San Francisco Freedom School

July 17, 2010

Student Activism in the Sixties
Supplemental Readings

NOTES RE: THE NASHVILLE SIT INS...........................................................................................................................2

Diane Nash…….1985 interview for Eyes on the Prize ......................................................................................................4
Nashville Sit-Ins, Boycott and Silent March – QUESTIONS.............................................................................................5
Interview with Jean Wiley by Bruce Hartford (excerpts)
......................................................................................................................................................................................................5
Freedom Rides and the Founding of SNCC........................................................................................................................8
The Freedom Rides..............................................................................................................................................................8
The Greensboro Sit-Ins......................................................................................................................................................11
The Nashville Movement...................................................................................................................................................12
The Founding of SNCC.....................................................................................................................................................13

5.A Ella Baker — Developing Leadership....................................................................................................14

Developing Leadership......................................................................................................................................................15
THE STRUGGLE OVER STRATEGY AND TACTICS IN MISSISSIPPI....................................................................16
CHRONOLOGY focusing on Mississippi ........................................................................................................................16
 NOTES RE: THE NASHVILLE SIT INS
(these notes are from both the book and DVD, A Force More Powerful)

NAACP Brown v Board 1954, ineffective because of white citizens councils

mid – 1950’s Bus Boycotts (Montgomery, Baton Rouge, Tallahasee)
--local organizations pair with NAACP locals to organize boycotts
--doesn’t spread – only suited to towns with mostly black populations
SCLC (1957) formed and launches voting rights campaigns with limited success
Bayard Rustin (FOR, CORE) teaches King about Gandhi’s satyagraha
Most black leaders ambivalent about non-violent resistance (NVR).

King meets James Lawson and convinces him to lead NVR workshops
Lawson appointed as FOR field secty to South
Nashville chosen as city because:
• Young and talented SCLC minister: Kelly Miller Smith
• 4 predominantly black colleges (thousands of students)
• whites considered themselves liberal
• newspaper had come out against poll taxes
• rigid social and economic segregation

September 1959 Lawson holds workshops once a week, few attend

GOAL: to end segregation in all public places downtown
STRATEGY: dramatize the injustice by getting the power structure to react in a way that reveals itself for
what it is---– be prepared to escalate conflict
TACTICS:
• the Sit-Ins provoked mass arrests of “nice” college students over a moral issue which mobilized the
local black community and win over white liberal support.
• Boycotts -- pickets and flyers used to announce boycott--- (to pressure local businesses to eliminate
segregation);
• Silent March ---- one must always be prepared to escalate conflict at any time. In Nashville, it was the
bombing of a respected black lawyer's house that allowed the activists to mobilize the town for a silent march
to city hall and for Diane Nash to ask the mayor if he believed segregation moral.
RESEARCH: To be able to choose the correct issue (Lunch counters) and be able to anticipate white reaction
-- for example, that counters will be closed. Learn they will be arrested in spite of no law against sitting at
lunch counters (will be cited for “disorderly conduct” as Henry Louis Gates was last week!!!!)
RECRUITMENT: depends on networking and timing. Singing at church meetings keeps up morale. First
Saturday Sit In = 25 students; 3rd Saturday = 600 students ready to be arrested. National spotlight garners a
deluge of new recruits
TRAINING and PLANNING: workshops instil discipline, meetings develop logistical support and develop
tactics from research and theory.

December 1959: decision to conduct sit-ins in Feb 1960

January 1960 – news of decision spreads throughout college campuses – many more attend workshops, now
must have them 2 x a week. Organize themselves as “Nashville Student Movement” – small group of
dedicated students become “central committee” making decisions by consensus.

Feb 3, 1960 Greensboro Sit INS, hundreds pack Fisk auditorium that evening to hear Lawson announce that
their first Sit In will be Feb 13 and asks for volunteers.

Workshops continue – those who couldn’t be non-violent or believed they could not afford to go to jail
assigned logistical support roles
Debate!!! Postpone Sit In – have only raised $100 in bail money -- but sit ins spreading throughout NC and
neighboring states – THE TIME IS NOW!!!!

Research/Intelligence
Don’t want to sit next to dirty person •
Lunch counter will close down
Will be victims of violence
Will be arrested
Tactic
Protesters wear Sunday best
• Bring homework, books to read
• Only those willing to be non-violent will be sit in
students
• Observers have phone numbers of ambulances
with a pocket full of change
• Carry tooth brush
• Students in pairs (same race if different sex)
• Raise bail money
• Only those willing to go to jail among sit in
students
• Additional groups of students wait out of site to fill
in chairs vacated by arrested group
• Observers report names of those arrested back to
Church HQ
• Refuse Bail on moral grounds (feeds indignation of
community) and on practical grounds (overburdens the
system)

The outrage that the mass arrests provoke allows protesters to ESCALATE conflict – community ready to
participate in boycott of downtown businesses.
Sit-Ins provoke racist backlash, whites unwittingly participate in downtown boycott

APRIL 17th NBC MEET THE PRESS, Sit -Ins spreading throughout south.
Moderator: “Wouldn’t you be on stronger ground if you refused to buy at those stores and if you called upon
the white people of the country to follow you because of both your moral and legal right not to buy?”
King: “Sometimes it is necessary to dramatize an issue because many people are not aware of what’s
happening. The sit-ins dramatize the indignities and injustices and the dissatisfaction of the Negro with the
whole system of segregation.”

April 19th – Looby’s home bombed - strategic opportunity!!! Letter sent to Mayor for a meeting. Silent
March to City Hall. Confrontation on steps. Mayor responds to direct, simple and moral questions from Diane
Nash. Nashville begins to desegregate.
Nashville Movement = Nonviolent Academy. Students learned how to: Organize a community; Conduct a
demonstration; Negotiate with authority; Deal with the media – carried this learning to the deep South
during Freedom Rides and other SNCC projects.

Diane Nash…….1985 interview for Eyes on the Prize

http://www.teachersdomain.org/resource/iml04.soc.ush.civil.nash/

And I recall talking to a number of people in the dormitories at school and on campus, and asking them if
they knew any people who were trying to -- to bring about some type of change. And I remember being,
getting almost depressed, because I encountered what I thought was so much apathy. At first, I couldn't find
anyone, and many of the students were saying, why are you concerned about that? You know, they were not
interested in trying to effect some kind of change, I thought, they certainly didn't seem to be. And then, I did
talk to Paul Lefred, who told me about the non-violent workshops, that Jim Lawson was conducting. They
were taking place a couple of blocks off campus. And the reason that I said earlier that I thought the other
students were apathetic was that after the movement got started, and there was something that they could do,
i.e., sit at a lunch counter, march, take part, many of those same students, who were right there, going to jail,
taking part in marches, and sit-ins, and what have you, it was that they didn't have a concept of what they
really could do, so when they got one, they were on fire. They wanted to -- a change. . . .

