The First Generation of SNCC

...This was the last question I asked Lewis after we had been talking for several hours, and as I asked it there occurred perhaps the most vivid event of the evening...

...And I write here frankly as a recorder and sometimes a commentator, but with no pretense to "inside" knowledge...

...They follow its affairs closely...

...hemmed in by the barriers of segregation, they began to use them as a fleet for the burgeoning movement...

...Marion Barry was chosen temporary chairman and Jane Stembridge, a white girl with religious pacifist convictions, became secretary...

...And by a paradox, just because they tried to hide from themselves the fact that they really were leaders, they began to act, maybe unconsciously, as an elitist group, further and further cutting themselves off from the masses of Negro people...

...Their style of dress, their inner group language, their sexual habits, their attitudes toward work—all these were caught in a series of cross-pressures between the "inside" SNCC world and the "outside" world in which they were trying to root themselves...

...It decided to go to the people and root itself among them...

...What makes them relatively fortunate in their trouble is that at least in one respect they are much better off than radicals of a generation ago who also became "graduates" of movements: these ex- or semi-SNCC people look back with great pride upon their time in the movement and they still hope again to be active...

...Mostly, they are not embittered, and none of them feels he has sacrificed himself for a falsehood...

...It is this moment of fraternity which lives most strongly in Lewis's mind: the moment before the burden of national strategies, before the complica tions of politics, and as he remarks with particular stress, "before we got around to having leaders...

...For as soon as SNCC people began to settle, they were in effect beginning to do what they consciously wanted least to do: they were beginning to set themselves up as a special group, a stratum of professional organizers, and thereby a potential elite...

...It matters enormously...

...It realized that a policy of dramatic raids followed by sudden withdrawals would bring large amounts of publicity but could also lead to severe damage in the local communities...

...Lewis understood why it was that Negro parents, proud to be able to send a son to college and hopeful he might rise above their own poverty, should have tried to dissuade him from activities which, in their innermost hearts, they admired...

...Two months before the famous sit-ins at Greensboro, North Carolina, the Nashville students had begun their test sit-ins at the downtown stores...

...Unless that happens, a large part of the sacrifice and energy of the last years will have been wasted...

...The danger in such a policy was always that the fabric of social life in the local Negro communities might be ripped apart while nothing better was offered or prepared to replace it...

...It does not pretend to be a history of SNCC, or even a full account of the matters raised by Lewis...

...There was of course a lot of adult Negro activity in the South during the early sixties, but not really a stable and coherent organization to which SNCC could attach itself...

...Since at this point there were occurring similar outbursts of protest on other Negro campuses, Ella Baker, a veteran of the movement then working for Dr...

...The idea of establishing grass-roots community movements was entirely sound...

...But what the SNCC people could not quite appreciate were the problems this new strategy would bring both to themselves as young well-educated students and to the people in the communities they were now going to enter...

...When he turns to the years 1960-63, John Lewis speaks with confidence and thrust...

...But realistically, one gathers, they cannot go back to SNCC, even if they were welcomed...

...During the academic year 1958-59 John Lewis, a student at the American Baptist Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, was one of a group of fifteen or twenty young people, both black and white, who would go each Tuesday night to a discussion group led by James Lawson, a Negro divinity student at Vanderbilt who preached the philosophy of non-violence...

...the perils of sudden dashes in and out of the most segregated places in the South were entirely obvious...

...Most of the original SNCC leaders were the sons of the Southern Negro middle class...

...And so there are now scattered through Northern cities these "graduates" of SNCC...

...SNCC undertook a major turn...

...They are in irregular communication with one another...

...Lewis smiled and said, "There's a lot to what the man says...

...Yet they feel, as Lewis sadly remarks, "nothing left to relate to...

...The dilemmas of organization and power, which have tormented so many other people in the past, now torment Lewis as he tries to draw up for himself a balance sheet of his experience in SNCC...

...Within SNCC the tendencies toward centralization grew stronger, and after a while Bob Moses, who represented those with a yearning for a style of strong and even anarchic individuality, went his own way...

...Among those who used also to attend were Marion Barry and Diane Nash, both to become leading members of SNCC...

...In a particular town, the three or four SNCC workers would be working selflessly to gain particular objectives the local Negroes needed—improved street lights or better schools...

...The more they learned, the more they felt themselves chocked-in by society...

...And still more difficult, they would have to face the possibility of a clash in outlook or even interest between those with whom they worked day by day and the movement to which they were committed...

