Word: sncc
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...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...
...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...
With dizzying speed, SNCC had turned from its strictly non-violent suits and ties at lunch counters to a strident denim-overalls organizing in the fields. It soon shifted again, this time to "Black Power" (a phrase made prominent by SNCC member Willie Ricks), and proceeded to expel its white members. Before the 1960s ended, it had forsaken the "non-violent" in its name, and become the "Student National Coordinating Committee." It began to speak a new language--Molotov cocktails, inflaming, needling, never giving an inch...
...whatever its validity, it succeeded in destroying the organization and helped to provoke a backlash that curbed the effectiveness of the civil rights movement. Carson's account shows the folly of rhetoric when it is unaccompanied by the work of organizing, of creating support. "During the final year of SNCC's existence, staff members became increasingly dogmatic and isolated. Formerly controversial ideas became cant and posturing. SNCC's demise as a national organization merely confirmed the earlier death of its singular spirit and of the black struggles that had produced that spirit...
...SNCC'S ANALYSIS of American society should have warned it of one more danger with increasing militance. Our government places sharp limits on dissent; when a person passes those limits without the support of huge numbers, he is doomed. From the moment that Black Power became the SNCC byword, phones were tapped, arrests were made, leaders shot. As one FBI memorandum about the organization concluded, "You are urged to take an enthusiastic and imaginative approach to this new counterintelligence endeavor and the Bureau will be pleased to entertain any suggestions or techniques you may recommend." Obviously, fear of repression should...