04.15_The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

#OTD The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was organized as the principal channel for student commitment to the civil rights movement in the U.S.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
This dan quistory. April fifteenth, nineteen sixty the Student Non
Violence Coordinating Committee was organized. The group's founders were young
activists at a meeting on the Shaw University campus in Raleigh,
North Carolina, who had emerged as leaders of the city
in protest movement started earlier that year in Greensboro, North Carolina.

(00:23):
Martin Luther King Junior and others had hoped that SNAKE
would serve as the youth wing of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, but the students remained independent of King and SELC,
generating their own projects and strategies. Snake's emergence as a
force in the Southern civil rights movement came largely through
the involvement of students in the nineteen sixty one freedom

(00:44):
rights voter registration efforts and a desegregation campaign in Albany,
Georgia known as the Albany Movement. The voting rights demonstrations
that began in nineteen sixty five and Selma, Alabama, however,
sparked increasingly bitter ideological debates within SNICK in nineteen sixty
six with new chairman Stokely Carmichael, as well as nineteen

(01:08):
sixty seven with new chairman h rap Round. A trend
away from nonviolence and interracial cooperation compromised Snake's relationships with
more moderate civil rights groups. Snakes became a target of
the counterintelligence program of the FBI and a concerted effort
of all levels of government to crush black militancy through

(01:29):
both overt and covert means. The group lost its effectiveness
by the end of the decade.