Word: sncc
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Indeed, music had become a weapon in the struggle: "After the song, the differences among us would not be as great," Bernice Reagan, an Albany student leader who joined SNCC, said. "Somehow, making a song required an expression of that which was common to us all." Wherever they traveled across the South in 1962 and 1963, SNCC organizers carried with them a favorite song that soon became a movement standard...
...music died as the years went on, and SNCC itself began to weaken. The visible enemy grew harder to see, as the sharpest edges of race-hate were blunted and as the cops and registrars grew savvy. The movement, including SNCC, found it hard to shift from protest focused on consensus issues like voting rights to protest focused on issues with less support, like the economic problems that were emerging as intractable plagues in Black America. Without a visible enemy and without the fire borrowed from the southern campuses at the start of the sit-in period, SNCC workers began...
...SNCC's most effective years were also marked by pragmatism. Its staff and volunteers organized to win limited and attainable goals such as the integration of bus stops and bathrooms and the right to vote. The organization was decentralized, its structure chaotic, its projects dependent on individual effort and initiative. But, for a while, anyway, it worked...
...moral passion and drama of the early civil rights struggle was one of the most important reasons for the group's success. Less traditionally Christian than King and his followers, SNCC spawned an emotional, windy pride and esprit that made up for the $10 a week wages and the dangers that went with trying to organize as entrenched an area as Amite County, Mississippi. They were "action-oriented," possessed of a "revolutionary elan," filled with courage and passion. Carson quotes a Black Georgia woman who lost her job when she let SNCC workers stay in her house...
...some ways, SNCC more than the rest of the movement, should have been able to adapt to the new economic and Northern emphasis, for its members had shifted course before and consistently had been at the movement's intellectual and ideological front. But it was exactly that fickleness and militance that made SNCC vulnerable and which eventually robbed it of all effectiveness and left it a shambles...