406 ChaPter^8
shut down the lunch counter, but the sit-in movement had been launched and
would change the nature of the Civil Rights struggle in huge ways. As they
had done during the Montgomery boycott, the Black community chose to act,
especially the youth. A couple months later, led by a brilliant organizer from
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] named Ella Baker,
students formed what would become the most important activist group of the
era, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC [pronounced
“snick”]. SNCC was compared to the abolitionists as it would confront head
on the reality of segregation. Its first tactic was the sit-in. Like the students in
Greensboro, young Blacks, and some sympathetic Whites who traveled down
from the North, began to sit down at segregated restaurants and nonviolently
protest by asking to be served, and then accept their arrests. The tactics,
though nonviolent, were militant nonetheless; the aim of the Black students
sitting in was to provoke a reaction and let the entire nation see how back-
wards and violent the South really was. Within months, over 50,000 blacks
had participated in the sit-ins and it was becoming a southern-wide move-
ment. Ella Baker and SNCC had found a potent and inclusive tactic to expose
the dread of segregation in the sit-in, but the majority of old- line black lead-
ers refused to endorse them, fearing that they were provocative and would
lead to more attacks on blacks. But King understood the power of the young
people, and endorsed the sit-ins–calling for “direct action against injustice
without waiting for other agencies to act... We will not obey unjust laws or
submit to unjust practices”–setting him apart at the most important black
leader of the times [though Ella Baker deserves equal acclaim for her actions].
Other groups began to join the cause and adopt the tactics of direct action.
In 1961, the Congress On Racial Equality [CORE], organized a series of free-
dom rides to challenge various laws throughout the south that had segregated
interstate travel. CORE was confrontational; its director, James Farmer, said
“our intention was to provoke the Southern authorities into arresting us and
thereby prod the Justice Department into enforcing the laws of the land.”
Farmer understood that only the federal government could overcome racist
laws in American society, that southern states would never act on their own
to make life better for Blacks. “There’s only one man in this country that can
stop George Wallace [the Governor of Alabama]... We can present thou-
sands and thousands of bodies in the streets if we want to. And we can have
all of the... moral commitment around this world. But a lot of these prob-