaled a mere passing car or imminent death. He had stayed – and not bailed out of – jails in Albany, Greenwood, and Atlanta. Once, in 1963, in Danville, Virginia, he had personally challenged E.G. McCain, that city’s malevolent police chief, in order to give demonstrators time to get away from McCain’s fire hoses. Furthermore, Forman had tirelessly maintained the material base of the organization since 1961, setting up an administrative structure to fund-raise and communicate with northern supporters – all despite serious health problems which led to multiple hospitalizations.[8]
Yet just as he admitted in his opening speech at Waveland, each SNCC person could only know so much. “I shall attempt to write a personal history of SNCC,” he said on November 6, “because there are many things about this organization which only I can write, just as there are many things about the Indianola project which only Charles McLaurin can write, or just as there are many things about McComb which only Jesse Harris can write, or Bill Hansen about Arkansas or Cordell Reagon about Southwest Georgia.” Forman had kept the Atlanta office functioning. He had traveled extensively in the field, spending a great deal amount of time in local projects in order to better understand and assess local needs – and convey these needs to northern supporters. In the aggregate, he had volunteered for a greater variety of undertakings than the vast majority of Americans, the vast majority of activists, and indeed, a goodly number of those present at Waveland.
There was one area of organizing in which Forman’s level of experience did not set him apart from a large number of his movement associates. That activity centered around the slow and patient work in communities – the daily work that an old time labor activist once described as happening “at the base of society where people lived.” And this fact associated Forman not with grassroots insurgency but with the political assumptions of all others persons, including activist intellectuals, who did not live “at the base.” This happenstance kept Forman from a central movement insight – namely, the specific process through which ordinary humans acquired that most sought-after political attribute: “consciousness.” It was not something that one learned by reading an approved text, or by following an esteemed leader. It was, rather, something one experienced through acting. And it was something that a large number (but not all) SNCC people learned through their own experiences at the base of society – people like Charles McDew, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Casey Hayden, Charles McLaurin, Hollis Watkins, and Charles Sherrod. Together with literally scores of other people who had lived in the movement long enough to see first-hand the process at work, these staff people learned (experientially and therefore in a manner that was reproducible) the specific ways through which self-activity generated consciousness.
Forman’s work did not involve prolonged personal relationships “at the base of society where people live.” He thus did not experience the process through which people moved from passive victims to active participants capable of saying (as the old lady in Indianola said to Charles McLaurin in 1962) “won’t be long now.”[9] As a result, McLaurin possessed a different understanding than Forman did of how to give concrete meaning to such terms of political description as “revolutionary.” The difference was graphic and unmistakable. This was why in 1964, Forman could not understand as McLaurin and Hayes did, voter registration as activity that could be transforming. “People going to the courthouse, for the first time. Then telling their friends to go down.” When McLaurin expressed this at Waveland, he condensed into two sentences the monumental battles black Mississippians had experienced in their own minds of whether or not to go to the courthouse. They were lines that carried much more meaning for McLaurin and other voter registration staff than for those whose major experiences were in remote administrative enclaves. McLaurin called this activity – working to get people to think of themselves as citizens not subjects – winning the “revolution.”[10] It was not the revolution envisioned by Forman. Theirs was not so much an ideological disagreement; more accurately, it was an experiential gulf.
Moses, however, had shared McLaurin’s work. Consequently, Forman’s concept of revolution through simply increasing the numbers of black voters did not at all appeal to Moses. Students could not just come down and do the slow and respectful work of encouraging people to risk their lives to vote. They had to be trained by people like McLaurin. Yet this training took time and energy, and Moses felt “it was useless to try and go into another student project” when SNCC first needed to focus on its internal problems.
Forman elected to describe Moses’ actions as a refusal to lead. It was clear to Moses, however, that he could not tell people what to do because he never in his own mind thought he had that right. “A basic principal in decision making in SNCC is that people who do the work make the decisions,” Moses stated at the beginning of the summer. “Decision making should be geared to programs, not to hierarchy.”[11]He simply did not believe that telling others what to do was the way people learned to grow.
Forman, on the other hand, worked from a different understanding of politics. He thought the task was to “outmaneuver the racists … hammer against the federal government … consolidate our power and extend our influence.” He felt that spending time in debate on how leadership was developed or decisions made within SNCC was an abdication of power – at the very moment in 1964-65 when SNCC might well be at its “peak of power and influence.”[12]
The gulf between Moses’ and Forman’s visions now widened. In fact, their philosophies and methods seemed so far apart that in hindsight it is difficult to envision how they appeared to work in concert for so long. A plausible explanation may simply be that a singular determination to register black voters had held them together prior to the Summer Project.
