SNCC

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was begun in 1960. Its goal was to organize the protest of African American college students who were against segregation, racism and discrimination in Southern states. Some of its founding members were Ella Jo Baker and John Lewis. Martin Luther King Jr. was also a member of the SNCC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee got its beginnings due to the Greensboro sit-in which was an incident where four African American college students sat down at a Woolworth’s (department store) lunch counter and ordered lunch. When the waiter refused to serve them the students refused to leave the lunch counter. This nonviolent protest strategy became the main strategy that the SNCC employed in the South to force desegregation of public facilities. Another goal of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was to work on voter registration drives for African Americans. The Mississippi Project in 1964 was a voter registration drive in which 800 volunteers registered thousands of African Americans to vote. The SNCC’s statement of purpose maintained that “nonviolence…seeks a social order of justice permeated by love…Through nonviolence, courage, displaces fear; love transforms hate. Acceptance dissipated prejudice; hope ends despair. Peace dominated war; faith reconciles doubt. Mutual regard cancels enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice…By appeal to conscience and standing on the moral nature existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice becomes actual possibilities”. [|SNCC] In 1966 the SNCC’s new leader Stokely Carmichael changed the SNCC from a nonviolent organization to a more militant revolutionary one. He advocated black power as a more important goal than integration of blacks into the white society. Because of these changes the SNCC eventually played less of a role in the civil right movement. In 1969 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee changed its name to The Student National Coordinating Committee. By the early 1970’s the group no longer existed.

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