SNCC in Trouble: A Report from Atlanta
Watters, Pat
The role of SNCC in the so-called Atlanta riots of September, 1966, gives some perspective on the black-power debate. In the first place, "riot" was probably too strong a term by ghetto...
...went nightly to the "riot" scenes, trying to quiet people down...
...Without this latter bastion, as essential to eradicating Southern racist control as the vote, none of the previous civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act itself, was secure...
...In Vine City, a slum where SNCC had been working with an eye to explosive grievances, its stock went very low after word of its role in the "riots...
...Perhaps they might avoid even the blandishments of black power, this sad thing to which their once most idealistic activists have been driven...
...Atlanta was probably further along than most Southern cities in creating, by deliberate public policy, a Northern-style ghetto belt around the center of the city...
...With each defeat of coalition, in the South and nationally, and such was the killing of the civil rights bill, black power's ugliest premise—that white society is thoroughly racist—was strengthened in its influence on Negroes...
...The "riots" were like that...
...But important was the break of SNCC and CORE with the non-violent tradition as a movement strategy...
...rather than against injustice...
...But the alternate strategy of coalition was not doing well either...
...Other groups, including Dr...
...e This scapegoating of SNCC had its national counterpart in the explanations given for the destruction of the 1966 civil rights act—a blow of incalculable damage to the Negro people of the South, because the bill contained not only the fair housing provision so distasteful to some former firebrand Northern friends of the Negro cause, but also the crucial provisions for reform of Southern administration of justice...
...In Georgia's governor's race—as though to underscore the real origins of Atlanta's "riots," and probably with a degree of back-lash from them—a racist white majority emerged to nominate the rabid little Lester Maddox in the Democratic primaries, and buttoned-down racism had in part inspired the candidacy of his Republican opponent, Howard Callaway...
...Carmichael and others have talked of exploiting riots with demands on the white power structure...
...But no moves or abilities along these lines seemed evident in SNCC during or after the Atlanta disturbances...
...SNCC people had as much right in Vine City as anybody else...
...I believe in my Bible and my 30-30," said a local voter registration leader in 1962...
...Similar rampaging broke loose in this locale and ended with the arrest of a suspect in the slaying...
...They were a warning, perhaps a harbinger of tomorrow's real, full-fury storm...
...The prospects, as translated into action in Atlanta, or as summed up in the dubious potential of all-black politics for even denting the desperate needs of the majority of Negro people, were not encouraging...
...a television newsman (a notably humane one) had his skull badly fractured...
...Some police officers were injured...
...The Summerhill slum is in the shadow of an $18 million municipal sports stadium recently built by stretching community resources and credit to the limit...
...In Atlanta, it is not uncommon in the summer for all the signs of a bad ATLANTA, OCTOBER 1, 1966 storm to build up all afternoon, with brooding black clouds, thunder rumbling and distant lightning flashing, and then to come to nothing—a few fat drops of rain, a gust of wind, no more, the sun soon shirting forth...
...These seemed the salient features of the new credo of hopelessness and revulsion, along with its emotional undertone of racism, denied by the black-power advocates but unmistakable to a white Southerner familiar with racism's nasty nuances...
...Its long-range economic influence is likely to be beneficial and may prove more humane than were the cotton mills erected in a similar spirit all over the South after the Civil War...
...The Community Council of Atlanta, a private agency, had outlined Summerhill's obvious ills in February, 1966, including overcrowding and neighborhood instability caused in part by ur ban renewal refugees from the stadium site...
...Negro violence, and Atlanta's "rioting" surely included, was also blamed...
...Congress now seemed to say that, as it had "punished" the white South for its violence by passing civil rights legislation, it would now "punish" the Negroes for theirs by withholding it...
...White violence set things off...
...But a statement by the city's responsible intergroup relations workers pointed out that the real causes of the riots were intolerable living conditions and a public policy that exacerbated rather than ameliorated them...
...Against this background Atlanta's mayor and chief of police proclaimed SNCC responsible for the Summerhill rioting, and a number of its staff members were arrested, including Stokely Carmichael...
...The people met in their Vine City Council, and here is what they decided: it is not right to run people out just because you don't agree with them...
...There was brick-throwing, and much milling about, with angry talk and shouts...
...In Sumerhill, grievances against parking restrictions caused by the stadium added to the old, justified hatred for the bully-boy cop, found also in Boulevard and every other American slum...
...and SNCC and black power were a new and dandy rationalization for not facing up to the real sickness...
...Mayor Allen came out of it all vowing to eliminate slums, and he is a man who, once he gets such an idea (as with the stadium), tends to deliver...
...James Baldwin in 1959 prophesized an all-engulfing Negro riot that would begin in Atlanta and spread across the nation...
...Mayor Ivan Allen Jr...
...Similarly, white racism was dimming the promise of political sanity inherent in reapportionment and Negro franchisement in much of the rest of the South...
...The role of SNCC in the so-called Atlanta riots of September, 1966, gives some perspective on the black-power debate...
...Negroes as individuals (as opposed to directaction demonstrators) had been armed and shooting back when they dared throughout the non-violent years...
...A white policeman shot a Negro auto-theft suspect who refused to halt in the Summerhill slum area on September 6, and three nights of rampage ensued...
...They have survived so much, with good sense intact...
...All along Congress (and much of the American public) had acted to help avoid violence (remember Birmingham...
...King's SCLC—all the while struggling with SNCC for the minds of the riotous—showed some adeptness at this...
...During the Atlanta disturbances, the Negro community initially recoiled from SNCC...
...Instead, of course, the next year non-violent direct action came out of the South...
...The dilemmas and paradoxes of black power have become clearer...
...There was relatively little firebombing and property destruction, and no looting...
...Such had been the real idealism of the movement and the source of its strength from the beginning, a beautiful grasp of the essential principles of civilization by the Negro people of the South...
...I think it is clear that SNCC, egging on spontaneous anger and dismay in both areas, acted irresponsibly...
...On September 10, Saturday night of the same week, a white motorist shot to death, apparently at random, a 16-year-old Negro boy in the Boulevard area, another slum...
...SNCC and CORE, in enunciating this summer the rationale and dogma of black power, advocated armed selfdefense...
...Aside from far more volatile rampages in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1960 and again in 1964, the Atlanta rumblings were as near to Northern-style ghetto rioting as a Southern city has come...
...But the slums were only the most obvious and pressing symptom of faulty public policy common to the South (and to how much of the nation...
...A second crucial strategic break was political—away from the concept of coalition with white liberals and labor...
...The people had come to precisely the same decision when SNCC, previously, had urged them to get rid of a white missionary living with his family in their midst...
...The mistake of jailing Carmichael mitigated this...
...There were also the conditions in the Boulevard area, where slum clearance was caused by motel building...
...Some residents were even convinced that the cops would not have been loathe to see a little anti SNCC rioting...
...In the first place, "riot" was probably too strong a term by ghetto standards...
...Many felt that, after his initial courageous action, he might spend his evenings better solving some of the real problems in this perilous situation: things might have gone up in flames any night—with more than half of Atlanta's firemen on strike at the time because of their notoriously low pay...
...But the city did not exhibit a similar determination to go all out to improve housing, schools, and other unspeakable ingredients of slum life...
...This was no innovation...
...But forces from without the community seemed to encourage Vine City to run SNCC out...
...Surely this outlet, this hope, along with several hundred years of conditioning against violence toward whites —which seems still to effect even so via lence-oriented an organization as the Deacons for Defense and Justice—saved the South or postponed disaster...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