What would replace this working consensus? Two different modes of thinking appeared within SNCC at this point (although many people moved frequently between them). At one pole were people clustered around James Forman’s driving question: how could SNCC create an organization which would survive and seek power? Forman and those who supported him felt that SNCC “had reached the point where it was necessary to become a revolutionary organization in every sense…And an organization that is seeking revolution, and willing to use violence, cannot afford the fear of power. It cannot afford weak or vacillating leadership; it cannot afford liberalistic forms of self-assertion.” At the other pole were those like Sherrod and Moses, who saw developing people at the grassroots to be their own leaders as the only coherent way to try to revolutionize society.[13]
Forman was very clear on this point: “Most [in SNCC], in fact, did not see themselves as creating an organization which would survive and seek power, but rather as working themselves out of business as a result of community organizing efforts that would spin off other organizations. Most did not see SNCC building a revolutionary organization.” What Forman did not acknowledge was that the two groups differed on how to define revolution: for Forman, it was building a revolutionary organization to seek power. Sherrod and Moses saw power emanating from building people at the grassroots, so they could articulate and achieve their own desires and needs.[14]
WAVELAND
In later years, Forman considered those at Waveland to adhere around two factions, “Freedom Highs” and “Field Staff.” For reasons that are not self-evident, historians and movement people alike then widely adapted this terminology. Yet it did not accurately describe the divisions at Waveland: it was not a matter of organizers on one side, and dreamers on the other. Everyone present was interested in organizing: they differed on what that meant. Some, like Moses and Sherrod, had come through the organization committed to the building of relationships that had emerged from the sit-ins and strengthened by their rural voter registration experiences. Forman labeled them “Freedom High.”[15] Subjecting his categories to the activity at Waveland, however, it is clear that those who were labeled “Freedom High” did not strategize together. They were not organizing for power within SNCC as an organization – they were searching desperately for a way to keep bringing people to civic life in local communities.
By the Waveland meeting, Forman said later, it was “revealed very clearly to me that we had a factional fight on our hands, and that it was necessary to organize in a way appropriate to such a fight” (emphasis added). Framing his understanding through such conceptual terms, he found it impossible to work any longer within the group’s democratic ethic. Forman now prepared for a battle, organizing against others in SNCC. In other moments he had advocated bringing criticisms of others – those whom he perceived as organizing against him – out into the open. Now he worked secretly to destabilize and overcome those he named Freedom Highs.[16]
At a certain point a small rump group led by Forman began to believe that their analysis was more important than maintaining the group and holding it together. At this moment, some attempted to take control of SNCC to enact their agenda. Simply put, people who wanted power took it. Goals become more important than process.
It was a circumstance repeated during the decade most notably in the national SDS organization through the fervent Progressive Labor Party between 1967-1968, but one that also played out in hundreds of local activist groups as well as those of regional or national scope.
Long before SNCC evolved, other groups of Americans had experienced similar tensions between hierarchical and democratic forms. But SNCC workers had pushed their capacities to participate in public life to a new limit – for themselves, and for the local people with whom they worked. The range of issues that emerged within SNCC during the fall of 1964 had been developing for at least two years. The limit of the democratic terrain they had plowed for so long as an organization was reached at Waveland.[17] [There would be one more SNCC moment of Democratic innovation – the Lowndes County Alabama organizing that took place in 1965-66. W. H.]
However, it is critical to note that even if no one had stepped forward to organize against others in SNCC, multiple impediments – disagreement on priorities, the lack of a process to make decisions or educate new workers, money problems, the central and undiscussed dynamic of racial identity, the questions surrounding nonviolence, and the lack of interpersonal trust – now had the cumulative effect of inhibiting both candor and mutual respect. This situation was noted by nearly everyone in the group at this point, and surely would have presented a crisis throughout the fall of 1964 and into 1965 even if factions had not developed. No individual can be saddled with the blame. It seems to be a strategic point in time reached by every voluntary organization striving for an authentic organizational form. At a juncture where the group has had enough success to attract many others, it then becomes too large to continue to depend on personal ties to hold it together.
