Writing Up a New Day

...So a veteran staff worker triumphantly ended a five-minute soliloquy during a SNCC conference last November...

...Among this last group-2 or 3 adult "advisors," a few lawyers, some SNCC "graduates" now back in school—was their chronicler, Howard Zinn...

...Zinn's best chapter provides an analysis of the role of the Federal Government in the South...

...The inevitable applause burst out, to dissolve into the hand-clap of a freedom song for Willie, whose confinement kept him away from the meeting...

...Although not a lawyer, Zinn does an excellent job of ferreting out imaginative legal remedies which could be used by the Justice Department if it wished to pursue the goal of civil rights with vigor...

...It had been called to discuss everything important about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee— its new and expanded goals and program and the necessity for a more complicated structure...

...Zinn sometimes records crucial decisions—the jail-nobail policy, for example—without making us understand the kind of growth and experience it took to reach them...

...Yet those who had read Zinn's SNCC The New Abolitionists could not have found it the kind of "history" (the quotes are Zinn's) from which people proverbially learn...

...Zinn has learned much from his years in the complicated South, especially from Mama Dollie of Southwest Georgia, who, in a SNCC report recorded in the book, instructed: "Now, boy, you go to writing and write up a new day...

...The attitudes of the first SNCC workers, who created the SNCC legend, unavoidably assumes a dominating place in a book such as this...

...If it fails to touch the serious problems confronting both SNCC and the movement, it nevertheless follows the natural bent of its subject matter to capture what a perceptive participant (Zinn also taught history at Spellman, the Negro women's college in Atlanta, for seven years) could hardly have avoided...

...In fact, the one arm left the other behind, as direct action became an adjunct to the more significant voter registration work...

...Zinn leaves the impression that a "compromise" between "the 'direct action' people and the 'voter registration' people" gave SNCC "two arms...

...That important decision deserves more than the single paragraph Zinn allots it, for it pointed the way toward the weighty goal of political power...

...Zinn's book is important as SNCC's first documentary...

...It was a coldly unromantic organizational decision deserving of analysis for its implications for SNCC and the entire Southern movement, even in a book inevitably focusing on the personal accounts, early hardships, and tenacious bravery that has given this country its first young heroes in decades...

...This move toward a more political involvement in Southern life, coming from the creators of sit-in and cup-of-coffee, demonstrations, was a remarkable and mature change of policy...

...But what we do get not from Zinn is the sense of constant revision that is underway in SNCC...

...Fannie Lou Hamer's account of how she first came into the movement, and Zinn's own incisive discussion of the contagion of the SNCC experience...

...Here in the part of the country they had patented as their own—a little town in Mississippi—came SNCC staff from Northern and Southern offices and others whose work had been sufficiently intermittent not to merit them the $9.64 weekly SNCC salary...

...direct action" SNCC which last summer barely existed, for by then the Mississippi staff voted not to test public accommodations under the new Civil Rights Act but to funnel its energy into politics (the Freedom Party), education (the freedom schools), and community work (voter registration, the community centers...

...An important example is the decision of summer 1961 to emphasize voter registration over the more dra matic action that had given birth to SNCC...

...Even allowing for the inherent romanticism of the subject, Zinn's book is something of an anachronism...

...But could the tribute to Willie Shaw still define a group that in five years had grown from two who had no budget to 225 who would spend a million dollars in 1964...

...It was SNCC's unique contribution, since followed by all others active in the Southern movement...

...For his book is a romantic account of the first four years of SNCC seen from up close and valuable chiefly because the author is close up...

...It mostly treats the "nonviolent...

...Or he gives inadequate treatment to crucial turning points...

...The author has expertly chosen his documents: I am grateful to have Julian Bond's poem, SNCC's first statement of purpose so motivated by love and nonviolence, Mrs...