Documents 153someone else $400 to bomb all the houses where volunteers are staying. I’m
not convinced that that particular story has any basis, but it touched off the
terror that must lie latent always in our sisters’ hearts. I overheard one of
them on the telephone: ‘My guhls probly think I’m out of mah head; I been
singin’ all mornin, every song I knows – I just has to.’ And she had been,
moaning ‘Lord have musee’ in between the songs. I talked with her a little
bit. She told me she knows people have suffered and died too long and that
we must take risks now so it won’t go on forever. But that doesn’t make the
risk any less painful to bear. She sleeps with a hatchet under her bed. She
told me she used to have a gun under her pillow until one night when she
almost accidentally shot a neighbor boy....
Jo
Source: Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez, ed., Letters from Mississippi(Brookline, MA:
Zephyr Press, 2002), p. 53.
SNCC POSITION PAPER, 5 AUGUST 1966
By the mid-1960s, SNCC had become deeply disillusioned by the interracial
civil rights movement championed by Martin Luther King and insisted that
white involvement prevented real social change.
In an attempt to find a solution to our dilemma, we propose that our organ-
ization should be black-staffed, black-controlled, and black-financed. We do
not want to fall into a similar dilemma that other civil rights organizations
have fallen. If we continue to rely upon white financial support we will find
ourselves entwined in the tentacles of the white power complex that controls
this country. It is important that a black organization (devoid of cultism) be
projected to our people so that it can be demonstrated that such organiza-
tions are viable.
More and more we see black people in this country being used as a tool
of the white liberal establishment. Liberal whites have not begun to address
themselves to the real problem of black people in this country; witness their
bewilderment, fear, and anxiety when nationalism is mentioned concerning
black people.... Whites can only subvert our true search and struggle for
self-determination, self-identification, and liberation in this country.
Reevaluation of the white and black roles must now take place so that white
people no longer designate roles that black people play but rather black
people define white people’s roles....
If we are to proceed toward true liberation, we must cut ourselves off from
white people. We must form our own institutions, credit unions, co-ops,
political parties, write our own histories.
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