Ella Baker had taught those at the center of SNCC the importance of a firm commitment to kindling these personal connections. But there was no longer enough interpersonal contact among all of the people within the group to maintain the interdependent vision possible through daily, shared experiences.[18] Without this contact, some people, in Baker’s vivid phrase, “ate on each other,” harshly critical of their comrades in order to justify their own vision. Forman was the most visible – but certainly not the only – such critic. He characterized those who opposed his vision as infected with a “middle-class bias.” Sometimes he distinguished them as too close to whites, or decried them for smoking marijuana, or cast them as people too tightly wedded to individualist or “liberalist” thought. Some, Forman said, lacked discipline or engaged in self-indulgence or elitism. Others, he alleged, were too close to SDS and its ethic of “participatory democracy.” He characterized his colleagues as a “small elitist core of self-perpetuating organizers,” who could not recruit masses of people into the organization. [19] But Forman’s style of argumentation never isolated the specific organizing methods that had to be guarded against – that is, the debilitating hazards remained undefined. Indeed, the prevailing reality was quite stark: the founding organizers of SNCC’s two largest and most visible projects – its bellwether projects – were the Mississippi project initiated by Bob Moses and the Southwest Georgia project launched by Charles Sherrod. Among the many local organizers SNCC had across the country, none had more prestige than Moses and Sherrod. Both persistently declined to cooperate with Forman’s centralizing objective.
DEMOCRATIC PATIENCE
Up until the 1964-65 period, respect and candor as modes of conduct had been the “radical” manners that structured the way people within SNCC were sanctioned to act with each other. The only way they had found to work successfully against all outside impediments – against the caste system itself – had been to band together and fight their way through to agreement, by compromise. As Dorie Ladner remarked at Waveland, “We have got to trust each other. If it takes all night, we should discuss [the lack of trust among us], to impress upon us all to be honest, a band of brothers we must be.” Mike Thelwell agreed. “If one doesn’t really trust someone in the organization, it is because we haven’t taught trust here. We have got to find ways of creating trust and responsibility with everyone here.” Absent these ways of being, the community faltered.[20]
How did this happen? In their own way, the participants have been trying to tell us. John Lewis noted, in preparing for the sit-ins over the winter of 1959-1960, that the Nashville group knew they were “going to do something. But it’s strange. We were very patient.” It was a remark that meant much more to the sit-in participants than to those who later heard it. What did Lewis mean by “patience”? It was not the patience called for by southern authorities, needless to say. Nor was it “radical” patience. It was, indeed, not a call to be patient relative to the external pace of change. Instead, it was an understanding each workshop participant had to maintain while sifting through his or her own experiences, feelings, and possible future actions. It was patience with each other. Patience in the presence of their own errors. Patience with their predecessors in the older generation. Patience with larger African-American constituencies across America. It was a mode of persistent but calm behavior that allowed people to combine the ingredients necessary to act, and to do so with sustained poise. Looking back on the Nashville workshops, Lewis’ comment defines a type of democratic act. His form of patience allowed people raised in a hierarchical and segregated society to go through a sequential process that prepared them to act as full citizens.
It would, in fact, be patience that Lawson-workshop participant Marion Barry would call for in his Waveland paper. “We want a world where people grow up learning to care for others and learning many different things they can do with their lives,” Barry wrote. “We hope for this world, all of us (although we don’t all believe it will ever really come about.)” Even though the programs SNCC developed “are sometimes dull, or ugly, or too impatient, the hope is beautiful,” he continued. “Maybe we would be more patient with each other – and our organization would therefore become more democratic – if we remember that while we are all very different, we are joined together by a hope that is very beautiful.”[21]
But this idea of democratic patience would be hard to summon in the crisis period following Atlantic City. For most people at Waveland, their sole experience outside of the civil rights movement took place within hierarchical institutions – those of family, church, school, or business. In fact, few Americans had extensive experience with voluntary social forms. When the staff gathered at Waveland and put all of these matters on the table, it was difficult for most people to even envision, much less create, an efficient and non-hierarchical structure for SNCC.
