Stokely

Someone once wrote, “People who know history are condemned to watch other people repeat it.” Recently I joined an integrated demonstration in support of Black Lives Matter, which is itself not integrated. This reminded me of SNCC, a similar group I’m old enough to remember. 

In the mid 1960s, I watched the rise of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). Like  Black Lives Matter, SNCC began as a radical and independent student wing of the civil rights movement. Under the leadership of James Forman, Bob Moses and Marion Barry, this group of students, black and white, carried out most of the dangerous sit-ins and freedom rides in the 1960s and staffed many of the registration drives in the Deep South. Three of its members were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. 

Later leaders included Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who began to lean in the direction of violence. In general SNCC looked down on Martin Luther King’s campaign, disdaining his compromises, calling for “black power,” helping form the Black Panthers. Some chapters of SNCC, a collective made up of many groups operating by consensus, expelled their white members. One of my friends was expelled. Distracted by these issues, the group’s influence waned as some members turned toward militant separatism. Many of the best organizers left. The money dried up. The FBI waged an ugly campaign against SNCC, and by 1970 it had disintegrated.

Stokely Carmichael, probably SNCC’s most interesting and charismatic leader, called integration “a thalidomide drug.”  He left his leadership role. Later he was expelled from SNCC. He also left the Black Panthers because they held that white members could help them reach their goals. Carmichael argued that whites should organize in their own communities, as Black Lives Matter argues today. Carmichael shifted his activities to Africa, where he worked with Kwame Nkrumah in Guinea to strengthen ties between revolutionary groups in many countries. He became the most prominent advocate of pan-Africanism. Carmichael is one of two people credited with inventing the term “institutional racism.”