[ Though the organization’s legacy has been domesticated, its
grassroots leadership embraced the global fight for freedom.]
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SNCC’S UNRULY INTERNATIONALISM  
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Dan Berger
November 16, 2021
Boston Review
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_ Though the organization’s legacy has been domesticated, its
grassroots leadership embraced the global fight for freedom. _

SNCC Newsletter turns toward black nationalism: 1967 , by Washington
Area Spark. This image was marked with a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.

 

Movements are made when people in motion outpace existing
organizations and tactical urgency remakes the existing landscape.

That’s what happened on February 1, 1960, when four college students
staging a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North
Carolina spurred dozens of sit-ins throughout the South by the end of
the month. By the middle of April that year, leading agitators of
these sit-ins gathered at Shaw University to formalize a new vehicle
to sync their efforts: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). Pronounced “snick,” the organization’s members became
known as the shock troops of the civil rights movement—people of
unparalleled courage and creativity in the fight against white
supremacy.

Though some SNCC veterans made their way to political office—most
famously John Lewis, James Clyburn, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Marion
Barry—SNCC’s greatest triumph was the emphasis it placed on
grassroots organizing. It empowered a generation of largely unheralded
organizers. Its members braved racist terror to challenge segregation,
demonstrate multiracial democracy, and forge transnational coalitions.
Since its collapse, SNCC veterans have been the most conscientious of
the ’60s-era activists to ground their individual and collective
legacies in the world-making pursuit of justice.

Today, even in commemoration, SNCC exemplifies the organized chaos of
social change. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its sixtieth anniversary
conference was postponed from an in-person gathering in April 2020 to
a virtual gathering in October 2021, over sixty-one years after its
initial founding. With an eye on history, the conference foregrounded
the pervasive threats facing the prospect of multiracial democracy
today. In 1964 Mississippi was widely seen as the most virulently
racist state in the country when SNCC expanded an ambitious plan to
organize voter registration efforts there. Now, as several conference
participants noted with restrained optimism, Mississippi has the
largest number of Black elected officials in the country—a sure sign
of SNCC’s legacy. Yet it also has rampant voter suppression and
remains one of the poorest states in the country in terms of
education, health care, and infrastructure—signs of institutional
problems SNCC could not overcome.

More than 1,000 people registered to attend the conference, where SNCC
veterans chopped it up with a multigenerational group of organizers.
With sessions on voting rights, police reform, Black elected
officials, public education, affordable housing, economic justice, and
the role of artists in activism, the gathering mapped an impressive
terrain. Less frequently discussed—but no less central to its
impact—was SNCC’s internationalism. The organization’s sense of
urgency was always enmeshed in a global understanding of racism and
liberation. Theirs was an unruly internationalism, however, one that
ultimately cost the organization external support and exacerbated
internal tensions. Though the difficulties of its global outlook may
have diminished the memory of SNCC’s internationalism, a review of
that history highlights the significance of the organization’s
legacy for all who desire a world without the color line.

SNCC always stayed one step ahead of what was popularly palatable,
both attracting and molding great organizers. Members took organizing
lessons from the Black church and the social knowledge of migration
from South to North _and_ Caribbean to United States. It was this
sense of internationalism, born of experience and awareness, that
defined SNCC. Indeed, as its founding statement proclaimed: “[W]e
identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern of all
mankind.”

The young militants were inspired by the move to decolonize Africa. As
Julian Bond observed in a reflection
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legacy, the group was addressed early on by the brother of the Kenyan
labor leader Tom Mboya, Alphonse Okuku, and Kenyan leader Oginga
Odinga. Speaking for SNCC at the 1963 March on Washington, John
Lewis proclaimed
[[link removed]] “‘One
man, one vote’ is the African cry. It is ours too. It must be
ours!” When the dramatic showdown at the 1964 Democratic National
Convention ended with the Democratic Party refusing to seat the
Mississippi Freedom Democrats, Harry Belafonte paid for eleven SNCC
organizers to recuperate in newly independent Guinea. Fannie Lou
Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper whose dynamic presence in Atlantic
City exemplified SNCC’s moral force, was among the group. As Keisha
Blain quotes Hamer saying of the trip in a new intellectual biography
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Africa.” That closeness was embodied in subsequent actions,
including SNCC’s March 1966 anti-apartheid protest
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the South African consulate.

SNCC confronted the limits of establishment commitments to civil
rights, leading many in the organization to forgo a seat at the table
while aiming to sweep out its legs. In Atlantic City, Hamer said “we
didn’t come all this way for no two seats at the table when all of
us is tired. SNCC’s legendary executive secretary James Forman, an
Air Force veteran who served in Okinawa, best expressed this sentiment
in a 1965 speech (an excerpt of which was aired at the conference).
Broad shouldered and wearing SNCC’s uniform of overalls (that of the
Southern Black farmer), Forman stood at a lectern crowded with
microphones and declared
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the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off.” The point was not to
be destructive, but to build alliances with liberation movements the
world over. The invitation behind an early SNCC poster
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let us build a new world together”—was primarily understood as
interracial, but the “us” became increasingly global and
anti-imperialist.

