The Shadows of Youth by Andrew B. Lewis

Author:Andrew B. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2009-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In November 1964, with the presidential election over and Freedom Summer receding into the past, SNCC members gathered at a little resort on the Mississippi coast to grapple head-on with the strains in the organization. The Methodist church retreat in Waveland appeared to be the perfect setting for SNCC to renew the bonds of organizational fraternity, for friends to reconnect with one another, and for individuals to take stock of their lives. It stood in a grove of oak and pine trees overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, near Bay St. Louis, with dormitories right on the water. The pleasant temperatures of late fall made the simple wood structures tolerable, and at night the members would wander out to the pier with a few bottles of wine to enjoy the last whispers of the warm fall, to share their company, to laugh, and to joke.8

But the old esprit was becoming difficult to maintain. SNCC now had the largest ground operation of any civil rights organization in the South—at least sixty field secretaries, a dozen people working out of headquarters, and more than one hundred full-time volunteers. Many of the summer volunteers and local recruits clamored for permanent membership. SNCC had always operated loosely and informally, with membership fluid and decisions made by consensus. That organizational structure was possible, however, only so long as it remained a small and close-knit group with a unified vision.9

A review of the attendees illustrates SNCC’s growing pains. The sprawling list included veterans and newcomers who were part of the ongoing programs in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi; headquarters staff like Bond and Forman; northern staffers from offices in New York and Washington; and “Friends of SNCC” volunteers and fund-raisers from Massachusetts and Michigan, New Jersey and California. Some of the fund-raising staff, like Barry, now stationed in Washington, and McDew, had been with SNCC from the beginning, but most were newcomers with little or no southern field experience. While acknowledging that most of these newcomers “were serious people with a long-term commitment,” Carmichael also saw a number of “faddists getting on…the newest ‘hot’ political thing.”10

The rapid expansion raised a difficult question about race in the movement. SNCC had always had a few white members, and one of its most respected veterans—Bob Zellner—was white. His relationship with SNCC went back to nearly the very beginning, and he had formed close friendships with Barry and Moses in the McComb jail, with Bond in Atlanta, and with Carmichael during Freedom Summer. Even among SNCC’s veterans, Zellner’s jail time and the beatings he had endured were legendary. For a group that accused King of being soft, with the refrain of “Where’s your body?” Zellner’s capacity to endure violence inoculated him against much criticism. But now, allowing all the northern volunteers to join SNCC would give it nearly as many white as black members. Older members, like Bond, Barry, and Moses, had always envisioned SNCC as an interracial organization, but they had imagined it remaining predominantly black.

Class anxieties mixed with questions of race.

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