I remember we used to role-play, and we would do things like actually sit-in, pretending we were sitting at
lunch counters, in order to prepare ourselves to do that. And we would practice things such as how to protect
your head from a beating, how to protect each other, if one person was taking a severe beating, we would
practice other people putting their bodies in between that person and the violence. So that the violence could
be more distributed and hopefully no one would get seriously injured. We would practice not striking back, if
someone struck us. There were many things that I learned in those workshops, that I not only was able to put
into practice at the time that we were demonstrating and so forth, but that I have used for the rest of my life ,
in shaping the kind of person I've become.. . . .

We felt we were right. We felt we were right, and rational. When we took a position that segregation was,
was wrong, and we really tried to be open and honest and loving with our opposition. A person who is being
truthful and honest, actually is, is standing in a much more powerful position than a person who's lying, or
trying to maintain his preference, even though on some level he knows he's wrong. I think, on some level,
most people really deep-down know that segregation was about the person. One of the things that we were
able to do in the movement, which was one of the things that we were also, that we learned, also, from
Gandhi's movement, was to turn the energy of violence, that was perpetrated against us, into advantage. And
so if Attorney Lubey's house was burned, that was used as a catalyst ….

I was really afraid. The movement had a way of reaching inside me and bringing out things that I never knew
were there. Like courage, and love for people. It was a real experience, to be among a group of people who
would put their bodies between you and danger. And to love people that you work with enough, that you
would put yours between them and danger. I can't say that I've had a similar kind of experience since
Nashville. And the friendships that were forged then, as a result of going through experiences like that, have
remained really strong and vital and deep, to this day. I think it's really important that young people today
understand that the movement of the sixties was really a people's movement. The media and history seems to
record it as Martin Luther King's movement, but if young people realized that it was people just like them,
their age, that formulated goals and strategies, and actually developed the movement, that when they look
around now, and see things that need to be changed, that they, instead of saying, I wish we had a leader like
Martin Luther King today, they would say, what can I do, what can my roommate and I do to effect that
change. And that's not to take anything away from Martin. I personally think he made a tremendous
contribution. And I -- I liked him a great deal, as an individual, thought he was a really nice guy. And I, still
feel the pain of his not being with us, but I think that, that, that it's really important to realize that each
individual shoulders a great deal of responsibility, and, and, and that's the way the movement in the sixties
was accomplished.

Nashville Sit-Ins, Boycott and Silent March – QUESTIONS

1. What was the goal of the sit-ins and boycott?

2. Why was nonviolent direct action chosen as a strategy?

3. Why was it important to do research (regarding where and when the sit-ins would happen; in
anticipating the reactions of the police and courts)?

4. What was the purpose of role-playing?

5. What were the different roles that people could perform during the implementation of the direct
action tactics?

6. Why must nonviolent strategists be flexible and creative during the implementation of direct action
tactics? (what is the example of this in the documentary?)

7. How did Martin Luther King defend the use of nonviolent direct action by the students? Why did
such actions have to be defended? Do you think the media today would be as critical of student sit-ins?

8. Did the sit-ins, boycott or the silent march end segregation in Nashville?

9. What is the historical importance of the nonviolent action in Nashville?

10. What do you think the difference is between someone who is philosophically nonviolent and
someone who is tactically nonviolent?

Interview with Jean Wiley by Bruce Hartford (excerpts)

October 26, 2001

http://crmvet.org/vet/wiley.htm Copyright © 2001 Bruce Hartford: webspinner@crmvet.org

[Jean Wiley was a student/teacher-activist and SNCC staff member in Maryland and Alabama from 1960-
1967.]
Origins
Wiley: When I was growing up, there was a term called "Racemen" and "Racewomen" and that's what you
wanted to be. You aspired to be a Raceman or Racewoman. It meant that you were constantly and
consciously doing things that furthered the race. That your personal success had to take a back step. In a
way, it was probably a little like the Talented Tenth except that the Talented Tenth meant the intellectuals.
This was across class and income lines. So you grew up knowing who the Racemen and Women were, in a
city as big as Baltimore. …….

