The Movement by Thomas C. Holt

Author:Thomas C. Holt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

A New Organizing Agenda

After their second meeting, in the summer of 1961, Moses followed up Moore’s suggestion that he contact C. C. Bryant, the president of the NAACP chapter in McComb, a town in Pike County, near the Louisiana border and roughly eighty miles south of the state capital at Jackson. Thus, Moses’s first major effort to register Mississippi voters began far from the Delta region that would later become the focus of SNCC’s Mississippi campaign and, ironically, in a region bearing place names like Lincoln and Lamar, which reflected its history in the last century when it was a hotbed of black Reconstruction politics. Moses began organizing a wary and vulnerable people by spending weeks simply listening to them. Only then did he try to prepare them to enter alienating courthouses and sheriff’s offices where they would confront confusing literacy tests administered by hostile registrars. After some encouraging initial successes, white resistance stiffened and violence erupted as the tempo of registration attempts quickened. In Liberty, Amite’s ironically misnamed county seat, Moses was arrested and jailed while accompanying aspiring voters to the registrar’s office. Shortly afterward he was assaulted by the sheriff’s cousin and needed eight stitches to close a head wound. The local court found the sheriff’s cousin not guilty.10

Although his effort was eventually reinforced by the arrival of a dozen more SNCC workers, Moses’s focus on canvassing voters was soon overtaken by the very different ambitions of the area’s high school youth, who were determined to emulate the daring challenges to segregated lunch counters they had witnessed elsewhere. Much like Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon in Albany, therefore, the SNCC field workers found themselves drawn into supporting sit-ins that these young people launched at Woolworth’s and the Greyhound bus station. This and similar developments in Jackson delayed further progress in the registration campaign, especially when many of the students were expelled from school, which, in contrast with earlier campaigns, turned many of the parents against the Freedom Riders. The brutal murder in broad daylight of Herbert Lee by a state legislator eroded the community’s support even further, effectively shutting down the project after just four months.11

The growing body count made clear that organizing the rural Deep South was a life-and-death decision. How people—ordinary people—came to make that decision was not a question to be taken lightly. This campaign would require different strategies and means of protecting both organizers and participants. The nonviolent discipline necessary during sit-ins and street demonstrations was useless in situations where violent attacks came from nightriders and assassins. Confronting such terrorism, local black communities eventually turned to armed self-defense to protect the activists as best they could.12

It was against this backdrop that the SNCC field staff had gathered at the Highlander center in August 1961 for a tense three-day debate over the future direction of their movement.13 The initial question was whether SNCC should shift its resources into voter registration projects, which many feared meant abandoning the direct-action campaigns that had defined the organization from its inception.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.