OUR STRUGGLE: WHY THE STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE EXPELLED ITS WHITE MEMBERS
Humanities
History 190Z: The Long Civil Rights Movement
In 1966, after more than 5 years working as an interracial organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) expelled its white members. SNCC had been a dynamic civil rights direct action group led and staffed entirely by white and African American people in their early twenties. The organization had grown out of the sit-ins of the early 1960s, and for the next several years they were instrumental in confronting the most dangerous elements of the racist Southern sociopolitical systems. They led parts of the Freedom Rides, planned Freedom Summer to register poor African American voters, and joined with Martin Luther King, Jr., and thousands of others in the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965. But internal disagreement about the direction of the group, and pressure from all sides (including violence from Klansmen and infiltration by the FBI), created the conditions that stirred rancorous debate about whether to continue fighting as an interracial organization. Tensions eventually heightened to the point that the group took a vote to bar white people from remaining in or joining SNCC. The decision, among other factors, diminished the effect the organization would have on the civil rights movement in the years to come. This paper looks in detail at the conditions that led to the decision of the group to move away from its founding principles of nonviolent interracial solidarity.