...Polite and well-dressed, the students would descend on the stores, to sit at lunch-counters, doing their homework and preserving strict decorum...

...Within the last two or so years, SNCC has undergone a further and, some may feel, an inevitable change...

...As Rustin talked, Lewis listened with complete absorption...

...What went wrong and did it have to go wrong...

...It matters whether they will find, sooner or later, a place in a renewed movement, one that is concerned both with the problems of the American Negroes and the problems of the country as a whole...

...For him, those were the days of purity: the first, sweet communion of coming together for action and risk...

...The ideas, or example, of Gandhi figured strongly in these discussions, and for Lewis, if not for others, Gandhi remains a moral hero...

...but at least for them, the SNCC mystique has been broken and that painful process of self-questioning which seems to follow the crest of all political movements, has begun...

...Lawson belonged to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the role he played in directing the religious sentiments of Lewis and his friends toward moral and political protest indicates the importance of American pacifism in sparking the civil rights movement, It also suggests that, on occasion at least, ideas can suddenly set off significant political action: even the ideas of obscure and confined little groups...

...They feel an intense affection for it, no matter how troubled they may be about its present course...

...Hungry, tired, and bruised, the Riders sought help from some Negro families in a tiny village in Tennessee...

...He speaks without hesitation about "the first SNCC generation," now scattered in Northern exile, but lie does hesitate to answer questions about his present opinions of SNCC...

...What will happen to John Lewis and the others like him...

...Field secretaries were now sent to work fulltime in Negro communities, in order to train people for voting and to create a new combative and independent spirit in the Deep South...

...About an hour earlier Bayard Rustin had dropped in at the apartment where we were talking...

...Lewis quickly, humorously agreed: "Sure, tell us...

...SNCC therefore, and for other reasons too, tried to go it alone...

...And what Rustin said, in rapid improvisation, might be summarized like this: First, SNCC was trapped in the difficulties all youth movements face when they have to go it alone, without an adult movement to learn from and fall back upon or graduate into—so that it was driven into accentuating differences of generation when it should have been struggling with problems of strategy...

...When Lewis now turns back in memory to the Nashville days, his voice becomes harsher than it usually is, so that one begins to understand how so gentle a young man could by all accounts have been an effective leader and speaker...

...Lewis is quite free from that generation-baiting which, among certain young radicals, has replaced both political thought and human response...

...Despite the fears of mothers and hesitations of fathers, the Nashville students were now able to use family cars...

...The sons could...

...We seek a community in which man can realize the full meaning of the self which demands open relationships with others...

...Lewis takes seriously the philosophy of non-violence, not merely as a tactic or device vis a vis the outer world, but as a genuine and fundamental value...

...But as I asked this final question and Lewis clearly indicated that this indeed was the key problem but one about which he could not yet speak with assurance, Rustin asked permission to break in...

...Right now John Lewis is a homeless man...

...They retain a strong feeling for SNCC, which remains the center of their emotional life...

...They would demonstrate on "T-Days," Tuesdays and Thursdays, when classes were light...

...Many of its activists were sincerely devoted to the moral-religious norms of non-violence, and most were also extremely suspicious of both for mal organization and centralized leadership...

...That these people in that little town in Tennessee were excited by the Freedom Riders and fearful of what might happen after an open display of support for them, was something Lewis not merely understood but could accept emotionally...

...More he would not say and more I saw no reason to ask...

...Nothing that Lewis recalled in our conversations seemed to stir him as much as the way that handful of Negro families wanted both to help the Riders and avoid the retaliation of the local whites—so that they went from white store to white store buying food in small quantities at each place, in order not to rouse suspicion...

...They said, with the deepest sincerity, that they hoped to enable the Negro people to fight for what they, the people, wanted...

...There was neither staff nor money, only a loose gathering of students, with most of them from the Negro middle class...

...Yet Lewis has also come to see that, as SNCC grew in size and influence, it simply could not continue to function as a loving community of primitive Christians...

...During one of the Freedom Rides he was thrown into jail in Birmingham...

...Within the past two or three years there has appeared a generation of SNCC "graduates," young men and women once completely caught up in that organization but now either inactive or entirely out...

...But then, once they decided—and in principle they were right—to go into the communities, to go to the people, they got into trouble...

...He went on a hunger strike and then, with several friends, was taken to the Alabama-Tennessee line and dropped on the road...