Desegregating Baltimore
Hartford: How and why did you get involved in the Civil Rights movement?
Wiley: I was a student at Morgan State College (now Morgan University) in Baltimore when the sit-ins
broke out in 1960. They seemed like the perfect thing to do, so Morgan, like Howard and all the other
border- state Black colleges, apparently, jumped right in.
Baltimore was completely segregated, as was Washington. The sit-ins struck me, I remember when I heard
about them, they struck me as the perfect answer to an impatience that — I'd been in the student council,
both in high school and in college, and most of those conversations were political, and it just struck me as the
perfect answer to the impatience that everybody was feeling coming out of, especially coming out of the
Supreme Court decision and then Little Rock. So, it was clear to us that it was going to go state by state,
school by school. So it seemed like a really good idea and it was something that you could do spontaneously.
So I jumped in then. We were picketing not just the five and dimes, but also the department stores and the
theaters.
Hartford: Because of segregation or because of jobs?
Wiley: This was because, as I recall, it was because, to open up facilities, lunch counters, restaurants. We
were college students, we weren't — as I recall now, we weren't thinking at that moment, it quickly came to
that, but we weren't thinking at that moment, about jobs. It was opening facilities — I mean, everything was
segregated in Baltimore. So it was the answer, for me, personally, it was the answer to, "You can't." I grew
up hearing, "You can't. You can't do this. You can't go to the symphony. You can't go to the library. You can't
go to the swimming pool. You can't go to that park, no." It became, "Oh, but I can do something about this." I
don't have to wait for the legal route, which is moving too slowly anyway. …. I got arrested in Baltimore for
sitting in. One of the stories that I really love is that I was in jail when the Howard group sent word that they
were on their way, en masse. Suddenly, the mayor woke up and thought, "Oh, we're not having this. Clear all
the jails out. Just get them out. Forget procedure, just get them out of there." And we got out. That was a real
big, oh, boy, there's real, real power in numbers.
Graduate School
Wiley: Then I went on to graduate school, choosing University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which was a hotbed
of activity. …I was finishing up my master's when the Mississippi Freedom Summer started being planned
and tons and tons of volunteers went down from the Ann Arbor campus. I kept watching the bulletins and
going to the meetings and the leaflets and stuff, and I was struck by the fact — I still am struck by the
fact — that all the information said you had to have so much money. Money for any medical expenses you
might need. Money for lawyers if you got arrested. Money for this, money for that. I was penniless. …
Tuskegee
Wiley: I got offered a position at Tuskegee as did a number of people. The new dean came to the campus to
recruit new teachers. This was while I was at Ann Arbor, that spring he came recruiting. So by the time I got
my degree in Literature and Language in '64, May '64, I knew that I was going to be going South. I thought
that I would hook up with the Mississippi Freedom Summer. And I never did.
….So I got to see Alabama, which was very different, I've always been told, than Mississippi. I was in Selma
and, mostly Selma and Montgomery, because that's where the student base was.
Then we started organizing in Macon County, which is where Tuskegee is. Started organizing students.
Sammy Young was one of my students. Then, of course, I began meeting people as they would come out of
Alabama and out of Atlanta and southwest Georgia on to Mississippi. My house became — it was my first
time ever to have a place of my own — and it became like a way station. You know, you need to spend the
night at Jean's house and then keep going eastward. That's how.
For me, it was not only the organizing and the, you know, constant terror and tension, but it was also the fact
that I was teaching at a school that in the history is going to look very progressive, but it really wasn't. It
wasn't this school that I had thought — actually, most of the Black colleges in the Deep South are very
conservative. So I was constantly battling administrators and, you know, heads of department and
everything. ….
Wiley: ….Tuskegee used to call itself the Oasis of the South. ….but they didn't want their students actually
to be taught.
Successes
Hartford: What would you say were the successes of the Civil Rights movement, particularly the Southern
Civil Rights movement? If any.
Wiley: I think there were many, but you kind of have to have been there before. You know, when I talk to
my son and his friends about it, it's like I'm talking in the 15th century. … The freedom of movement, that's
what people don't understand, it's the freedom of movement. Not to be able to walk into the main library of
any place. Not to be able to go to the museum, except on days when they might let a couple of Black people
in and might not. Public accommodations never did it for me, having grown up in the border states. It was
movement.
You were literally imprisoned in a system, and it wasn't — I mean, the Black community in many ways was
thriving, but it couldn't provide everything that the society does, and as soon as you left it, you were in
hostile territory. First of all, you couldn't leave, mostly. I mean, you couldn't go into other neighborhoods. …
Freedom Rides
Wiley: Another thing that stands, really comes to my mind a lot, is the Freedom Rides. I guess that's again
because it was motion. I think people ought to study the Freedom Rides more than they do because it's
inconceivable now, especially to young people, that you couldn't hop on a bus and go wherever the hell you
want to go, and sit wherever you wanted to sit without fear of safety. You couldn't, and it's really striking
that when that Supreme Court decision came down, it didn't have to be limited to schools. It didn't have to be
limited to state by state. "Oh, okay, we'll send troops to Little Rock and maybe we'll send," — actually, they
did send troops to Virginia. You know, they could have opened it all up, but they didn't, so you had to try the
buses.
First of all, you had to test it and then you had to test it stop by stop by stop. Later on, years later, 20 years
later, I would interview Bernice Regan and I asked her the same question, how she got involved in the
movement, and she said she was a college student and they decided to test the train station because, okay, if
you're going to open the buses, maybe the train stations will be open, but they weren't. They got arrested and
that's how that Albany movement began by testing Freedom Rides again, but this time, on the train.
The other reason that I think the Freedom Rides are important, even though I didn't go on them, is because
they radicalized a lot of people with those buses ending in jail and in Parchman prison at that, for people
going into Mississippi, but for Bernice and her group of students, they were going to jail in Albany. So they
radicalized an enormous number of people in a way that nothing else could have. I was struck, too, by what,
I realized that I had never heard somebody else talk about the Freedom Rides the way they are in my mind,
but when Bob Bob Moses said that it was the Freedom Rides that literally moved the movement to the
deepest of the Deep South and I thought, you know, that's it exactly because the sit-ins were mostly in the
border-states.
Hartford: What other successes?
Opening Minds
Wiley: People — it opened up minds. That was a lot of what the organizing did, but I think that the
demonstrations did, too. So that you start questioning "the why." Why things are this way. Why they have to
stay this way. Segregation forever, you're told, and you're told you better damn well believe it, too. The
organizing and the brilliant idea, I think, of the freedom schools, began to show people that in numbers, they
can make a real difference, and where power was and why it was. So you had more of something to go on
than it's white folks who are doing it this way. You had more of a critique of what the society's like and
where the real power is and what's Washington doing.
Hartford: And that there were alternatives and choices. It wasn't just, "this is the way nature is?"
Wiley: "Right. This is the way God made it. Right.
Mississippi Challenge
Wiley: There's lots of things. I think COFO was a success. There are things I'm jumping over, but I think
COFO was a huge — just to get from Sunflower County to Atlantic City and to Washington.
Hartford: By COFO you mean the MFDP [Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party] challenge?
Wiley: Yeah. That's was COFO, Confederated Organizations. You know, SCLC, all of them.
Wiley: So the physical movement itself was enormous and then you have the movement of people like Miss
Devine and Fannie Lou Hamer and all of those other people making that leap. It's a huge leap from a
plantation to challenging the halls of Congress. So I think there were a lot of successes, I should probably
make a list, but there were a lot. There are things that I know because I was there. I don't think there are
things that people are aware of. So, in my view, the Southern movement was a success. It didn't go far
enough, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a success.
Hartford: I think in some ways the evidence of its success is the fact that people, particularly young people
today, have no idea of what it was like. That what is now the norm was our success.
Wiley: Yeah, yeah. I think about that when I get depressed.
Hartford: It's true. The whole Jim Crow system, the whole forced inferiority — all of that is just
inconceivable today.
Wiley: Yeah.
Failures
Hartford: On the flip side, were there failures and, if so, what were they?
Wiley: Well, we didn't finish. There was a solid movement base in the South. The organizations were under
enormous pressure to move to the North, that's why King went to Chicago. Enormous pressure. Some of us
like myself really just had to get out of the South, at least for a breather. I was pretty sure I wasn't gonna
return to the South. But I didn't know that the movement wasn't gonna keep doing what it was doing, and
really nestle in for the long haul.
By then, there were huge questions about the economics of oppression and so forth, and those had always
been discussions, but that's where I thought the movement in the South would be heading. Very few people
did stay for the long haul. While I understand it, I think, I thought then and I think now, that that was a
mistake, because I think we could have had a really good base for continued organizing, continued critiquing
of the society, a place to be.
Hartford: There's still economic discrimination. There's still rich and poor that has a big racial aspect to it
There's all kinds of class and race disparities, but there isn't this, "you're not even a human being anymore,"
in the sense that there was then.
Wiley: Yeah. …….[interview continues for five more pages]

