Carmichael and the Vine Street Project Statement In May 1966 Forman was replaced by
Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, who was determined "to keep the SNCC together." But Forman recalls male leaders fighting "her attempts as executive secretary to impose a sense of organizational responsibility and self-discipline," and "trying to justify themselves by the fact that their critic was a woman" In October 1967 Smith-Robinson died, aged just 25, "of exhaustion" according to one of her co-workers, "destroyed by the movement." Replacing John Lewis as chairman in May 1966 was the 24-year old
Stokely Carmichael (the future Kwame Ture). When on the night of June 16, 1966, following protests at the shooting and wounding of solo freedom marcher
James Meredith, Carmichael walked out of jail (his 27th arrest) and into Broad Street Park in
Greenwood, Mississippi, he asked the waiting crowd "What do you want?." They roared back "Black Power! Black Power!" For Carmichael, Black Power was a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations."We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves. A new direction SNCC was evident in the
Atlanta, Georgia, "Vine City" Project, SNCC's first effort at urban organizing. Co-directed by William "Bill" Ware and
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons (Robinson), it took up the challenge of the Georgia State Legislature's refusal to seat
Julian Bond because of SNCC opposition to the
Vietnam War. Ware, who had been greatly affected by his experience of newly independent
Ghana, emphasized racial solidarity. Black people, he argued, needed to work "without the guidance and/or direction and control of non-Blacks". Without control over their affairs, he warned, "Black people will know no freedom, but only more subtle forms of slavery." A Vine Street Project position paper on Black Power, which Simmons helped write, suggested that: Negroes in this country have never been allowed to organize themselves because of white interference. As a result of this, the stereotype has been reinforced that Blacks cannot organize themselves. The white psychology that Blacks have to be watched, also reinforces this stereotype. Blacks, in fact, feel intimidated by the presence of whites, because of their knowledge of the power that whites have over their lives. One white person can come into a meeting of Black people and change the complexion of that meeting ... People would immediately start talking about "brotherhood", "love", etc.; race would not be discussed. This was "not to say that whites have not had an important role in the Movement." If people now had "the right to picket, the right to give out leaflets, the right to vote, the right to demonstrate, the right to print," the Vine City paper allowed that it was "mainly because of the entrance of white people into Mississippi, in the summer of '64." But their "role is now over and it should be," for what would it mean "if Black people, once having the right to organize, are not allowed to organize themselves? It means that Blacks' ideas about inferiority are being reinforced." What was needed now for "people to free themselves" was an "all-Black project" and this had to "exist from the beginning." Future cooperation with whites had to be a matter of "coalition". But there could be "no talk of 'hooking up' unless Black people organize Blacks and white people organize whites." Those "white people who desire change" should go "where the problem (of racism) is most manifest," in their own communities where power has been created "for the express purpose of denying Blacks human dignity and self-determination." (Although overridden, on that basis
Oretha Castle Haley already in 1962 had suspended whites from the
CORE chapter in
New Orleans).
Julian Bond later reflected: ...the successes Freedom Summer achieved resulted from its embrace of a paradox — it tried to fight bigotry by appealing to people more concerned about whites, not blacks. Appealing to the nation's racism accepted white supremacy. By acknowledging its dependence on whites to popularize the civil rights struggle in the South, SNCC contradicted its rhetorical belief in the equal worth of all races, and undermined its insistence that indigenous blacks were best prepared to lead the struggle for their deliverance from white dominance. Yet like Forman (now urging the study of
Marxism), Carmichael hesitated to accept the implication that whites should be excluded from the movement. It was in December that he led the SNCC national executive in a narrow decision (19 in favor, 18 against and 24 abstentions) to ask white co-workers and volunteers to leave. In May 1967 the Coordinating Committee formally asked its non-black staff to resign. Whites were told they should concentrate on organizing poor white communities and leave SNCC to promote African-American self-reliance.