STRUCTURING FREEDOM
At Waveland, the staff discussed “program” – what to do next – for three and a half days. On Monday, Forman passed around a paper suggesting a new staff structure. to grow the group into what he later defined as a “revolutionary organization in every sense.” In it, the Coordinating Committee would meet three times a year to decide on policy, voting “very tightly and efficiently.” An administrative body, the Executive Committee, would then form a Finance Committee to raise monies to disburse the budget laid out by the Coordinating Committee. An Executive Secretary “should be asked by [that] body to be the overall administrative officer of the organization.” A single person – the Program Secretary – would be assigned to support people’s work in the field. Even this was presented as more of an enforcer role than a supportive one: the role of the Program Secretary, Forman wrote, “will be to travel in the field to examine how programs are carried out and to report to the Executive Secretary his findings and to the Executive Committee.” [22]
The other two structure groups – one led by Francis Mitchell, the other by Casey Hayden and Maria Varela – presented alternatives to Forman’s proposal to knit local groups through a tightly-controlled hierarchy. In contrast, Hayden and Varela’s group suggested a structure in which local groups could decide themselves when to draw together to show collective strength. Mitchell’s group presented what amounted to a compromise between the decentralized and hierarchical models, instituting a ‘representative democracy’ with an elected “interim committee” that met monthly and made decisions between full staff meetings.[23]
On Wednesday, the second-to-last day of the retreat, each group presented their workshop’s structure to the full staff at Waveland. When Hayden’s turn came, she felt it difficult to make clear an organizational form that unfamiliar to people largely accustomed to hierarchies. She consequently drew a picture of seven or eight dots connected by a circle. Each dot, Hayden explained, represented a work group. Work groups consisted of people working on the same programs: a freedom school work group, a community center work group, voter registration work group, etc. Each work group would elect an administrator from the group, who would then talk to every other group’s administrator, exchanging ideas, coordinating plans, and distributing scarce resources. She then drew a triangle to represent the hierarchy Forman’s structure represented. The executive secretary would be at the tip of the triangle, and s/he would tell subordinates how to proceed.[24]
But when Hayden finished, people laughed and booed. It was unclear why.[25] In this rancorous environment, no clear resolution of SNCC’s identity and purpose was possible. The three proposals by Forman, Mitchell, and Varela and Hayden both provided a strong framework for the organization, although the decentralist models were seen by some within the organization as “no structure,” or “loose” compared to Forman’s hierarchical structure. “That is inaccurate,” Hayden later wrote. “Both are tight.” Both, in other words, had the potential to hold people accountable and effectively distribute resources.[26]
Staff members then discussed the possible drawbacks to each of the three structures. The Forman (“C” in the minutes) and Mitchell (“A”) proposals would make SNCC an institution, not service a movement. The Varela-Hayden proposal (“B”) could service the movement, but did not have a formalized channel to interact with the outside world, and did not have a check or balance on the personnel/finance committee. Structure B also assumed that people in the field had enough information to make decisions every day, but SNCC’s communication channels were not efficient or dependable enough to provide such information. Structure A did not clarify responsibilities for personnel and budget decisions, and required work specialization. Structure C did not provide adequately for field needs.[27]
All of the designs were sincere, legitimate structures for the organization, and in the tradition of SNCC, democratically generated by staff. Compared to traditional hierarchical models, the A and B structures offered SNCC a way to stay both “organized” and “accountable” to one another, without resorting to telling others what to do. B had flaws, but amounted to a decentralized structure, not anarchy.
In the absence of using consensus, Forman noted, they could not find a group solution “in an honest, thorough, collective way that would put problems in perspective and reduce frustration.” Faced with this impasse, those at the Waveland conference ended on the decision to “remain with what we now have.” Forman, Ivanhoe Donaldson, and Courtland Cox remained as executive secretary, administrative assistant, and program director respectively. Those interested in planning the next staff gathering were encouraged to meet.[28]
Though nothing in the existing secondary literature reveals that Forman’s plan was a “minority position” during the Waveland meeting, the minutes of the retreat make clear that a majority of those voicing their opinion were highly skeptical of centralization; indeed, two of the three proposals for a new SNCC structure rejected hierarchy, and Forman himself noted that his ideas were out of sync with most others in SNCC. “What kind of structure we are to have was left hanging,” one staff member reported. Most later secondary accounts simply note that over the course of 1965, a hierarchical structure was implemented. South Carolinian and summer recruit Cleveland Sellers recalled that in this period, SNCC workers lost the “zip and enthusiasm that had kept us going in previous times.”[29]
SNCC persisted. Forman pursued the “Black Belt Project.” Others participated in the Selma campaign in the spring of 1965. Out of this effort came SNCC’s last major organizing campaign in Lowndes County, Alabama. [30]
Outside of Lowndes, though, organizing now took a back seat to the traditional idea of leadership. The energy generated by the group who remained in the organization now came from the fundamental intellectual ferment that the SNCC leaders created amongst themselves in an immense struggle to reinvent black culture, the effort so powerfully documented by historian Clayborne Carson. Over the next two years, SNCC became an organization of leaders that told people what to think, rather than developing individuals’ capacities to think.[31]
Notes
1. Charles McLaurin, “To Overcome Fear,” Frame 55-56, Reel 40, SNCC Papers.
2. Charles McLaurin to Cleve Sellers, n.d. [August 1965], “Report on the Second Congressional District,” Frame 165-166, Reel 40, SNCC Papers.