Freedom Rides and the Founding of SNCC

From Lessons from Freedom Summer
Common Courage Press (September, 2008)
Emery, Gold, Braselmann

The Freedom Rides

In December of l960, the Supreme Court, in Boynton vs. Virginia, extended the ban on discrimination aboard
buses traveling interstate to include facilities in bus terminals. Despite this, Jim Crow was enforced in
waiting rooms, restaurants, and restrooms serving passengers on buses traveling through the South. James
Farmer, who assumed leadership of CORE in February of l961, announced that CORE would apply direct
action techniques to the desegregation of facilities at bus terminals to pressure the Federal government into
enforcing existing laws. “What we had to do was to make it more dangerous politically for the federal
government not to enforce federal law than it would be for them to enforce federal law, . . .” explained James
Farmer. “We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis.”
CORE field secretary Gordon Carey recalled that the idea for reviving the Journey of Reconciliation
actually came to him as he and fellow CORE worker Tom Gaither were riding a bus back from a nonviolent
training workshop in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Stranded in a snowstorm on the New Jersey Turnpike for
twelve hours, Carey found that his only reading material was Louis Fisher’s biography of Gandhi. “Tom and
I were reading and talking about it, and a combination of sitting on the bus, the recent Supreme Court
decision, and reading about Gandhi’s march to the sea got us talking about an analogous march to the sea in
the South. . . . We planned to go to New Orleans because that was the ocean and that was analogous to
Gandhi’s salt march to the sea.”
Although the Freedom Rides were modeled also on 1947’s Journey of Reconciliation, they extended the
objectives of that effort in several ways. Their plan included desegregation not only of seating on buses but
of bus stations facilities; they would travel all the way to New Orleans, challenging the most resistant areas
of the Deep South, and they would pledge to remain in jail without bail if arrested along the way. Half of the
group would ride a Greyhound bus, half a Trailways. The group that assembled in Washington D.C. to begin
the Freedom Rides included seven black and six white activists. The CORE group included James Farmer
and James Peck, who had made the l947 Journey of Reconciliation. Twenty-one-year old John Lewis
decided to forego his college graduation to make the journey. Aware that they might be risking their lives,
the group assembled for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, D.C. on the eve of their departure.
John Lewis recalled, “It was my first time having Chinese food. Growing up in the South and going to school
in Nashville, I’d never had it before. To me this meal was like the Last Supper, because you didn’t know
what to expect going on the Freedom Ride.”
As intended, the Freedom Rides provoked the confrontation between state and federal authorities. In
Anniston, Alabama, the tires of a Greyhound bus were shot out by a mob following the bus. An incendiary
bomb tossed through one of the windows of the stalled bus destroyed it. A dramatic photograph of the
flaming bus was picked up by newspapers and shown throughout the world. When the Trailways bus arrived
in Birmingham, the riders were assaulted by a mob armed with lead pipes, baseball bats, and chains. When
asked why no police protection had been given the riders, Birmingham Chief of Police “Bull” Connor
explained that, because it was Mother’s Day, his department was understaffed.
Shaken by their assault and unable to locate a driver to continue the ride to Montgomery, the first group
of Freedom Riders was flown to New Orleans. They were soon replaced by a second group of SNCC (the
Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee) students, coordinated by Diane Nash, ready to face retaliation
in The Deep South. To continue the rides, CORE formed a coalition with SNCC and the SCLC. The new
alliance, The Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee, determined to “fill the jails of Montgomery and
Jackson in order to keep a sharp image of the issue before the public.” In Montgomery, the riders were again
attacked. “The Freedom Riders emerging from the bus were being mauled,” recalled Presidential aide John
Seigenthaler. “It looked like two hundred, three hundred people all over them.” Martin Luther King, in
Montgomery to address a rally in support of the Rides at Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s church, was trapped with
the congregation inside the building as an angry mob swarmed outside. The mob was finally dispersed by
Alabama state troopers under orders, however reluctantly given, by Governor John Patterson.
The Freedom Riders were headed for Mississippi. “If Alabama had been purgatory,” commented James
Farmer, “then Mississippi would be hell.” Some Freedom Riders began writing final messages to their
parents, which the men stuffed into their pockets and the women into their bras. Crossing the Mississippi
border, the riders uneasily read a sign reading “Welcome to the Magnolia State.” Reporters covering the
event received word that the bus was to be ambushed and destroyed. All but one left the bus. Driving through
darkened Mississippi woods, with moss-draped live oaks meeting the highway, the riders saw armed
National Guard troops with rifles drawn to the forest. As the bus approached Jackson, Farmer recalled, “one
of the Freedom Riders broke into song, and this was as it had to be. His words went something like this:
 I’m a-taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line,
I’m a riding the front seat to Jackson this time.
Hallelujah, I’m a-travelin’
Hallelujah, ain’t it fine?
Hallelujah, I’m a-travelin’
Down Freedom’s main line.

