Carmichael, Stokely
(1941–98): Organizer of
voter registration projects
in Mississippi and Lown-
des county, Alabama;
charismatic SNCC chair-
man who popularized
the term ‘black power.’
Leftist: A radical view of
politics, often supporting
socialism and condemn-
ing discrimination.
effective that Highlander was forced to close, the victim of constant police
harassment, FBI surveillance, IRS audits, and state investigations.
To accelerate the movement, SCLC’s outspoken director Ella Baker con-
vened a meeting of student protesters in April at her alma mater, Shaw
University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Baker believed that the sudden suc-
cess of the sit-ins rendered Martin Luther King’s cautious strategies obsolete.
Two hundred participants attended, mostly from elite black colleges and high
schools, including Fisk and Morehouse. The ‘Nashville All-Stars’ included
James Lawson, C.T. Vivian, James Bevel, Diane Nash, Bernard LaFayette, and
Marion Barry. Julian Bond led the Atlanta contingent. Stokely Carmichael,
a Trinidad native, and Courtland Cox headed up the Nonviolent Action
Group from Howard University. Sympathetic observers arrived from liberal
and leftistorganizations, including FOR, CORE, SCEF, YWCA, the National
Student Association, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Young
People’s Socialist League, and the ecumenical National Council of Churches
in Christ, the largest religious organization in the United States. The 55-year-
old Baker recognized that ‘the younger generation is challenging you and me.
They are asking us to forget our laziness and doubt and fear, and follow our
dedication to the truth to the bitter end.’ She challenged the students, in
turn, to find larger targets – ‘something much bigger than a hamburger or
even a giant-sized Coke’ – especially voting, housing, jobs, and health care.
King was the chief draw at the Shaw meeting, but it was James Lawson
who struck a responsive chord among his listeners. He, not King, had been
on the frontlines of the sit-in movement. After praising sit-ins as the opti-
mum way to end segregation, Lawson criticized the NAACP for its ‘middle-
class conventional, half-way efforts’ that left blacks as a whole ‘victims of
racial evil.’ He predicted that ‘all of Africa will be free before the American
Negro attains first class citizenship.’ Even as Lawson spoke, sixteen African
nations, including Chad, Senegal, and Nigeria, became independent of
European colonialism. Lawson warned that ‘until America honestly accepts
the sinful nature of racism, this cancerous disease will continue to rape all
of us.’
At the close of the meeting, the participants formed an important civil
rights organization – the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), pronounced ‘snick’ – that spurned formal ties to King’s SCLC.
SNCC welcomed white allies, refused to follow a prophetic leader, and dis-
tinguished itself by its piercing internal debates, democratic procedures, and
ventures into the most dangerous areas of the deep South, especially the
small towns of McComb, Mississippi; Albany, Georgia; and Selma, Alabama.
Its fearless, even reckless, workers became known as the ‘shock troops of the
revolution.’ As SNCC’s work grew in importance, the civil rights establish-
ment tried to hijack the student organization. The NAACP, CORE, and SCLC60 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Student Nonviolent Co-
ordinating Committee:
This student-run organ-
ization was formed after
the 1960 sit-ins to organ-
ize a community-based
movement in the deep
South.