3. Common custom in a field of literature already flowering with thousands of books is to challenge traditional narratives, asserting the luminosity of the new work when compared to the fading explanatory power of previous endeavors. My intent is to deviate from this patricidal pattern. Instead, what follows is only one piece of the larger truths emerging from the activity known as the “civil rights movement”: It is an attempt to uncover the precise sequential dynamics of how individuals successfully insisted on the right to their own lives. Barbara Deming’s insightful approach has shaped my own. See Barbara Deming, We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (Phila.: New Society Publishers, 1984). Deming’s idea, that we all only have one piece of the truth, does however open one to criticism – how does one’s work interact with and reshape the themes in previous work in the field? Rather than include this material in the footnotes, I have included most of it in a separate appendix, “A Note on the Literature of the Movement.” I beg the scholarly reader’s patience with the placement of material in the footnotes that specialists in the field might include in the text. However, since such matters are of primary interest only to specialists, I tried to keep them in the notes, and direct the text toward the general reader.
4. Recent emphasis by historians on transnational scholarship illuminates the profound limitations of writing “U.S.” history in the post World War II period. While the story that follows focuses on a movement within U.S. borders, it is essential to note that the participants saw their activity in the context of global liberation activities.
5. James Forman, “Text of speech delivered at the staff retreat of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee…” 6 Nov. 1964, page 2- 3, Stewart Ewen Papers, SHSW.
6. Martha Norman summarized these traditions: “Everybody ran their own project. Bob Moses used to say, ‘When people are volunteering to do things, you can’t tell them what to do.’ And they were risking their lives. The combination meant that the people doing it made the decisions about what they were going to do.” Martha Norman, Interview by Eynon and Fishman. In his autobiography, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Forman noted that it was not until this period that he realized “the gap between my ideas of what SNCC should be and the ideas of most SNCC workers.” (Forman, Black Revolutionaries, 430).
7. Forman mentioned the Black Belt Project earlier as well, in a June, 1964 staff meeting: “We should begin to view MSP [Mississippi Summer Project] as pilot project and after summer begin a black belt project.” In a memo to all staff before he left for Guinea, Forman listed six positions that would be opening on the black belt project, including administrator, labor program coordinator, federal program coordinator, FDP coordinator, community center coordinator, and freedom school coordinator. Despite the fact that the full staff had not yet agreed to it, Forman’s memo indicated that the project had been approved the by executive committee in September. Forman, “Staff Meeting Minutes, June 9-11, 1964,” p.24-25, Frame 988, Reel 3, SNCC Papers; James Forman, to “All staff, Friends of SNCC, and potential members of the Freedom Corps,” n.d. [early fall, 1964], f. 679, reel 12, SNCC Papers; Forman, Black Revolutionaries, 414, 416, 426, 429. Forman writes that “Moses and I were [the Black Belt Project’s] chief proponents.” Moses specifically stated that he did not support it in the interview with Carson. Ella Baker advised: “We should accept the concept that our first consideration is to solidify the programs we have; and the second step is to establish a nucleus in one or two areas in which we can develop programs via workshops and exploratory meetings. Do not commit selves to summer [Black Belt] project.” (Ella Baker, “Staff meeting Oct. 11,” [1964], p. 6, Frame 1018, Reel 3, SNCC Papers). The October, 1964, debate on the Black Belt project can be found on Frames 1016-1021, Reel 3, SNCC Papers. From the minutes, it appears that among those who supported it at this time were Courtland Cox, Mendy Samstein, James Forman, Ivanhoe Donaldson; those cautious, hesitant, or skeptical included Ed Brown, Charles McLaurin, Tom Brown, Lawrence Guyot, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Ella Baker, Marion Barry.