The Riders were unaware that their fate had been decided in an agreement between Attorney General Robert
Kennedy and Mississippi Senator James Eastland. Freedom Riders would not be assaulted by a crowd in the
state of Mississippi if they could be taken immediately to prison. The Freedom Riders commitment to “jail
no bail” (see section above) was seriously tested in the prisons of Mississippi. When the protestors arrived in
Jackson, they were ushered quickly through an eerily silent bus terminal to the county jail. The stream of
Freedom Riders soon strained the city and county facilities, and the first group of male Freedom Riders was
transferred to Parchman prison. The female Freedom Riders jailed at the county facility staged a hunger
strike until they, too, were taken to Parchman.
Parchman, the forbidding Mississippi State prison farm, was the most feared prison in the South. The
Freedom Riders found themselves packed into army trucks and driven through the Mississippi night. When
two white freedom riders went limp rather than cooperate with the guards removing them from the truck, a
prison sergeant commented, “Ain’t no newspapermen here. Why you asking like that for?” A few days later,
the original group of Freedom Riders were surprised to see Mississippi’s Governor Ross Barnett escorting
visitors through the prison, asking the Freedom Riders, “Are they treating you all right?” Barnett, aware of
the publicity surrounding the rides, had instructed that the prisoners not be beaten.
Despite their special status, the group found prison conditions grim. As more Freedom Riders came
South to replace those arrested, Parchman received frequent new arrivals. Occupying stifling eight by ten
cells, the prisoners were separated by race and sex and spent monotonous hours which lengthened to days.
Twice a week, they were allowed to shower. The prisoners were stripped of their clothing, and the men given
prison shorts and undershirts, the women striped prison garments. When some of the riders complained,
Nashville sit-in veteran James Bevel commented that Gandhi, clad only in a rag, had “brought the whole
British Empire to its knees.”
The prisoners maintained their spirits and broke the monotony by singing freedom songs, a practice
which maddened their captors, who threatened to remove their mattresses. Howard University student and
later SNCC field secretary Stokely Carmichael refused to relinquish his mattress, as did his cell mate, Fred
Leonard; observers recalled each man clinging tenaciously to his mattress as a guard dragged him down the
hall. As he was dragged, Carmichael sang, “I’m Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me.” Nashville student
leader Bernard Lafayette, who had been nicknamed by Farmer “Little Gandhi,” said, “Look, men, we’re all
worrying about these thin, hard, stupid mattresses, because that’s all we’ve got in this place. But these
mattresses ain’t nothing but things. Things of the body. And we came down here for things of the spirit.
Things like Freedom and equality and brotherhood. What’s happening to us?” Freedom Rider Hank
Thomas took to calling to the guards, “Come and get my mattress. I will keep my soul.” And the male
inmates keep singing, creating a joint chorus with the women housed nearby. After Parchman Deputy Tyson
ordered them to be quiet with the threat that they would find themselves “singing in the rain,” the group
improvised:

Ole big man Deputy Tyson said,

I don’t want to cause you pain
But if you don’t stop that singin’ now
You’ll be singing in the rain.

Tyson responded by turning the fire hose on their cells. The prisoners were alternately blasted with fans as
they froze on the metal frames of their beds at night or confined to the stifling heat with the windows closed.
By the end of the summer, more than three hundred Freedom Riders were confined at Parchman. The
first group was released after serving thirty-nine days, the longest sentence a prisoner could serve and still
appeal a case. Like Gandhi, they had won sympathy for their cause and survived Parchman Penitentiary,
whose reputation was such that many referred to conditions there as “worse than slavery.” The Reverend
C.T. Vivian, who had been beaten in prison for refusing to call prison guards “sir”, remembered, “The
feeling of people coming out of the jail was not that they had triumphed, [but] that they had achieved, that
they were now ready, they could go back home, they could be a witness to a new understanding.
Nonviolence was proven in that respect. It had become a national movement and there was no doubt about it,
for common people in many places in the country. And there was a new cadre of leaders.”

The Founding of SNCC

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee developed out of two grassroots movements in 1959—the
Greensboro Sit-Ins and the Nashville Movement. From the founding conference of SNCC at Shaw
University in 1960 to it’s central role in mobilizing to create the Mississippi Democratic Party in 1964,
SNCC promoted a concept of leadership that differed significantly from that of CORE and SCLC. Ella Baker
articulated SNCC’s concept of leadership as “group-centered” in contrast to the “leader-centered group
pattern of organization” of the more established civil rights groups. This concept of leadership influenced the
evolution of the organization. When SNCC leaders left their campus and local communities to become full-
time freedom fighters in the South, they did not do so with the intention of creating SNCC local chapters as
CORE did, nor offer support to already established organizations as SCLC did. Instead, SNCC activists
focused on building grassroots leadership and indigenous organizations that would carry on the struggle after
SNCC organizers moved on. Hoping to create organizations that represented the majority of a community
and not just the elite, SNCC organizers recruited and trained leaders from the bottom rather than the top of
black society. SNCC organizers were instrumental in creating the local organizations that eventually knitted
together the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as well as creating organizations that advanced the
political and economic interests of the tenant farmers, sharecroppers, maids, and laborers.
While SNCC’s concept of leadership and organizational strategy were distinctive, the direct action
tactics used by the Greensboro and Nashville students in 1959 were not invented by them. The young SNCC
organizers who employed the tactics of sit-ins, jail-ins, kneel-ins and similar nonviolent tactics throughout
the Civil Rights era were using the same tactics that both the labor movement and the women's suffrage
movement had used in the past. The Industrial Workers of the World experimented with both the sit-down
strike, jail-ins and slowdowns. The Woman's Party in 1917 employed the tactic of silent pickets and hunger
strikes. The labor, feminist and civil rights movements, as they developed, experienced tensions between a
leadership that felt uncomfortable with direct action and grassroots leaders who felt impatient with the slow
pace of working within the political system. But an honest appraisal of how social movements happen
indicates that both direct action and the slow and tedious work of canvassing, lobbying, and filing law suits
are all needed in order to produce fundamental change.

The Greensboro Sit-Ins

In the fall of 1959, four students at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (NCA &T) sat in
their dormitory rooms at night discussing the central contradiction of their lives. What good were the ideas
they were learning in college, when their ambitions were so arbitrarily limited by the laws of the Jim Crow
South? One of the students, Ezell Blair, Jr., whose father was a member of the NAACP, had recently been
intrigued by a television documentary on Gandhi. The four young men decided on a course of action: they
would sit-in at a local segregated lunch counter.
At four-thirty p.m., on February 1, l960, the students entered the local Woolworth’s, purchased school
supplies, and requested receipts. Resolved to be courteous but firm, the four—Blair, David Richmond,
Joseph McNeill, and Franklin McCain—seated themselves at the store’s “white” lunch counter. Blair politely
attempted to place an order. The students were refused, but remained seated. Responses from white patrons
ranged from fury to encouragement; the four young men were ignored by the management and the police.
Although they were not served, they remained until the store closed. The next day, twenty NCA&T students
joined the original four; white students joined the protest on the third day. The movement spread rapidly,
prompting demonstrations first in other North Carolina communities and then throughout the South.
Of the sit-ins, Lillian Smith, white Southern author and long-time critic of segregation, wrote, “For me,
it is as if the No Exit sign is about to come down from our age. It is the beginning of new things, of a new
kind of leadership. If the white students will join in ever-increasing numbers with these Negro students,
change will come; their experience of suffering and working together for what they know is right; the self-
discipline, the refusal to act in violence or think in violence will bring a new spiritual life not only to our
region but to our entire country.”