...King's Southern Christian Leadership Council, proposed that a meeting be held to coordinate activity on the campus...

...The original flavor comes through with equal strength in the remarks of Marion Barry—they form a sharp contrast to later SNCC pronouncements— at the 1960 Democratic National Convention: To label our goals, methods and presuppositions "communistic" is to credit Communism with an attempt to remove tyranny . . . [But] Communism seeks power, ignores people, and thrives on social conflict...

...Obviously, this means something decidedly lower on the economic scale than the point occupied by the white middle class...

...Some even feel that it is they who still or best exemplify the original SNCC spirit...

...He had struggled as a boy with his own father, a farmer in Troy, Alabama, who disapproved of John's rebelliousness...

...In April, 1960 about 200 students came to Raleigh, North Carolina, and set up the group that would later be known as SNCC...

...It is here, one must tentatively conclude, that SNCC ran into its greatest problem...

...His mother had tried to persuade him to drop out of the movement while he was a student in Nashville...

...For as it became more and more a self-contained world, SNCC developed its own mores, its own language, its own style...

...Where SNCC had been, during its most active period, a bi-racial organization, it has recently been strongly drawn to black nationalism...

...Did he agree...

...Even as Lewis defined SNCC as the Negro group most eager to break out of traditional patterns of compliance —and this clearly is one of its major accomplishments—so he also spoke with respect and compassion about the older generation of Negroes...

...but it is, I think, faithful to the way Lewis now looks back upon his relationship to the movement...

...Even as their loyalties would be given with the utmost generosity to the people among whom they were now working and living, they would sooner or later have to face the discrepancies between their own political and cultural styles and those of the people...

...Piling into a town in Alabama and Mississippi, starting a much-needed protest movement and then pulling out, might or might not help create a local and indigenous leadership...

...Chairman of SNCC during its most active and heroic period, one of the first Freedom Riders, arrested innumerable times in the Deep South, and a vividly radical speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, Lewis now lives in New York City, privately employed and not prominently involved in any of the Negro organizations...

...To these ideas and values Lewis remains faithful, and his recent estrangement from SNCC seems the result of the drift its present leadership has encouraged away from the original SNCC outlook...

...Nor is he alone in this respect...

...There they were, these educated Negro boys and girls— which in that world meant they were like aristocratsl—trying to pass themselves off as peasants...

...They work for the poverty program, they go to school, or they simply drift...

...but at the same time the SNCC organizers were more and more becoming part of an ideological elite which knew, or felt it knew, what the people should want...

...Rustin sat quietly, not saying a word...

...A sense of achievement, even of small victories registered, is needed to keep people from slipping into despair and frustration...

...but at the same time, within the SNCC world, they were beginning to develop the ideology that it was mistaken to want to integrate into a "sick society...

...Lewis himself grasps the fact that he is in a dilemma...

...It was they, the younger ones, the students, who sparked the rebellion...

...They have passed beyond...

...it is a problem that has confronted all political movements deciding to "go to the people" from the distance of political ideology and/or intellectual life...

...They simply weren't willing to confront the responsibility and the torment of leadership...

...Any organization as committed as SNCC is to the imagery of a final confrontation, must expect a large turnover of participants, young people who burn themselves out in their intensity, or who become exhausted from frustration, loneliness, and violence, or who grow bewildered at the discrepancies between their experience and their vocabulary...

...All that one can ask is that the people caught in this problem be aware of it and not let themselves muck it up with populist rhetoric...

...In any case, what follows is a sum mary, mostly in my words, of a long conversation recently held with Lewis...

...Perhaps he is not quite sure and perhaps he finds it painful to discuss...

...He is skeptical about the tendency which has arisen in the Negro movement to indulge in apocalyptic fantasies: "the worse things get, the better for us...

...I do not say this as a criticism...

...Their parents, settled into a way of life, couldn't move...

...perhaps had to go it alone...

...They set themselves up as absolute instances of the American virtues, to the confusion and anger of the segregationists...

...James Lawson's opening speech expounded the ethic of non-violence, and the flavor of the whole occassion can be gotten from Jane Stembridge's recollection: "It was inspiring because it was the beginning and because, in a sense, it was the purest moment...

...After the Freedom Rides...

...Without quite knowing how, I think that it will happen...

...In these early years SNCC was almost entirely Southern in membership, about 60 per cent Negro and 40 per cent white...