Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

==1965: Differences over "structure" and direction==
At the end of 1964, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. Yet to many the movement seemed to be at a loss.

In Mississippi [[Casey Hayden]] recalls everyone "reeling from the violence" (3 project workers killed; 4 people critically wounded; 80 beaten, 1,000 arrests; 35 shooting incidents, 37 churches bombed or burned; and 30 black businesses or homes burned),<ref name=":7" /> and also from "the new racial imbalance" following the summer influx of white student volunteers.  The local black staff, "the backbone" of the projects were frustrated, even resentful, at having to deal "with a lot of young white people who were intellectual and moneyed," "ignorant" of realities on the ground, and who, with their greater visibility, brought additional risks. But most of all SNCC activists were "staggered" by the debacle in Atlantic City. Being confronted by the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner" had thrown "the core of SNCC's work", voter registration, into question.<ref name="auto">{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc45.htm|title=[Casey Hayden (aka Sandra Cason)], "Memorandum on Structure," November 1964|website=womhist.alexanderstreet.com|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

Notwithstanding passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment and private education, and the equally broad [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], faith in the Johnson Administration and its liberal allies was ebbing, and a gulf had opened between SNCC and other civil rights organizations. In Atlantic City Fannie Lou Hamer confessed she "lost hope in American society."<ref>Mary E. King. Notes; SNCC meeting; Fall, 1965, p. 87. [http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15932coll2/id/26004 Mary E. King papers, 1962–1999]; Archives Main Stacks, Z: Accessions M82-445, Box 3, Folder 2, Freedom Summer Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society.</ref>

Questions of strategic direction were also questions of "structure". What Stokely Carmichael described as "not an organization but a lot of people all doing what they think needs to be done,"<ref name="auto1">{{Cite web|url=https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/26004|title=p. 45|website=content.wisconsinhistory.org|accessdate=Apr 2, 2023}}</ref> was for Hayden the very realization of her mentor's vision. Such was "the participatory, town-hall, consensus-forming nature" of the operation Ella Baker had helped set in motion that Hayden could feel herself to be "at the center of the organization" without having, "in any public way", to be "a leader".<ref name="crmvet.org">{{Cite web|url=https://www.crmvet.org/comm/hayden.htm|title=Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement – In the Attics of My Mind|website=www.crmvet.org|access-date=2019-12-17}}</ref>

Yet when Elaine DeLott Baker joined Hayden in Mississippi in May 1964 she found "a hierarchy in place". Based "on considerations of race, the amount of time spent in the struggle, dangers suffered, and finally, of gender," this was not a hierarchy office, but "an unspoken understanding of who should speak up at meetings, who should propose ideas in public places, and who should remain silent." Black men were at the top, "then black women, followed by white men, and at the bottom, white women." Field staff, among them "women, black and white," still retained "an enormous amount of operational freedom, they were indeed the ones that were keeping things moving." But from those leading the debate on new directions for the movement DeLott Baker saw "little recognition of that reality,"<ref name="Document98">{{Cite web|url=https://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc98.htm|title=Document 98: Elaine DeLott Baker, excerpts from Francesca Polletta and Elaine DeLott Baker, "The 1964 Waveland Memo and the Rise of Second-Wave Feminism," Organization of American Historians, Annual Meeting, Seattle, 26–29 March 2009, Elaine DeLott Baker Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University|website=Alexander Street}}</ref>  and the ground was shifting.<blockquote>The violence and emotional stresses of four years had eroded the focus and spirits of many veteran field staffers who appeared to central office staff as increasingly unpredictable and unreliable. Communication between core staff and field staff was poor and getting worse. To field staff, the Atlanta office was out of touch and becoming more and more irrelevant. Meanwhile, there were no central strategies. Resources were dwindling and tensions over the allocation of resources were mounting <ref name=":5" /></blockquote>As an opportunity to take stock, to critique and reevaluate the movement, a retreat in [[Waveland, Mississippi]], was organized for November 1964. Like Ella Baker, in criticizing King's "messianic" leadership of the SCLC, Executive Secretary [[James Forman]] saw himself as championing popularly accountable, grassroots organization.  Believing it "would detract from, rather than intensify" the focus on ordinary people's involvement in the movement, he had not appreciated King's appearance in Albany in December 1961.<ref>James Forman (1972). ''The Making of Black Revolutionaries''. University of Washington Press, p. 255.</ref> When on March 9, 1965, King, seemingly on his own authority, was able to turn the second [[Selma to Montgomery march]] back at the [[Edmund Pettus Bridge]] where two days before ("Bloody Sunday") the first had been brutally charged and batoned, Forman was appalled.<ref>[http://crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965m2mtial1 "1965-Students March in Montgomery; Confrontation at Dexter Church"], Civil Rights Movement Archive History and Timeline</ref> Yet within SNCC itself Forman increasingly was concerned by the lack of "internal cohesion".<ref>Meta Mendel-Reyes (2013), ''Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory'', Routledge. pp. 46–47.</ref>

At Waveland Forman proposed that the staff (some twenty), who under the original constitution had had "a voice but no vote," constitute "themselves as the Coordinating Committee" and elect a new Executive. It was time to recognize that SNCC no longer had a "student base" (with the move to voter registration, the original campus protest groups had largely evaporated) and that the staff, "the people who do the most work," were the organization's real "nucleus".  But the "many problems and many strains within the organization" caused by the "freedom" allowed to organizers in the field were also reason, he argued, to "change and alter" the structure of decision making. Given the "external pressures" the requirement now was for "unity".<ref>[https://www.crmvet.org/info/6411_sncc_forman-waveland.pdf Text of speech delivered at the staff retreat of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] at Waveland, Mississippi, November 6, 1964, by James Forman, Executive Secretary.</ref>

Bob Moses opposed. The role of SNCC was to stimulate social struggles, not to provide an institutionalized leadership.<ref>Clayborne Carson (1995). ''In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s''. Harvard University Press. p. 303</ref> "Leadership," Moses believed, "will emerge from the movement that emerges." <blockquote>Leadership is there in the people. You don't have to worry about where your leaders are, how are you going to get some leaders. ... If you go out and work with your people leadership will emerge. ... We don't know who they are now: and we don't need to know.<ref>quoted in Meta Mendel-Reyes (2013). p. 36</ref></blockquote> 
"To get us through the impasse," Casey Hayden tried to attach to Forman's proposal various sub-committees and provisos to ensure that "leadership for all our programs" would continue to be driven from the field, and not from central office "which makes many program areas responsible to one person rather than to all of us." For Forman this still suggested too loose, too confederal a structure for an organization whose challenge, without the manpower and publicity of white volunteers, was to mount and coordinate a Southwide Freedom Summer<ref name="auto"/> and "build a [[Black Belt (geological formation)|Black Belt]] political party."<ref name="auto1"/>

At her last Committee meeting in the fall of 1965, Hayden told both Forman and Chairman John Lewis that the "imbalance of power within SNCC" was such that, if the movement was to remain "radically democratic", they would need to step down.<ref name="auto1"/> Forman and Lewis did step down in their own time, in the spring, but with questions of structure and direction for the organization unresolved.