The Nashville Movement

Under the tutelage of minister and activist James Lawson, a group of students in Nashville also had begun
preparing for direct action in the fall of l959. Lawson conducted training workshops in nonviolence in the
basement of Clark Memorial Methodist Church on Tuesday nights, workshops which attracted students from
Fisk, Meharry Medical College, and American Baptist Theological Seminary. Among these students were
John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and Diane Nash. In addition to teaching the workshops,
Lawson had visited churches and community centers to ask local people which specific form of segregation
troubled them most. Most named segregation in lunch counters located in stores where most black Nashville
residents shopped. So, on November 28, l959, the students made their first test of Jim Crow in Nashville.
Diane Nash led a racially mixed group of well-dressed, orderly students to Harvey’s, a popular downtown
department store, where they made a small purchase, establishing themselves as store patrons. The students
proceeded then to the lunch counter and seated themselves. Nash, the appointed spokesperson for the group,
requested service. When she was refused, she asked to speak to the manager, who also refused the group
service. Nash requested service for the white students, and was told that, because they were accompanying
the black students, they could not be served. Nash thanked the manager and the group left the store. The
following Saturday, a group of eight students approached the lunch counter at Cain-Sloan, another Nashville
store, and met with a similar response.
“These tests,” explained John Lewis, “were a prelude to a massive assault, a series of sit-ins that would
involve hundreds of students. How many sit-ins for how long a time would depend on the response of the
stores and the city. We would not stop until the policy of segregation at those counters was ended. It was that
simple.”
During the month of January, attendance at Lawson’s workshops increased, and both black and white
students trained in techniques of nonviolent resistance. After hearing of the Greensboro sit-ins, the Nashville
students became even more impatient for their first real demonstration. The week after the events in
Greensboro, during a meeting attended by more than five hundred students at Fisk University, Lawson asked
for volunteers for a massive sit-in effort in all of Nashville’s department stores. On February 13, l960, a
group of one hundred and twenty five students marched to downtown Nashville occupying several lunch
counters. Although the counters were immediately closed, the students remained, reading or doing
homework quietly until 6 PM. The following Saturday, three hundred and forty students sat in. The store
owners requested a moratorium on sit-ins until they could draft a proposal; Lawson granted their request.
The store owners failed to produce a proposal, but the police chief announced that all participants in sit-ins
would be arrested. In spite of hecklers, the students resumed the sit-ins. . . . .

. . . .The first group of students were arrested in Nashville on February 27. Eighty-one students were arrested
that day. “We hadn’t been in jail more than a half hour,” said LaPrad, “before food was sent into us by the
Negro merchants. A call for bail was issued to the Negro community and within a couple of hours there was
twice the amount needed.”
At the students’ trial, the judge found them guilty on charges of disorderly conduct. Members of the
group were fined fifty dollars and court costs, and several were rearrested on charges of “conspiracy to
obstruct trade and commerce.” More student demonstrators were arrested after sitting-in at Nashville
Greyhound and Trailways bus stations.
Because a network camera crew was filming the demonstrations, Tennessee Governor Buford Ellington
charged that the sit-ins were “instigated and planned by and staged for the convenience of the Columbia
Broadcast System.” A committee appointed by the Mayor continued to negotiate with the demonstrators. On
April 5, the committee suggested that stores “make available to all customers a portion of restaurant facilities
now operated exclusively for white customers” and that charges against demonstrators be dropped. The
students rejected this proposal. “The suggestion of a restricted area,” they replied, “involves the same stigma
of which we are earnestly trying to rid the community. The plan presented by the Mayor’s Committee
ignores the moral issues involved in the struggle for human rights.”
On April 11, the students resumed their demonstrations. The black community of Nashville, maintaining
their Easter Week boycott, flexed their economic power by seriously damaging the downtown merchants
during one of their most profitable seasons. On April 19, the home of African American attorney Z.
Alexander Looby was bombed. In response, a group of nearly two thousand students and local citizens
marched on City Hall to confront Mayor Ben West.

“You all have the power to destroy this city,” the Mayor told the demonstrators. “So let’s not
have any mobs.” After stating that he had no power to force restaurant owners to serve anyone they
did not want to serve, West suggested, “Let’s all pray together.” Someone in the crowd shouted, “How
about eating together?” Diane Nash stepped from the crowd and asked the Mayor to use “the prestige
of your office to appeal to the citizens to stop racial discrimination.” “I appeal to all citizens,” he
replied, “to end discrimination, to have no bigotry, no bias, no hatred.” “Do you mean that to include
lunch counters?” Nash asked. “Little lady,” West retorted, “I stopped segregation seven years ago at
the airport when I first took office, and there has been no trouble there since.” “Then, Mayor,” Nash
continued. “Do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated? “Yes,” replied West.

The next night, Martin Luther King arrived in Atlanta and addressed an audience which had filled the Fisk
University gym to capacity. “I came to Nashville not to bring inspiration,” King said, “but to gain inspiration
from the great movement that has taken place in this community. . . . No lie can live forever. Let us not
despair. The universe is with us. Walk together, children. Don’t get weary.” On May 10, l960, Nashville
lunch counters served meals to black customers for the first time in the city’s history.