Indeed, the Thanksgiving 1965 SNCC staff meeting ended with a heated
debate about whether the organization should publicly oppose the U.S.
war in Vietnam. No one supported the war, but decades of Cold War
orthodoxy had chastened civil rights organizations from speaking about
U.S. foreign policy. Yet as the war accelerated, alongside U.S.
anticommunist activity in Latin America and U.S. apartheid support in
southern Africa, many argued that SNCC could not stay silent.
Partisans of the emerging push for Black Power and veterans of the
Mississippi movement and Lowndes County Freedom Organization led the
discussion and prevailed. Gloria House
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time in Lowndes County, met Algerians and other Africans while
studying in Paris—authored the statement drawn from the collective
conversation.

The statement lingered in SNCC’s office for a month until Sammy
Younge, a Navy veteran turned SNCC organizer, was shot in the back
trying to use a bathroom in Tuskegee, Alabama on January 3, 1966.
Three days after Younge’s murder, SNCC released its statement
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not just the war in Vietnam, but U.S. empire everywhere: “We believe
the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of
concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the
government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of
colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the
Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself.” The
organization saw internationalism as both immediate and intimate. How
could the United States claim to want free elections abroad when
“for the most part, elections in this country, in the North as well
as the South, are not free” the statement asked. “We maintain that
our country’s cry of ‘preserve freedom in the world’ is a
hypocritical mask behind which it squashes liberation movements which
are not bound, and refuse to be bound, by the expediencies of United
States cold war policies.” Turning attention to the coercive
enlistment practices feeding the U.S. war effort, the statement
juxtaposed the civil rights movement as the antidote to empire: “We
ask, where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States?”

SNCC was the first civil rights organization to come out against the
Vietnam War, and its anti-imperialism was thus inseperable from its
growing embrace of Black Power. After SNCC Communications Secretary
and Georgia state representative-elect Julian Bond refused to disavow
the statement, his segregationist colleagues in the legislature
refused to seat him. Their obstinance triggered a special election in
which Bond ran again, with SNCC forming a project in Atlanta to
coordinate his reelection. Based in the Vine City neighborhood,
the Atlanta Project
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SNCC joined its campaign for Bond’s reelection with a nimble program
targeting slumlords and protesting the war in Vietnam.

The organization also produced the first attempt to think through what
would become Black Power. Based on wide-ranging conversations among
project staff, they drafted a “Black Consciousness” proposal
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spring of 1966, three months before Stokely Carmichael made his
legendary call for “Black Power” during a march through
Mississippi. SNCC rejected the “Black Consciousness” proposal and
dismissed the Atlanta Project, a trend that many historians have
continued to adopt. Despite being directed by longtime SNCC organizers
from the South, the Atlanta Project has been dismissed as a group of
Northern separatists with little history in the organization. Yet the
Atlanta Project, written off as pushing a divisive agenda, vocalized
what many in SNCC were thinking. Indeed, SNCC itself took up the
Atlanta Project’s emphasis when Stokely Carmichael led a crowd in
Mississippi in calling for Black Power. Following this public demand
for Black Power, SNCC would adopt the signature dimensions of the
Atlanta Project position paper: an emphasis on self-determination,
cultural pride, and a call for white people to organize against racism
in white communities. The name Black Consciousness would soon augur a
potent challenge to white supremacy when South African students, led
by Steve Biko, took it as their mantle.

As it vocalized Black Power, and alongside new organizations such as
the Black Panther Party, SNCC continued to flout Cold War liberalism.
In May 1967, it proclaimed itself a human rights organization that
“encourages and supports the liberation struggles against
colonialism, racism and economic exploitation wherever these
conditions exist.” The next month, Jim Forman launched
SNCC’s International Affairs Commission
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combat the “triple-threat hyenas of Racism, Capitalism, and
Imperialism across the globe.” (Forman’s language echoed Martin
Luther King’s April 1967 speech
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which proclaimed the existential threat posed by “the giant triplets
of racism, materialism, and militarism.”)

During that same month, June 1967, Israel gained control of the Golan
Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem after the
six-day war. The move prompted SNCC to release a statement
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Zionism. “During World War II, six million Jews were murdered by the
Nazi war criminals in German concentration camps,” the statement
opened. “SNCC understands this tragedy of what happened to the Jews
and sympathizes with them since we black people possibly face the same
fate here in the United States.” The statement then offered a
condensed history of Zionism as a form of racist colonialism against
Palestinians, albeit undermined by antisemitic canards about “the
famous Rothschilds” controlling the wealth of Europe and Africa and
involved in the “original conspiracy to create the State of
Israel.”