8. Forman suffered from bleeding ulcers. See “SNCC [Interstaff] Newsletter,” 21 Jan. 1963, Frame 4, Reel 15, SNCC Papers. On Forman’s confrontations with southern sheriffs and other authorities, see The Student Voice, Oct. 1962, 20 Jan. 1964, 20 Dec. 1965, as well as Making of Black Revolutionaries, 197, 257, 303, 329.
9. See introduction, p. 3.
10. Frank Smith raised this point at the staff meeting in October, 1964: “Atlantic City left many people with feeling for the necessity of an increased impetus to work in the political arena. Are we interested in building a politicial empire for SNCC [Forman’s vision], or in building local leadership. …these two types of organizations are not compatible. We must discuss what SNCC is.” Frank Smith, “Staff Meeting Oct. 11,” [1964,] page 4, Frame 1017, Reel 3, SNCC Papers; James Forman, “Text of speech delivered at the staff retreat…” Mary King Papers, SHSW; Charles McLaurin, “Minutes,” 8 Nov. 1964, page 7, SNCC Papers, Reel 11, Frame 939. On McLaurin’s work in Ruleville, see for example SNCC [Interstaff] Newsletter, 21 Jan. 1963, Frame 5, Reel 15, SNCC Papers.
11. Moses also supported the concept of group leadership, rather than that of individuals. A telling example of this involved a decision he made in rejecting CBS Television’s proposal to interview Governor Paul Johnson, then Moses. Moses rejected it “because I didn’t want myself projected as leader as would be if set next to Johnson. Concept of group leadership more important to get across. Decided we’d focus on a group which was representative not necessarily of the decision-making group in COFO but of COFO itself.” Moses, “Staff Meeting Minutes, June 9-11, 1964,” p. 21; Frame 986, Reel 3, SNCC Papers; Forman, Black Revolutionaries, 416, 417; Bob Moses, “Staff Meeting Minutes, June 9-11, 1964,” page 11; Frame 980, Reel 3, SNCC Papers; Robert Moses, Interview by Clayborne Carson. These ideas of non-directive leadership are also clearly articulated in the position paper Maria Varela wrote for Waveland, “Training SNCC Staff to Be Organizers,” Charles Sherrod Papers, SHSW.
12. Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 418.
13. Sherrod pressed the group to examine SNCC after five years in the field. Who were they as organizers, and who did they want to organize next? To what end? These questions “flowed out” of what was for them “the central issue”: who was SNCC? “Who we are and who we will be should determine what we want, what direction we go in.” Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 412; It is not in the minutes, everyone citing it is coming off of Forman, Dittmer knows about this according to Casey; Charles Sherrod, “From Sherrod,” n.d. [Nov. 1964], Stuart Ewen Papers, SHSW.
14. Lawrence Guyot later voiced the impact this divide had on staff in February, 1965, as the group still struggled over the structure question. Guyot averred: “I’ll work with anyone willing to work” rather than “polarize about structure.” “We were told what we needed was a structure to operate. That’s intimidation, only we didn’t know it.” James Forman, Making of Black Revolutionaries, 412; Lawrence Guyot, Staff meeting minutes, Feb. 1965, p. 9, Mary King Papers, SHSW.
15. “Freedom High” surfaces in the SNCC papers for the first time, to my knowledge, in May 1965, in Mary King’s minutes of the staff meeting at Gammon Theological Seminary. Mary King Papers, SHSW. Forman uses the term in Black Revolutionaries, 422.
16. It was following the October 1964 staff meeting, Forman recalled in his memoirs, that he felt for the first time, “careful planning and control of SNCC meetings” was an “absolute necessity.” There is some contradiction within Forman’s account about when he began to perceive a faction working against him. On page 419, he puts it following the Gammon conference in Oct. 1964. On page 433, he puts it between his return from Atlanta and the Waveland conference. On page 436, he says it is immediately after Waveland. The matter is relevant because at whatever point he began to feel a faction was being organized against him, he responded in a way that fundamentally changed the organization. His opening speech at Waveland represented a departure from usual SNCC practice, but became more common in subsequent years.
17. Individuals within SNCC continued to pioneer new democratic forms. But the organization had reached its limit.
18. Interestingly, Joseph Ellis has recently argued that such daily shared experiences was a major factor holding the generation of “founding brothers” together through the war of independence and the creation of permanent federal institutions. Ellis, Founding Brothers, (NY: Knopf, 2000), 7.
