It is no surprise that SNCC became the most decentralized, democratic, and independent of the major civil rights groups. In its heyday, from 1961 to 1964, the young SNCC activists, some who quit college to join the movement, did what no civil rights group was willing to do. It set up quarters in Mississippi and mounted a grassroots campaign against the most brutal and entrenched regime of White supremacy in the nation. SNCC’s Mississippi work remains one of the most underappreciated efforts in American social history.
Lawson grounded the Nashville students in a deep well of nonviolence and passive resistance that was to serve them well through many difficult years ahead. Baker helped set the young people on a path free from the control of older folks. It’s doubtful that the student movement would have survived without them.
Robert Anthony Watts is associate teaching professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is writing a novel about the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
