The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in 1960 by young people dedicated to non-violent, direct-action tactics. While Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders had hoped that SNCC would serve as the youth-wing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the students remained fiercely independent of King and the SCLC, generating their own projects and strategies. Although ideological differences eventually caused SNCC and SCLC to be at odds, the two organizations worked side-by-side throughout the early years of the civil rights movement.
The idea for a decentralized, student-run organization was conceived in April 1960 when Ella Baker, a veteran civil rights organizer and an official of SCLC, invited black college students who had participated in the 1960 sit-ins to gather at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Baker also invited representatives of other civil rights organizations to the meeting, but asked them to serve only in an advisory role. In fact, adult participants, including Martin Luther King, Jr., were requested to "speak only when asked to do so." Furthermore, Baker encouraged the more than 300 student attendees to remain autonomous rather than affiliate with SCLC or any of the other existing civil rights groups.
The students, for their part, admired SCLC leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who addressed the gathering, but were generally reluctant to compromise the autonomy of their local protest groups. They voted to establish a temporary coordinating body, with Fisk University student Marion Barry serving as chairman. Vanderbilt University theology student James Lawson, whose workshops on nonviolent direct action served as a training ground for many of the Nashville student protesters, wrote an organizational statement of purpose which reflected the strong commitment to Gandhian nonviolence that would pervade SNCC during its early years:
“We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love.”
In June 1960, the first issue of SNCC's newspaper, Student Voice, was published. As SNCC "freedom fighters" became deeply involved in an expanding southern freedom movement, they developed a distinctive style of representative protest that inspired many black southerners. Their approach to community organizing enabled the successful coordination of mass movements under indigenous leadership. A willingness to challenge powerful institutions allowed SNCC organizers to be particularly effective in the most racially repressive regions of the South. Blacks often saw SNCC's militancy as an alternative to cultural and political conformity. SNCC workers became role models for a generation of young activists, both inside and outside the South, who challenged many of the assumptions that perpetuated injustice and oppression in American society. SNCC's militancy particularly influenced the early development of the predominantly white New Left group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
SNCC's emergence as a force in the southern civil rights movement came largely through the involvement of students in the 1961 Freedom Rides, which were designed to confront southern segregation policies. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized the initial Freedom Rides in May, but CORE's efforts were stymied by violent assaults on Freedom Riders traveling through Alabama. Students from Nashville, under the leadership of Fisk University student Diane Nash, resolved to continue the rides. By the fall of 1961, the campaign had produced a cadre of deeply committed student activists who were willing to become full-time SNCC workers.
As SNCC acquired a staff of organizers and full-time protesters, the group established major projects in those areas of the Deep South where segregationist resistance was greatest. During the fall of 1961, SNCC worker Charles Sherrod developed ties to local students and older black residents and formed the Albany Movement, an organization which invited King and other SCLC officials to participate in major protests during December 1961 and the summer of 1962.
Concurrently, the most extensive of SNCC's organizing efforts were occurring in Mississippi, the state with the lowest proportion of registered black voters and the highest level of white resistance to racial integration. Bob Moses, who eventually became voter-registration director of Mississippi's Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), moved to Jackson and began recruiting young Mississippi residents to serve as field secretaries, mainly in the Mississippi Delta region. Moses, who was firmly committed to a non-hierarchical, grassroots organizing, encountered considerable resistance; but the Mississippi voter registration effort created conditions for racial reform by bringing together three crucial groups: dynamic and determined SNCC field secretaries, influential civil rights leaders from Mississippi, and white student volunteers who participated in the Freedom Vote mock election of October 1963 and the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. Early in 1964, SNCC supported the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) in an effort to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s all-white Democratic Party.
In the mid-60s, SNCC entered a period of internal ideological ferment, as staff members began to question some of the assumptions underlying their previous activities. During intense and extended debates, staff members challenged not only SNCC's interracial composition, but its guiding philosophy as well. While initially dominated by advocates of Christian Gandhianism, after 1961, SNCC became an increasingly secular community of organizers devoted to the development of indigenous black leaders and local institutions. As the focus of the southern black struggle changed from desegregation to political and economic concerns, SNCC's radicalism was increasingly influenced by Marxism and Black Nationalism rather than religious ideals, and policies and direction were often determined not by the coordinating committee, but by field secretaries who worked for nominal salaries and insisted on autonomy.
The voting rights demonstrations that began in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, sparked increasingly bitter ideological debates within the group, as some SNCC workers openly challenged the group's previous commitment to nonviolent tactics and its willingness to allow the participation of white activists. Distracted by such divisive issues, the day-to-day needs of the group's ongoing projects suffered. In many Deep South communities, where SNCC had once attracted considerable black support, the group's influence waned. Nevertheless, during the spring of 1965, SNCC organizers entered the rural area between Selma and Montgomery and helped black residents launch the all-black Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), which became known as the Black Panther Party. Meanwhile, several SNCC workers established incipient organizing efforts in volatile urban black ghettos.
In May 1966, a new stage in SNCC's history began with the election of Stokely Carmichael as chairman. Because Carmichael identified himself with the trend away from nonviolence and interracial cooperation, his election compromised SNCC's relationships with more moderate civil rights groups and many of its white supporters. During the month following his election, Carmichael publicly expressed SNCC's new political orientation when he began calling for "Black Power" during a voting rights march through Mississippi. The national exposure of Carmichael's "Black Power" speeches brought increased notoriety to SNCC, but the group remained internally divided over its future direction.
Even after the dismissal of a group of SNCC’s Atlanta field workers who called for the exclusion of whites, the organization was weakened by continued internal conflicts and external attacks, along with a loss of northern financial backing. The election in June 1967 of Hubert "Rap" Brown as SNCC's new chair was meant to reduce the notoriety of the group. Brown, however, encouraged militancy among urban blacks, and soon a federal campaign against black militancy severely damaged SNCC's ability to sustain its organizing efforts. The addition of SNCC as a target of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was part of a concerted effort at all levels of government to crush black militancy through both overt and covert means.
The spontaneous urban uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968 indicated a high level of black discontent; but by then, SNCC had little ability to mobilize an effective political force. Its most dedicated community organizers had left the organization, which then became known as the Student National Coordinating Committee rather than the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Although individual SNCC activists played significant roles in politics during the period after 1968 and many of the controversial ideas that once had defined SNCC's radicalism had become widely accepted among African Americans, the organization disintegrated. By the end of the decade, FBI surveillance of SNCC’s remaining offices was discontinued due to lack of activity.