19. Ella Baker, quoted in Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 367; Forman, Black Revolutionaries, 412. The number of references to “middle-class” SNCC workers as part of the problem in this crucial section of Forman’s history of SNCC is staggering. The analytical weight Forman puts to bear on class as an explanation for people’s actions indicates that we as a culture need more precise terms of description to explain why people do the things they do in addition to whatever class they come from or reside within. Certainly more precise terms of description would elucidate in finer detail the complex reasons why the staff began to fracture at this point. Class orientation simply cannot account for the entirely of the reasons why they began to split. For instance, Moses, Sherrod, and Hayden were all from families without great means. Furthermore, they did not adhere to middle-class lifestyles or values. Forman, Black Revolutionaries, 413, 414, 418, 419, 425, 431, 434, 435, 437, 440, 444; Sellers, River of No Return, 133.
20. Dorie Ladner and Mike Thelwell, 9 Nov. 1964, page 26, Frame 951, Reel 11, SNCC Papers; Jimmy Bolton to Personnel Committee, 9 March 1965, frame 689, reel 1, SNCC Papers.
21. Marion Barry, “What is SNCC,” position paper prepared for Waveland [Nov. 1964], Mary King Papers, SHSW.
22. This was the role Forman had been carrying out during the previous four years. Forman suggested that the Executive Secretary appoint at least seven people to report to him in carrying out the administrative duties: an administrative assistant, a Program Secretary, someone to run the Jackson office, a Northern Coordinator, Southern Campus Coordinator, a Director of Communications, and a Research Director. James Forman, “Memorandum on the Structure of the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee,” submitted to staff at Waveland [Nov. 1964], Mary King Papers, SHSW. Forman, Black Revolutionaries, 435-437. See also, James Forman, “Text of Speech delivered at the staff retreat of the SNCC at Waveland…” and James Forman, “What is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: A Band of Brothers, A Circle of Trust,” prepared for the SNCC staff retreat of Nov. 1964…” in Mary King Papers, SHSW.
23. The two groups differed in their decentralized structure. See Appendix. A decentralized structure would later be suggested by Greg Calvert within SDS. Indeed, Charles Payne argues that such a structure was favored by Ella Baker: “She envisioned small groups of people working together,” Charles Payne wrote, “but also retaining contact in some form with other such groups, so that coordinated action would be possible whenever large numbers were really necessary. I know of no place where she fully explains her thinking, but, given her values, it is almost certain that she would have been put off by the undemocratic tendencies of larger organizations as well as by their usual failure to provide the kind of environment that encouraged individual growth. I suspect that she also favored smaller organizations precisely because they were less likely to factionalize or develop climates of distrust.” (Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, 369). Baker’s position on structure, however, is made a bit more obscure by her remarks at a Personnel Committee Meeting in May, 1964, where SNCC people were discussing a wide range of the organization’s structural problems. Baker noted that “Some jobs are more specific, i.e., well run offices, fund raising, bookkeeping, etc. [SNCC people] have been running away from structure, established procedure.” Ella Baker, Frame 480, Reel 12, SNCC Papers. On Waveland, “Group 5, Francis Mitchell chairman,” n.d. [Nov. 1964], Mary King Papers, SHSW; Mitchell, “Minutes,” 10 Nov. 1964, page 32-35, Frames 954-955, Reel 11, SNCC Papers.
24. Casey Hayden, “Memorandum on structure,” n.d. [Nov. 1964], Casey Hayden Papers; Casey Hayden, “Fields of Blue,” 361-364; Hayden, personal interview.
25. For some time, Cason felt that the people who were booing her wanted a strong leader, and reacted to her as a white woman, rather than to her idea. Later on, she felt the explanation was more complex than race and gender. This is one moment where it would be important to determine exactly at what point Forman began to organize against what he perceived to be a faction organizing against him within SNCC. If it was prior to the Waveland meeting, then this might have been part of the reason why Hayden’s ideas were dismissed. But certainly at Waveland, when Forman stated: “I want to deal with the idea in Casey’s mind of where power in the organization resides…” (p. 36) he had recognized the differences between his own and Hayden’s approach. Frame 955-956, Reel 11, SNCC Papers.