The Founding of SNCC

The Nashville students were not the only young people moved by the Greensboro sit-ins. Similar
demonstrations spread rapidly throughout the South—Raleigh, Durham, and Fayetteville, North Carolina;
Chatanooga, Tennessee; Atlanta, George; Montgomery, Alabama; and Tallahassee, Florida, among other
places. In New York and New Haven, sympathizers picketed Woolworth’s to exert pressure on the store
chain. Ella Baker, an NAACP and SCLC veteran decided that it was time to organize these many efforts, and
at the same time saw an opportunity to develop leadership “among other people.” In a letter to all major
protest groups, signed by herself and King, she asked them to send representatives to a meeting at her alma
mater, Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, April of 1960.
Baker and King assured the youthful activists that “Adult Freedom Fighters will be present for counsel
and guidance, but the meeting will be youth-centered.” A week before the conference, Ella Baker requested
the individual stories of student activists planning to attend the Shaw Conference. “We need—YOUR
STORY!” began her letter. “Write the story up in your own way,” she advised, but we suggest that you will,
no doubt, want to cover the following questions:
 1. How, when, and by whom were your demonstrations started?
2. What was the reaction of (1) student body, (2) parents,(3) Faculty, (4) President and governing
board?
3. How have the police and public officials reacted?
4. How has the white community reacted?
5. Have any efforts been made to set up bi-racial or student committees to negotiate with businesses
and others involved?
6. Have any businesses or public facilities changed their discriminatory practices?
7. What are your plans now?

The students arrived at Shaw University on Friday, April 16, 1960. On Saturday, the students led a panel
discussion followed by workshops. Suggested topics for workshop discussions were:

1. Advantages and Disadvantages: of Mass Demonstrations of Small Sit-ins.

2. “Jail vs. Bail” . . . Going to Jail with a Purpose
3. Where Picketing and Economic Pressure are Useful
4. Dangers, Limitations, and Potentials of the Legal Approach
5. Philosophy and Techniques of Nonviolence.

A Saturday evening discussion session was led by Martin Luther King, and the students ended their meeting
with a luncheon and press conference early Sunday afternoon. Although the more established and influential
civil rights organizations hoped to appropriate the fledgling student group as a youth branch, Ella Baker
insisted on the right of the students to maintain their autonomy. With her support, they created the “Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee”. SNCC resisted the bureaucratic structure of the established adult
groups, preferring instead loose organization and a consensus style of decision making. The students
established an organization that was very different from the established civil rights groups. Baker described
that difference as one of “group-centered leadership” versus “leader centered group pattern of organization”.
A SNCC pamphlet in 1960 warned its members of the dangers that organizations fall into, one of which was
that leaders tend to become more interested in perpetuating their own leadership rather than keeping the
focus on the goals of the organization.
At the organization’s founding conference at Shaw University, students also established a newspaper,
The Student Voice. From the beginning, the students in SNCC understood the power of the press. Media
coverage of the sit-ins helped create a mass movement. From Diane Nash’s dramatic confrontation with
Mayor Ben West to the assault of Tougaloo College students and faculty at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in
Jackson, Mississippi, the press captured moments which defined, recorded, and extended the sit-in
movement. When SNCC extended its activities into the Deep South, embattled field workers hoped that
journalists could bring public attention to injustice which had thrived on secrecy. . . .

5.A Ella Baker — Developing Leadership

“I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a
leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader
because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through
the public media, which made him, and the media may undo him. . . Such people get so involved
with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they
don’t do the work of actually organizing people.”

Born in Virginia in l905, Ella Baker learned early the principles which she would apply in her work for civil
rights. Baker believed strongly in communities who achieved self-sufficiency through sharing; throughout
her life, she remained skeptical of the type of leadership which robbed people of their initiative and right to
act autonomously. It was this vision she communicated to the young people in SNCC; in this way, she served
as a bridge between the visions of community of the rural south and the political activism of the SNCC
workers. Historian Charles Payne wrote, “The young activists of the l960’s trying to work within the
organizing tradition were bringing back to the rural Black South a refined, codified version of something that
had begun there, an expression of the historical vision of ex-slaves, men and women who understood that,
for them, maintaining a deep sense of community was itself an act of resistance.”
After graduating from Shaw University, Baker went to New York during the Depression to work as a
community organizer, joining the Young Negroes Cooperative League, a consumer group which hoped to
establish cooperative buying practices among African Americans. “With the Depression,” she said, “I began
to see that there were certain social forces over which the individual had very little control . . . I began to
identify . . . with the unemployed.” Later, she became assistant field secretary for the NAACP, travelling
frequently through the South to organize work at local branches. “At that time, the NAACP was the leader
on the cutting edge of social change. I remember when NAACP membership in the South was the basis for
getting beaten up or even killed.” Although Baker questioned the bureaucratic style of leadership in the
NAACP, through her field work she was able to establish a network of relationships which proved invaluable
in later civil rights work. Sent by the NAACP to assist at a meeting of the newly formed SCLC in l958,
Baker stayed to organize the SCLC’s headquarters in Atlanta. Because of her questions about King’s style
of charismatic leadership, Baker was considering resigning from this position. “There would never be any
role for me in a leadership capacity with SCLC. Why? First, I’m a woman. Also, I’m not a minister. And
second . . . I knew that my penchant for speaking honestly . . . would not be well tolerated.” When the
student sit-ins arose, Baker felt that experienced activists should offer their support without assuming
control. “I believe in the right of people to expect those who are older, those who claim to have had more
experience, to help them grow.” . . . . .

Developing Leadership
Baker organized SNCC’s founding conference, held at her Alma Mater, Shaw University, April 16-18, l960.
She was unwavering in her encouragement of the students’ autonomy and resisted their co-optation by one of
the established civil rights organizations. What Baker felt was needed in social movements was “the
development of people not who are interested in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among
other people.” “And after SNCC came into existence, of course, it opened up a new era of struggle. I felt the
urge to stay close by. Because if I had done anything anywhere, it had been largely in the role of supporting
things, and in the background of things that needed to be done for the organizations that were supposedly out
front.”
Although the more established and influential civil rights organizations hoped to appropriate the
fledgling student group as a youth branch, Ella Baker insisted on the right of the students to maintain their
autonomy.

