Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

==1966: Black Power Movement==
===Carmichael and the Vine Street Project Statement===
In May 1966 Forman was replaced by [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson]], who was determined "to keep the SNCC together."<ref>Harry G. Lefever (2005). ''Undaunted by the Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957/1967''. Mercer University Press. p, 216</ref> But Forman recalls male leaders fighting "her attempts as executive secretary to impose a sense of organizational responsibility and self-discipline," and "trying to justify themselves by the fact that their critic was a woman"<ref>Paula Giddings (1984). ''When and Where I Enter''. New York: Bantam. pp. 314–315</ref> In October 1967 Smith-Robinson died, aged just 25, "of exhaustion" according to one of her co-workers, "destroyed by the movement."<ref>Cynthia Fleming (1998). ''Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson''. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. {{ISBN|978-0847689729}}</ref>

Replacing John Lewis as chairman in May 1966 was the 24-year old [[Stokely Carmichael]]. When on the night of June 16, 1966, following protests at the shooting of solo freedom marcher [[James Meredith]], Carmichael walked out of jail (his 27th arrest) and into Broad Street Park in [[Greenwood, Mississippi]], he asked the waiting crowd "What do you want?." They roared back "Black Power! Black Power!"<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00x6mb9|title=BBC Two – Witness, Civil Rights, USA, Stokely Carmichael and 'Black Power'|date=10 August 2012 |publisher=BBC|language=en-GB|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

For Carmichael Black Power was a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."<ref>{{Cite web  |date=2009 |title=Stokely Carmichael |url=https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/stokely-carmichael |access-date=2 April 2023 |website=www.history.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last1=Hamilton |first1=Charles V. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Eu2Ez9K8cQEC |title=Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America |last2=Ture |first2=Kwame |date=2011|orig-date=1967 |publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |isbn=978-0-307-79527-4 |pages=44 |language=en}}</ref><blockquote>We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/black-power-speech-28-july-1966-stokely-carmichael|title="Black Power" Speech (28 July 1966, by Stokely Carmichael) {{!}} Encyclopedia.com|website=www.encyclopedia.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref></blockquote>
A new direction SNCC was evident in the [[Atlanta, Georgia]], "Vine City" Project, SNCC's first effort at urban organizing. Co-directed by William "Bill" Ware and [[Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons]] (Robinson), it took up the challenge of the Georgia State Legislature's refusal to seat [[Julian Bond]] because of SNCC opposition to the [[Vietnam War]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=Bond, Horace Julian {{!}} The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute |url=https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/bond-horace-julian |access-date=2023-10-13 |website=kinginstitute.stanford.edu |language=en}}</ref>

Ware, who had been greatly affected by his experience of newly independent [[Ghana]], emphasized racial solidarity. Black people, he argued, needed to work "without the guidance and/or direction and control of non-Blacks". Without control over their affairs, he warned, "Black people will know no freedom, but only more subtle forms of slavery."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/bill-ware/|title=Bill Ware|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> A Vine Street Project position paper on Black Power,<ref name=":9">{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/atlanta-project-statement/|title=Atlanta Project Statement|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> which Simmons helped write, suggested that: 
<blockquote>Negroes in this country have never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference. As a result of this, the stereotype has been reinforced that Blacks cannot organize themselves. The white psychology that Blacks have to be watched, also reinforces this stereotype. Blacks, in fact, feel intimidated by the presence of whites, because of their knowledge of the power that whites have over their lives. One white person can come into a meeting of Black people and change the complexion of that meeting ... People would immediately start talking about "brotherhood", "love", etc.; race would not be discussed.</blockquote>

This was "not to say that whites have not had an important role in the Movement." If people now had "the right to picket, the right to give out leaflets, the right to vote, the right to demonstrate, the right to print," the Vine City paper allowed that it was "mainly because of the entrance of white people into Mississippi, in the summer of '64." But their "role is now over and it should be," for what would it mean "if Black people, once having the right to organize, are not allowed to organize themselves? It means that Blacks' ideas about inferiority are being reinforced."

