Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

==Women in the SNCC==
[[File:Anne Moody.jpg|thumb|Anne Moody in the 1970s]]

In impressing upon the young student activists the principle "those who do the work, make the decisions," [[Ella Baker]] had hoped the SNCC would avoid the SCLC's reproduction of the organization and experience of the church: women form the working body and men assume the headship.<ref name="abu-jamal">[[Mumia Abu-Jamal|Abu-Jamal, Mumia]]. ''We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party''. [[South End Press]]: Cambridge, 2004. p. 159</ref> In SNCC black women did emerge as among the movement's most dynamic and courageous organizers and thinkers.

In addition to [[Diane Nash]], [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson|Ruby Doris Smith Robinson]], [[Fannie Lou Hamer]], [[Oretha Castle Haley]], and others already mentioned, these women included Tuskegee student-body president, [[Gwen Patton]]; Mississippi Delta field secretary, Cynthia Washington; [[Sammy Younge]]'s teacher, Jean Wiley; head of COFO's Mississippi operations, [[Muriel Tillinghast]]; [[Natchez, Mississippi]], project director [[Dorie Ladner]], and her sister [[Joyce Ladner|Joyce]] who, in the violence of Mississippi (and having worked with [[Medgar Evers]]), regarded their own arrests as "about the least harmful thing" that could occur;<ref>Joyce Ladner interviewed, [https://www.pbs.org/ktca/americanphotography/filmandmore/transcript3.html "Show Transcripts – Episode 3: Photography Transformed (1960–1999), Civil Rights"]. ''American Photography: A Century of Images''. PBS. Retrieved July 11, 2013.</ref> Annie Pearl Avery, who when organizing in Natchez carried a gun;<ref>{{Cite web |title=Annie Pearl Avery |url=https://snccdigital.org/people/annie-pearl-avery/ |website=Digital SNCC Gateway}}</ref> MDFP state-senate candidate [[Victoria Gray Adams|Victoria Gray]]; MFDP delegate [[Unita Blackwell]]; leader of the [[Cambridge Movement (civil rights)|Cambridge Movement]] [[Gloria Richardson]]; [[Bernice Johnson Reagon|Bernice Reagon]] of the [[Albany Movement]]'s [[Freedom Singers]]; womanist theologian [[Prathia Hall]]; LCFO veteran and ''[[Eyes on the Prize]]'' associate producer [[Judy Richardson]]; [[Ruby Sales]], for whom [[Jonathan Daniels]] took a fatal shot-gun blast in Hayneville, Alabama; [[Fay Bellamy]], who ran the Selma, Alabama office; the singer [[Bettie Mae Fikes]] ("the Voice of Selma"); playwright [[Endesha Ida Mae Holland]]; [[Eleanor Holmes Norton]], first chair of the [[Equal Employment Opportunity Commission]]; and [[sharecropper]]s' daughter and author (''[[Coming of Age in Mississippi]]'') [[Anne Moody]].

Anne Moody recalls it was the women did the work: young black women college students and teachers were the mainstay of voter registration and of the summer [[Freedom Schools]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Moody|first1=Anne|title=Coming of Age in Mississippi|date=1968|publisher=Bantam Dell|location=New York}}</ref> Women were also the expectation when looking for local leadership. "There was always a 'mama'," one SNCC activist recalled,"usually a militant woman in the community, outspoken, understanding and willing to catch hell."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Countryman |first1=Matthew |title=Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia |date=2006 |publisher=University of Pennsylvania Press |isbn=9780812220025 |location=Philadelphia |page=183}}</ref>

From the outset white students, veterans of college-town sit-ins, had been active in the movement. Among them were Ella Baker's [[YWCA]] proteges [[Casey Hayden]] and [[Mary King (professor)|Mary King]]. As a Southerner (as were the other white women first drawn to SNCC),<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Browning |first=Joan |date=2017-12-31 |title=White Women in the 1960s Freedom Movement, From Memory to History: The writing of "Shiloh Witness," a chapter in Deep in Our Hearts (2000) |url=https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/9993?lang=en |journal=Transatlantica. Revue d'études américaines. American Studies Journal |language=en |issue=2 |doi=10.4000/transatlantica.9993 |issn=1765-2766|doi-access=free }}</ref> Hayden regarded the "Freedom Movement Against Segregation" as much hers as "anyone else's"—"It was my freedom." But when working full-time in the black community, she was nonetheless conscious of being "a guest." (For this reason it was important to Hayden that an opportunity in 1963 to work alongside [[Doris Derby]] in starting a literacy project at [[Tougaloo College]], Mississippi, had come to her "specifically" because she had the educational qualifications).<ref name="Casey Hayden 2015 p. 65"/> Having dropped out of [[Duke University]], Freedom Rider [[Joan Trumpauer Mulholland]] graduated from Tougaloo, the first white student to do so. The majority of white women drawn to the movement, however, would have been those from the north who responded to the call for volunteers to help register black voters in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. Among the few that might have had obvious qualifications was [[Susan Brownmiller]], then a journalist. She had worked on a voter registration drive in [[East Harlem]] and organized with [[Congress of Racial Equality|CORE]].<ref>[https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brownmiller-time.html Susan Brownmiller (1999) ''In Our Time Memoir of a Revolution'' Dail Books. "The Founders"]. Excerpt in ''The New York Times''.</ref>