26. It was not until three months later, at the February 1965 staff meeting, that the decentralized structure was “not being ‘no structure’ but different structure,” Mary King’s notes indicate. But it was here to that many of those felt that hierarchical structure was a “hard line” position, “with all its phallic appeal and connotations,” recalled Emmie Schrader Adams. Feb. 1965 Atlanta SNCC Meeting, transcription of M. King notes, Mary King Papers, SHSW; Emmie Schrader Adams, “From Africa to Mississippi,” Deep in Our Hearts, 327. Casey Hayden, “Fields of Blue,” 363. Forman referred to weak versus strong structures in Black Revolutionaries, 424. One of the more interesting examples today of this structure of a horizontal network of projects with a coordinating center is the Frente Autentico del Trabajo union in Mexico. See Dale Hathaway, Allies Across the Border: Mexico’s “Authentic Labor Front” and Global Solidarity (Boston: South End, 2000).
27. “Minutes,” 12 Nov. 1964, pp. 35-39, Frame 956-957, Reel 11, SNCC Papers; “Summary of Staff Retreat Minutes,” [Nov. 1964], page 4, Frame 718, Reel 12, SNCC Papers.
28. The Planning Committee Meeting for the next staff meeting (Feb. 1965) was held in Pine Bluff, Ark. People disagreed about what had actually been decided or not decided at Waveland. See, for example, Mary King’s response to John Lewis’s memo to staff over “alleged coup” in SNCC, and “red-baiting of SNCC”: John Lewis to All SNCC Staff, n.d. [winter 1964-65], Frame 23, Reel 2, SNCC Papers; Mary King to John Lewis, 10 Jan. 1965, Frame 650, Reel 1, SNCC Papers. “Minutes” 12 Nov. 1964, p.39, Frame 957, Reel 11, SNCC Papers.
29. The next full staff meeting was in February, 1965, in Atlanta. Sections of these minutes are in the Mary King Papers. The structure discussion continued at the February meeting. It is unclear to me if or when a structure was actually decided upon, or if the designs presented at Waveland ever received a vote. “Summary of Staff Retreat Minutes,” [1964], frame 716, Reel 12, SNCC Papers; Sellers, River of No Return, 131; Carson, In Struggle, 149. Muriel Tillinghast reported that “people knew how to manipulate the organ. I mean Forman used to manipulate SNCC to beat the [inaudible] who used to cuss Forman out, because if he wanted to get a vote through, he knew exactly who to pinhole, how long to hold them in the meeting and when to bring the vote up and usually votes were around 2 a.m. and everyone would be stoned asleep.” Muriel Tillinghast, interview with Clay Carson, 6 Nov. 1976, courtesy of Clayborne Carson.
30. The one significant exception to the inertia subsequently characterizing SNCC’s organizing was their activity in Alabama during 1965-1966, where a voter registration drive resulted in the formation of the Lowndes County Freedom Party infamously symbolized by a black panther. SNCC entered Lowndes County – whose adult population was 82% African American – in February, 1965. Stokely Carmichael led the effort. On Lowndes County, see Hasan Jeffries, “Standing Up For Freedom: the Civil Rights Movement in Lowndes County, Alabama,” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2002). John Hullet and Stokely Carmichael, The Black Panther Party: Speech by John Hullet, Interview with Stokely Carmichael, Report from Lowndes County (NY: Merit Publishers, 1966); Jack Minnis, Lowndes County Freedom Organization; the Story of the Development of an Independent Political movement on the County Level (Louisville: Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1967); Lowndes County Freedom movement: the Rise of the Black Panthers, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 25 min., Princeton, NJ: 1995, videocassette; “The Time Has Come (1964-66),” Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954 to 1965, produced and directed by James DeVinney and Madison Davis Lacy, Jr., 60 min., Pacific Arts, 1992, videocassette. The MFDP also spun off organizations to work on issues including welfare distribution, low-income housing, and education. Evidence of their activities can be found in the SNCC and MFDP Papers, WATS line reports, Frames 520-on, Reel 14, SNCC Papers. Marion Barry, “Minutes,” 9 Nov. 1964, page 26, SNCC Papers, Reel 11, Frame 951; Charles Sherrod, “From Sherrod,” [Nov. 1964], Stewart Ewen Papers, SHSW; “Minutes,” 12 Nov. 1964, SNCC Papers, microfilm, Reel 11, Frame 955. The issue of different values and priorities between SNCC staff and MFDP organizations emerges throughout the SNCC minutes. See, for example, Ed [Brown], “Transcription of MEK Notes, Feb ’65 Atlanta SNCC Meeting [historic],” Mary King Papers, SHSW.
31. On SNCC’s intellectual contributions to the Black Cultural movement, see Carson, In Struggle, chapters 11, 13, and 14. For an account of the loss of the organizing tradition that is stunning for its clarity and poignancy, see Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, chapter 13.