Word: sncc
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...workshop will be instructions on how to use nonviolent techniques in dangerous situations. In the past such training has included little dramas, in which the trainee will pretend to be a field-worker, while other members of the group curse him, spit on him, shove, slap, and hit him. SNCC members have found that these practice sessions help make the real-life confrontations less strange and frightening...
These techniques have been used over and over again throughout the South; two years ago, in McComb, Mississippi, Bob Zellner, a white field-secretary, was being beaten by a mob on the court house steps. Charles McDew (then Chairman of SNCC) and Robert Moses (now Mississippi Project Director) made their way through the crowd to Zellner, and stood shoulder to shoulder in front of him, to absorb the angry blows...
...heroism is not always what is required, and SNCC feels it has no interest in getting its summer workers hospitalized. "Absenting oneself," as it is wryly put, is often the best answer to a bad situation. Robert E. Wright '65, who worked in Jackson last summer, found that by keeping calm and using good sense it was possible to avoid explosive confrontations. John W. Perdew '64 reports similar experiences from Americas...
...SNCC leaders expect that instruction and guidance will continue even after the new workers arrive in Mississippi. "We feel very strongly that the students coming down will be essentially working under the staff [about 50 people] that we have down here now." Strict discipline will be asked of all newcomers, and those who take unnecessary risks, endanger the group, or simply refuse to cooperate, will be dropped from the Project, and asked to leave the state...
Even those students who enter the Summer Project in July or August, will be sent for training sessions in Edwards, Miss, before they are allowed into the field. The freedom movement has too much at stake to see the future botched by unprepared workers; that is why SNCC believes the Summer Project is worth a little careful planning...