==="Sex and Caste"===
Among the Position Papers circulated at Waveland conference in 1964, number 24 ("name withheld by request") opened with the observation that the "large committee" formed to present "crucial constitutional revisions" to the staff "was all men." After cataloguing a number of other instances in which women appear to have been sidelined, it went on to suggest that "assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro."<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc43.htm|title=Document 43, Position Paper #24, (women in the movement), November 1964, Waveland, Mississippi|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

This paper was not the first time women had raised questions about their roles in SNCC.  In the spring of 1964, a group of black and white SNCC staffers had sat-in at James Forman's office in Atlanta to protest at being burdened, and stymied in their contributions, by the assumption that it was they, the women, who would see to minute taking and other mundane office, and housekeeping, tasks: "No More Minutes Until Freedom Comes to the Atlanta Office" was [[Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson]]'s placard. Like Mary King,<ref>Lynne Olson (2001). ''Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970''. Simon Shuster. p. 334</ref> [[Judy Richardson]] recalls the protest as being "half playful (Forman actually appearing supportive), although "the other thing was, we're not going to do this anymore."<ref name=":6">{{Cite web|url=https://scalar.usc.edu/works/sex-and-caste-at-50/1964-sncc-position-paper-on-women-in-the-movement|title=Sex and Caste at 50: 1964 SNCC Position Paper on Women in the Movement|website=Sex and Caste at 50|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> The same might be said of the Waveland paper itself. With so many women themselves "insensitive" to the "day-to-day discriminations" (who is asked to take minutes, who gets to clean Freedom House), the paper concluded that, "amidst the laughter," further discussion might be the best that could be hoped for.<ref name=":6" />

At the time, and in "the Waveland setting," [[Casey Hayden]], who with Mary King was soon outed as one of the authors, regarded the paper as "definitely an aside."<ref>{{Cite web|last=Hayden|first=Casey|author-link=Casey Hayden|date=2010|title=In the Attics of My Mind|url=[https://www.crmvet.org/comm/hayden.htm|access-date=2020-12-29|website= ][[Civil Rights Movement Archive]]|type=Written for ''Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC}}</ref> But in the course of 1965, while working on leave for the SDS organizing women in Chicago, Hayden was to reconsider. Seeking to further "dialogue within the movement," Hayden circulated an extended version of the "memo" among 29 SNCC women veterans and, with King, had it published in the [[War Resisters League]] magazine ''Liberation'' under the title "Sex and Caste". Employing the movement's own rhetoric of race relations, the article suggested that, like African Americans, women can find themselves "caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/revisiting.htm|title=Revisiting "A Kind of Memo" from Casey Hayden and Mary King (1965)|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc86A.htm|title=Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason) and Mary King, "Sex and Caste," 18 November 1965|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref> Viewed as a bridge between civil rights and women's liberation, "Sex and Caste" has since been regarded as a "key text of [[second-wave feminism]]."<ref>Jacobs, E (2007), ' Revisiting the Second Wave: In Conversation with Mary King ' ''Meridians'', vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 102–116 .</ref><ref name="Document98"/>

===Black Women's Liberation===
The two other women subsequently identified as having direct authorship of the original position paper on women  (which has sometimes been mistakenly attributed to Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson),<ref>Yates, Gayle Graham (1975). ''What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. {{ISBN|978-0-674-95079-5}}. pp. 6–7</ref> Elaine Delott Baker and Emmie Schrader Adams, were also white. This, it has been suggested, was the reflection of a movement culture that gave Black women greater opportunity "to protest directly".<ref name="auto2"/> That white women chose an anonymous paper was testimony, in effect, to the "unspoken understanding of who should speak up at meetings" that Delott Baker had identified when she joined Hayden in Mississippi in 1964.<ref name=Document98 /> But many black women were to dispute the degree and significance of male-domination within the SNCC, denying that it had excluded them from leadership roles.<ref>[http://www.crmvet.org/disc/women1.htm Women & Men in the Freedom Movement] ~ Civil Rights Movement Archive.</ref>  Joyce Ladner's recollection of organizing [[Freedom Summer]] is of "women's full participation,"<ref>Joyce Ladner (2014), [https://www.crmvet.org/comm/ladner14.htm "Mississippi Movement Set Example for Female Leaders"]. Originally published in ''Jackson Clarion Ledger'', June 29, 2014.</ref> and [[Jean Smith Young|Jean Wheeler Smith's]] of doing in SNCC "anything I was big enough to do."<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://snccdigital.org/people/jean-wheeler/|title=Jean Wheeler|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref>