What was needed now for "people to free themselves" was an "all-Black project" and this had to "exist from the beginning." Future cooperation with whites had to be a matter of "coalition". But there could be "no talk of 'hooking up' unless Black people organize Blacks and white people organize whites." Those "white people who desire change" should go "where the problem (of racism) is most manifest," in their own communities where power has been created "for the express purpose of denying Blacks human dignity and self-determination."<ref name=":9" />

Even without embracing an explicitly separatist agenda, many veteran project directors accepted the case that the presence of white organizers undermined black self-confidence.<ref>Carson (1995). p. 299</ref> (Although overridden, on that basis [[Oretha Castle Haley]] already in 1962 had suspended whites from the [[Congress of Racial Equality|CORE]] chapter in [[New Orleans]]).<ref>{{Cite book|title=Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times|last1=Allured|first1=Janet|last2=Gentry|first2=Judith|publisher=University of Georgia Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0-8203-2946-8|location=Athens, GA|pages=303–323}}</ref> [[Julian Bond]] later reflected:<ref>Bond (2014)</ref>
<blockquote>...the successes Freedom Summer achieved resulted from its embrace of a paradox — it tried to fight bigotry by appealing to people more concerned about whites, not blacks. Appealing to the nation's racism accepted white supremacy. By acknowledging its dependence on whites to popularize the civil rights struggle in the South, SNCC contradicted its rhetorical belief in the equal worth of all races, and undermined its insistence that indigenous blacks were best prepared to lead the struggle for their deliverance from white dominance.
</blockquote>

Yet like Forman (now urging the study of [[Marxism]]),<ref name="Christopher M. Richardson 2014 p. 181">Christopher M. Richardson, Ralph E. Luker (2014). ''Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement''. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 181</ref> Carmichael hesitated to accept the implication that whites should be excluded from the movement. It was in December that he led the SNCC national executive in a narrow decision (19 in favor, 18 against and 24 abstentions) to ask white co-workers and volunteers to leave.<ref>{{cite web|title=Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Actions 1960–1970|url=https://depts.washington.edu/moves/SNCC_map-events.shtml|website=Mapping American Social Movements}}</ref> In May 1967 the Coordinating Committee formally asked its non-black staff to resign.<ref>Kristin Anderson-Bricker (1992). ''From Beloved Community to Triple Jeopardy: Ideological Change and the Evolution of Feminism Among Black and White Women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1960–1975''. Syracuse University. p. 56</ref> Whites should concentrate on organizing poor white communities and leave SNCC to promote African-American self-reliance.<ref name=forman>James Forman, [https://books.google.com/books?id=Y2RIhBEy7dEC&dq=sncc+expulsion+of+whites&pg=PP16 ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries''], pp. xvi–xv (2nd edn 1997). Accessed March 17, 2007.</ref>

===Lowndes County===
Carmichael had been working with a voter registration project in Alabama that had taken what, at the time, may have seemed an equally momentous step. In the face of murderous Klan violence, organizers for the [[Lowndes County Freedom Organization]] openly carried arms.<ref name="LowndesCounty - Encyclopedia">[http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1781 "Lowndes County Freedom Organization"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130813072422/http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1781 |date=2013-08-13 }}, Encyclopedia of Alabama.</ref> Participating in the Selma to Montgomery march, Carmichael had stopped off in the county in March 1965.<ref name=lcfogenesis>{{cite web|url=https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/selma-montgomery-march/#:~:text=On_March_23,_1965,_the,County_Freedom_Party_(LCFP).|title=March 23, 1965: Selma to Montgomery March Continues|publisher=Zinn Education|access-date=August 3, 2020}}</ref>  Local registration efforts were being led by [[John Hulett]] who that month, with John C. Lawson, a preacher, became the first two black voters in Lowndes County in more than six decades.<ref>{{ Cite book|last=Greenshaw|first=Wayne|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bI1rzKFsBl4C|title=Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama|publisher=Chicago Review Press|year=2011|isbn=9781569768259|pages=[https://books.google.com/books?d=bI1rzKFsBl4C&pg=PA214 214]}}</ref>

Carmichael gained the confidence of local residents when, handing out voter registration material at a local school, he refused to be intimidated by local police: they were either to arrest him or leave. With SNCC workers then "swarmed" by young people, Carmichael took the initiative to help form the LCFO with Hulett, its first chair. The organization would not only register voters but, as a party, run candidates for office—its symbol, a rampant black panther, representing black "strength and dignity".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Jeffries |first1=Hasan Kwame |title=Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt |date=2009 |publisher=New York University Press |isbn=9780814743065 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XFWVLK4_PCoC}}</ref>