Armed self-defense Carmichael had been working with a voter registration project in Alabama that had taken what, at the time, may have seemed an equally momentous step. In the face of murderous Klan violence, organizers for the
Lowndes County Freedom Organization openly carried arms. Participating in the Selma to Montgomery march, Carmichael had stopped off in the county in March 1965. Local registration efforts were being led by
John Hulett who that month, with John C. Lawson, a preacher, became the first two black voters in Lowndes County in more than six decades. Carmichael gained the confidence of local residents when, handing out voter registration material at a local school, he refused to be intimidated by local police: they were either to arrest him or leave. With SNCC workers then "swarmed" by young people, Carmichael took the initiative to help form the LCFO with Hulett, its first chair. The organization would not only register voters but, as a party, run candidates for office—its symbol, a rampant black panther, representing black "strength and dignity". Hulett warned the state of Alabama that it had a last chance to peacefully grant African Americans their rights: "We're out to take power legally, but if we're stopped by the government from doing it legally, we're going to take it the way everyone else took it, including the way the Americans took it in the
American Revolution." Certain the federal government was not going to protect him and his fellow LCFO members, Hulett told a federal registrar, "if one of our candidates gets touched, we're going to take care of the murderer ourselves." Together with CORE, SNCC was embracing the principle of armed self-defense. After they, and other civil-rights, organizations had recruited hundreds and then thousands of marchers in June 1966 to continue, in a
March Against Fear, what was to have been Meredith's solitary walk from
Memphis, Tennessee, to
Jackson, Mississippi, Carmichael called for the armed
Deacons for Defense and Justice to provide security. The Deacons, formed in November 1964 in response to KKK violence in
Jonesboro, Louisiana, had recruited veterans with
Korean War and
World War II combat experience. After some debate, other leaders, including King, agreed.
Akinyele O. Umoja writes: "Finally, though expressing reservations, King conceded to Carmichael's proposals to maintain unity in the march and the movement. The involvement and association of the Deacons with the march signified a shift in the civil rights movement, which had been popularly projected as a 'nonviolent movement."' The message to white activists, "organize your own", was one that Terry took home with her to uptown, "Hillbilly Harlem", Chicago. This was the neighborhood in which, having taken the prompt the year before,
Casey Hayden had already been working, organizing welfare mothers into a union. She was "on loan" from SNCC to
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Like other new left groups, SDS did not view a self-consciously black SNCC as separatist. Rather it was seen as the vanguard of a prospective "interracial movement of the poor". Accepting the Vine Street challenge, the goal was no longer integration but what Chicago
Black Panther leader
Fred Hampton was to project as the "rainbow coalition". In the South, as SNCC began turning them away white volunteers moved over to the New Orleans–based
Southern Conference Education Fund with which Ella Baker had been working since the 1950s. There, in effort to advance a coalition agenda, they joined
Bob Zellner, the SNCC's first white field organizer and son of a former Klansman, in working with
Carl and
Anne Braden to organize white students and poor whites.
Opposition to the Vietnam War The Meredith shooting in June 1966 had been preceded in January by the killing of
Sammy Younge Jr., the first black college student to be killed as a result of his involvement in the civil rights movement, and by the acquittal of his killer. SNCC took the occasion to denounce the
Vietnam War, the first statement of its kind by a major civil rights organization. "The murder of Samuel Young in
Tuskegee, Alabama," SNCC proposed, "is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam, for both Young and the Vietnamese sought, and are seeking, to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths." In the face of a government that "has never guaranteed the freedom of oppressed citizens, and is not yet truly determined to end the rule of terror and oppression within its own borders," where," it asked, "is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States." It could longer countenance the "hypocrisy" of a call upon "negroes ... to stifle the liberation of Vietnam, to preserve a 'democracy' which does not exist for them at home." At an SDS-organized conference at
UC Berkeley in October 1966, Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in the August 1965
Watts Uprising and in the ghetto rebellions that followed had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC had first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and
Waldo Martin, SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power [and] emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appear to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"
Criticism of Israel In what
Ralph Featherstone, program head at the Atlanta office, presented as a contribution to a "third-world alliance" of the "oppressed", the June-July 1967 SNCC Newsletter published an article by the Committee's communications director,
Ethel Minor, embracing the Arab cause in the
Six-Day War. Drawing heavily on a pamphlet published by the
Palestine Research Center, it asserted that
Zionists had conquered Arab land through "terror, force, and massacres" (a purported photograph of executions in 1956 carried the caption: "this is the
Gaza Strip, Palestine, not
Dachau, Germany"); that "Israel segregates those few Arabs who remained in their homeland . . . under martial law"; that "dark-skinned Jews from North Africa and the Middle East are also second class citizens"; and that the resulting state is "tool and foothold for American and British exploitation" in the region. Anticipating swift condemnation from white liberals, the office head, Johnny Wilson, called a press conference to announce that the article did not represent SNCC’s official position. But a subsequent statement from the office in August, “The Middle-East Crisis”, broadly endorsed Minor's analysis while conceding the horrors of the
Holocaust, and noting that were also Jewish voices critical of Zionism and Israeli policy. For the historian,
Clayborne Carson, the controversy was further evidence that Carmichael and staff members in Atlanta were moving toward "racial separatist positions that discounted the possibility of future black-white coalitions". ==1967–1968: Northern strategy and the split with Carmichael and the Panthers==