SNCC paid a heavy price for its internationalism. While the trope of
“Black-Jewish conflict
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been overdetermined in explaining fractures of the civil rights
movement, it was SNCC’s opposition to the war in Vietnam that first
cost the organization funding and support. As Clayborne Carson
recounts in his history
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Lyndon Johnson pressured other civil rights leaders to denounce it for
its antiwar statement. They did not need much encouragement. NAACP
leader Roy Wilkins opposed SNCC in his national newspaper column.
Whitney Young of the Urban League complained, as Vice President Hubert
Humphrey put it, that the Johnson administration treats “leaders of
civil rights groups with a sort of benevolent equality” that should
not be extended to those engaged in “the most outrageous attacks on
the President and the Administration.” Lillian Smith, the white
southern liberal writer, implied that “SNCC was now dominated by
Communists.” The loss of donors and goodwill only increased as Black
Power emphasized self-determination and global solidarity.

Though the organization suffered, many of the individuals involved
leaned further into internationalism. Ella Baker, whom SNCC veterans
still reverentially call Ms. Baker, is widely credited for encouraging
SNCC’s participatory democracy and grassroots leadership. She also
nurtured its spirit of global solidarity. Baker became the chair of
the Puerto Rico Solidarity Committee and, in a 1974 address
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Garden, voiced how grassroots leadership harmonized with the global
freedom fight. Baker implored attendees to reach out to friends and
neighbors outside of the Left, “and get them to understand that
they, as well as you and I, cannot be free in America, or anywhere
else where there is capitalism and imperialism, until we can get
people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and
have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year,
until they win it.” That same year SNCC veterans helped organize the
Sixth Pan-African Congress, held in Tanzania, which was the first on
the African continent. Former SNCC members were the shock troops of
the anti-apartheid and anti-U.S. intervention movements of the ’70s
and ’80s, much as they had been on the frontlines against
segregation and colonialism during the ’60s.

An additional cost of SNCC’s internationalism may be the
domesticating of its memory. Despite internationalism’s centrality
to SNCC’s life and afterlife, it has been largely forgotten as a
core tenet of the organization. It is not for lack of material.
The SNCC Digital Gateway [[link removed]], a phenomenal
multimedia archive of SNCC’s history that includes archival sources
as well as more recent oral histories, features several items on the
organization’s internationalist politics and activism. And yet, the
story of SNCC—even its commemoration—has been domesticated to its
work in and understanding of the United States as separate from the
rest of the world.

Without question, SNCC’s unparalleled bravery in Mississippi,
Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia is a heroism of epic proportions. Its
legacy exemplifies the kind of tenacity necessary to secure and
maintain multiracial democracy. Yet SNCC’s democratic pursuits
clearly were not limited to the United States.

Even partial victories can dull the edges of unruly movements. Because
the civil rights movement rendered formal segregation not only illegal
but also unpopular for many, SNCC’s organizing in the clutches of
Jim Crow has been easier to reconcile than its emancipatory
internationalism. But for many in the organization, the two were
inseparable. As SNCC workers dug in for long-haul fights in rural
towns and big cities, they did so with a recognition that the “local
people” they organized with were a subset of the “local people”
that were everywhere capable of and engaged in fighting oppression.
The hyper-localism of being grounded in particular communities was in
service of a supra-universalism: the global fight for freedom.

Black Power heightened SNCC’s already present internationalism, but
it also proved controversial—during SNCC’s day and, until
recently, within scholarly and popular accounts of the period. Blamed
for destroying the “beloved community” and endorsing
identity-based marketing campaigns, Black Power’s radical insistence
on global belonging has too often been discarded in official
retrospectives of the ’60s.

As always, the grassroots tell a different story. Originating out of
protests against police violence, the Movement for Black Lives has
exceeded as well as interrogated U.S. borders. As Adom
Getachew recently argued
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the Vision for Black Lives
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uplifts a Black internationalist thought that stretches at least back
to W. E. B. Du Bois. And though it is not acknowledged nearly as much
as it should be, even by some SNCC veterans, SNCC’s example reminds
us that such ideas are enlivened by the interconnected struggles of
“local people” everywhere.

We should remember SNCC’s action in Mississippi six decades ago as a
beacon of what must happen in Mississippi today. But what occurred in
Mississippi was also a reflection on Ghana and Tanzania, the Dominican
Republic and Vietnam. Mississippi today is a prism through which we
might link Hungary and Haiti, Puerto Rico and Palestine. As we once
again battle against neo-confederates clinging to a declining empire
with violent fury, SNCC’s legacy beckons to us still: come, let us
build a new world together.

_Dan Berger is associate professor of comparative ethnic studies at
the University of Washington Bothell._

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