Historian [[Barbara Ransby]] dismisses, in particular, the suggestion that in its concluding Black Power period SNCC diminished the profile of women within the movement. She points out that [[Stokely Carmichael]] appointed several women to posts as project directors during his tenure as chairman, and that in the latter half of the 1960s, more women were in charge of SNCC projects than during the early years.<ref>Barbara Ransby, ''Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision'' (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 310–11.</ref> On the other hand, Hayden, in the position paper she presented under her own name at Waveland, "On Structure", had seen herself defending [[Ella Baker]]'s original participatory vision in which women's voices are heard precisely because decision making is not dependent on formal rank position but rather on actual work and commitment,<ref>Smith, Harold L. (2015). "Casey Hayden: Gender and the Origins of SNCC, SDS, and the Women's Liberation Movement". In Turner, Elizabeth Hayes; Cole, Stephanie; Sharpless, Rebecca (eds.). Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. University of Georgia Press. pp. 295–318. {{ISBN|9780820347905}}</ref> and a movement culture that she recalls as "womanist, nurturing, and familial."<ref>Casey Hayden (2010). "In the Attics of My Mind."</ref>

[[Frances M. Beal]] (who worked with SNCC's International Affairs Commission and its [[National Black Antiwar Antidraft Union]]) is in no doubt that as the SNCC moved away from "sustained community organizing toward Black Power propagandizing that was accompanied by increasing male dominance."<ref>{{Cite book|title=Black women in America : An historical encyclopedia|last=Hine, D. C., Brown, E. B., & R. Terborg-Penn|publisher=Carlson Pub|year=1993|isbn=978-0926019614|location=Brooklyn, NY|url=https://archive.org/details/blackwomeninamer00hine}}</ref> (Beal and others objected to the [[James Forman]]'s initial enthusiasm for the [[Black Panther Party]], judging [[Eldridge Cleaver]]'s [[Soul on Ice (book)|''Soul on Ice'']], which he brought back to the office, to be the work of a "thug" and a rapist).<ref>Frances Beal interview (May 6, 2015). [http://www.thestreetspirit.org/frances-beal-a-voice-for-peace-racial-justice-and-the-rights-of-women/ "Frances Beal: A Voice for Peace, Racial Justice and the Rights of Women".]</ref> "You're talking about liberation and freedom half the night on the racial side," she recalls of her time in the SNCC, "and then all of a sudden men are going to turn around and start talking about putting you in your place. So in 1968 we founded the SNCC Black Women's Liberation Committee to take up some of these issues."<ref name=":3">{{cite web|url=http://www.shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com/the-film/|title=The Film — She's Beautiful When She's Angry|publisher=Shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com|access-date=2017-04-28}}</ref>

With the SNCC's breakup, the Black Women's Liberation Committee became first the Black Women's Alliance and then, following an approach by revolutionary Puerto-Rican women activists, the [[Third World Women's Alliance]] in 1970.<ref name=":3" /><ref name=":4">{{Cite book|title=The Movements of the New Left, 1950–1975: A Brief History with Documents|last=Gosse |first=Van|publisher=Bedford/St. Martin's|year=2005|isbn=978-1403968043|location=Boston|pages=131–133}}</ref> Active for another decade, the TWWA was one of the earliest groups advocating an [[intersectional]] approach to women's oppression—"the triple oppression of race, class and gender."<ref name="Springer1999b">{{cite book|first=Kimberly|last=Springer|title=Still Lifting, Still Climbing: Contemporary African American Women's Activism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Jq-gCmP1CQsC&pg=PT113|year=1999|publisher=NYU Press|isbn=978-0-8147-8124-1|page=113}}</ref>

[[Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons|Gwendolyn Delores Robinson/Zoharah Simmons]], who co-authored the Vine Street Project paper on Black Power, was struck by the contrast between the SNCC and her subsequent experience of the [[Nation of Islam]]: "there was really no place for a woman to exercise what I considered real leadership as it had been in SNCC." Breaking with the NOI's strict gendered hierarchy, she went on to identify, teach and write as an "Islamic feminist."<ref name=":2">{{Cite book|title=Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West|date=2006|publisher=University of Texas Press|others=Nieuwkerk, Karin van, 1960–|isbn=9780292712737|edition=1st |location=Austin|oclc=614535522}}</ref>

On top of seeking to increase African-American access to land through a pioneer [[Freedom Farm Cooperative]], in 1971 [[Fannie Lou Hamer]] co-founded the [[National Women's Political Caucus]]. She emphasized the power women might have acting as a voting majority in the country regardless of race or ethnicity: "A white mother is no different from a black mother. The only thing is they haven't had as many problems. But we cry the same tears."<ref>Mills, Kay (April 2007). [https://web.archive.org/web/20150311160112/http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/51/fannie-lou-hamer-civil-rights-activist "Fannie Lou Hamer: Civil Rights Activist"]. Mississippi History Now. Mississippi Historical Society. Archived from the original on March 11, 2015. Retrieved January 1, 2020.</ref> The NWPC continues to recruit, train and support "women candidates for elected and appointed offices at all levels of government" who are "[[pro-choice]]" and who support a federal [[Equal Rights Amendment]] (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution.<ref>[https://www.nwpc.org/politicalaction/ National Women's Political Action Caucus]. Retrieved January 1, 2020.</ref>