Hulett warned the state of Alabama that it had a last chance to peacefully grant African Americans their rights: "We're out to take power legally, but if we're stopped by the government from doing it legally, we're going to take it the way everyone else took it, including the way the Americans took it in the [[American Revolution]]." Certain the federal government was not going to protect him and his fellow LCFO members, Hulett told a federal registrar, "if one of our candidates gets touched, we're going to take care of the murderer ourselves."<ref>[http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Lowndes_Co/513.LowndesCO.bpp.6.1966.pdf ''The Black Panther Party''] (pamphlet), Merrit Publishers, June 1966.</ref>

===Interracial coalition===
While other white SNCC activists in the Broad Street Park, Greenwood, crowd that affirmed Carmichael's call for Black Power were bewildered, Peggy Terry recalls "there was never any rift in my mind or my heart. I just felt Black people were doing what they should be doing. We reached a period in the civil rights movement when Black people felt they weren't being given the respect they should have, and I agreed. White liberals ran everything."<ref>Amy Sony, James Tracy (2011), ''Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times''. Brooklyn, Melville House. p. 53</ref> The message to white activists, "organize your own", was one that Terry took home with her to uptown, "Hillbilly Harlem", Chicago. This was the neighborhood in which, having taken the prompt the year before, [[Casey Hayden]] had already been working, organizing welfare mothers into a union. She was "on loan" from SNCC to [[Students for a Democratic Society]] (SDS). Like other new left groups, SDS did not view a self-consciously black SNCC as separatist. Rather it was seen as the vanguard of a prospective "interracial movement of the poor". Accepting the Vine Street challenge, the goal was no longer integration but what Chicago [[Black Panther Party|Black Panther]] leader [[Fred Hampton]] was to project as the "rainbow coalition".<ref>{{cite journal|first=Manfred|last=McDowell|year=2013|title=A Step into America: the New Left Organizes the Neighborhood|journal=[[New Politics (magazine)|New Politics]]|volume=XIV|issue=2 |pages=133–141}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://newpol.org/review/step-america/|title=A Step into America – New Politics|date=10 February 2013 |language=en-US|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

In the South, as SNCC began turning them away white volunteers moved over to the New Orleans-based [[Southern Conference Education Fund]] with which Ella Baker had been working since the 1950s.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/scef/|title=Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF)|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> There, in effort to advance a coalition agenda, they joined [[Bob Zellner]], the SNCC's first white field organizer and son of a former Klansman, in working with [[Carl Braden|Carl]] and [[Anne Braden]] to organize white students and poor whites.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/bob-zellner/|title=Bob Zellner|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref><ref>Bob Zellner (2008). ''The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement''. Montgomery, AL., New south Books.</ref>

===Opposition to the Vietnam War===
The Meredith shooting in June 1966 had been preceded in January by the killing of [[Sammy Younge Jr.]], the first black college student to be killed as a result of his involvement in the civil rights movement, and by the acquittal of his killer. SNCC took the occasion to denounce the [[Vietnam War]], the first statement of its kind by a major civil rights organization.<ref>[http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1669 "Samuel Younge Jr."] Encyclopedia of Alabama.</ref>

"The murder of Samuel Young in [[Tuskegee, Alabama]]," SNCC proposed, "is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths." In the face of a government that "has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders," where," it asked, "is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States." It could longer countenance the "hypocrisy" of a call upon "negroes ... to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a 'democracy' which does not exist for them at home."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/vietnam/|title=Vietnam|website=SNCC Digital Gateway|language=en|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

At an SDS-organized conference at [[UC Berkeley]] in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in the August 1965 [[Watts Riots|Watts Uprising]] and in the ghetto rebellions that followed had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC had first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and [[Waldo Martin]], SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power [and] emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appear to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"<ref>Joshua Bloom and [[Waldo Martin|Waldo E. Martin]], ''Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party'' (University of California Press, 2013), pp. 29, 41–42, 102–103, 128–130.</ref>