Ella Baker: “Bigger than a Hamburger”

RALEIGH, N.C., June 1960—The Student Leadership Conference made it crystal clear that
current sit-ins and other demonstrations are concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger
or even a giant-sized coke . . . it is important to keep the movement democratic and to avoid struggles
for personal leadership.
It was further evident that desire for supportive co-operation from adult leaders and the adult
community was also tempered by apprehension that adults might try to “capture” the student
movement. The students showed willingness to be met on the basis of equality, but were intolerant of
anything that smacked of manipulation or domination.
This inclination toward group-centered leadership, rather than toward a leader centered group
pattern of organization, was refreshing indeed to those of the older group who bear the scars of the
 battle, the frustrations and the disillusionment that come when the prophetic leader turns out to have
heavy feet of clay.
However hopeful might be the signs in the direction of group centeredness, the fact that many
schools and communities; especially in the South, have not provided adequate experience for young
Negroes to assume initiative and think and act independently accentuated the need for guarding the
student movement against well-meaning, but nevertheless unhealthy, over-protectiveness.
Here is an opportunity for adult and youth to work together and provide genuine leadership—the
development of the individual to his highest potential for the benefit of the group. . .
A SNCC document of October, l960 states: If we forget the importance of means, then we shall
not obtain goals. If we use the movement as an abstract cause, as a way to quick glory, as a dramatic
device to manipulate—then we cheat. If our concern is that we, as chairman of such and such a group,
be re-elected chairman, be given publicity, be asked to speak all over the nation—then we, too, are
victims of the same kind of fear that has built segregation. . . . The using of the movement for personal
security is a very present danger. This must not happen . . . because it would kill the movement and
forever prevent the reaching of being and the redemptive community.

THE STRUGGLE OVER STRATEGY AND TACTICS IN MISSISSIPPI

From John Dittmer’s Local People (last two paragraphs of chapter 5):
“For the young men and women of SNCC, McComb was an invaluable testing ground. They
found that they could stand up to intense white pressure and survive. They discovered their natural
constituency among the young, and they saw that the activism of high school students brought
adults into the movement. On the other hand, much of the black middle class was under severe
economic constraints and could not be counted on to support the assault against segregated
institutions. SNCC workers learned that although officials of the Justice Department listened to
their grievances, the activists could not rely on the Kennedy administration to enforce the First and
Fifteenth amendments in Mississippi.
SNCC also learned from its mistakes in McComb. It now understood that direct action protests
conducted against an intransigent and lawless white establishment could be counterproductive and
internally divisive when not endorsed by local black leaders. Moreover, in the Deep South, the
apparent dichotomy between direct action and voter registration had proven a distinction without a
difference. Simply attempting to register could bring on the wrath of the mob. SNCC applied these
lessons as it fanned out across the state, particularly into the Mississippi Delta.”

CHRONOLOGY focusing on Mississippi

1952 Mound Bayou, MS. T.R.M. Howard hired Medgar Evers to sell insurance for his Magnolia Mutual
Life Insurance Company. Howard was also the president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership
(RCNL), a civil rights and pro self-help organization. Involvement in the RCNL gave Evers crucial training
in activism. RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou between 1952 and 1954 which drew crowds of ten
thousand or more.

l954 (July) a group of thirteen white Mississippi businessmen, led by Delta planter Robert Patterson,
met in Indianola to form the White Citizens Council.

1954 Medgar Evers organizes branches of the organization in Mound Bayou and Cleveland,
1954 February Medgar Evers applied for admission to the law school at the University of Mississippi.
l955, Amzie Moore elected President of the Cleveland, MS, branch of the NAACP, a group of eighty-seven
members.

1955 (August 31) Emmett Till’s body recovered from Tallahatchie River, near Money, MS.

1956, Senator Eastland (MS) joined eighteen other Senators and seventy-seven members of the House of
Representatives from the South in signing the Southern Manifesto

1956 Medgar Evers becomes field secretary of the Mississippi Conference of NAACP branches.

March 29, 1956, Mississippi state legislature creates State Sovereignty Commission

1956 NAACP’s convention in San Francisco. Evers led a group of delegates who called for the
organization’s immediate endorsement of the Montgomery, Alabama boycott. Preparing a three-page
resolution in support of the boycott, Evers found himself at odds with NAACP veterans Roy Wilkins and
Thurgood Marshall.

l958, the SCLC held mass meetings in twenty-two Southern cities to launch its Crusade for Citizenship.

1959 Ross Barnett Barnett pledges in his successful l959 campaign for MS governor to maintain
segregation at all costs.

1957 Feb 14 Evers attended the founding sessions of the SCLC and was elected assistant secretary of the
new organization which stressed direct action.

l960, frustrated by the bureaucracy of the NAACP, Moore attended a meeting of SNCC in Atlanta,
Georgia, and invited Bob Moses and the voter registration drive to Mississippi.

1960 Aaron Henry becomes MS state NAACP President

l960 Civil Rights Bill,

1960 (February 1). Four students sit-in at Wolworth’s, Greensboro, N.C.

1960 (April 16-18) founding conference of SNCC at Shaw University, Raleigh, NC.

l960 (May 10) Nashville lunch counters served meals to black customers for the first time in the city’s
history

l960 (summer) Bob Moses, at the suggestion of Ella Baker, met with Amzie Moore to discuss a strategy
for making a permanent change in the state of Mississippi.

l960, the Supreme Court, in Boynton vs. Virginia, extended the ban on discrimination aboard buses
traveling interstate to include facilities in bus terminals. Despite this, Jim Crow was enforced in waiting
rooms, restaurants, and restrooms serving passengers on buses traveling through the South.

1961 federal lawsuit against Hattiesburg (MI) county registrar Theron Lynd. After successful lawsuit, Lynd
allowed two blacks to take the test and failed them both.
1961 Aaron Henry organizes a boycott of local businesses in Clarksdale, MS.

l961 (September 25) Herbert Lee was shot by his neighbor, Mississippi State Representative E.H.
Hurst outside of the cotton gin in Liberty, Mississippi.

l961 (October 4) one hundred and fifteen high school students marched to protest Lee’s death and the
expulsion of Brenda Travis and Ike Lewis from Berglund High School after their arrest.

l961 James Farmer, who assumed leadership of CORE announced that CORE would apply direct action
techniques to the desegregation of facilities at bus terminals to pressure the Federal government into
enforcing existing laws.

FREEDOM RIDES BEGIN and last well into 1963

l961 In Anniston, Alabama, the tires of a Greyhound bus were shot out by a mob following the bus. An
incendiary bomb tossed through one of the windows of the stalled bus destroyed it. When the Trailways bus
arrived in Birmingham, the riders were assaulted by a mob armed with lead pipes, baseball bats, and chains.
Shaken by their assault and unable to locate a driver to continue the ride to Montgomery, the first
group of Freedom Riders was flown to New Orleans. They were soon replaced by a second group of
SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee) students, coordinated by Diane Nash, ready to face
retaliation in The Deep South. To continue the rides, CORE formed a coalition with SNCC and the
SCLC. The new alliance, The Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee, determined to “fill the jails of
Montgomery and Jackson in order to keep a sharp image of the issue before the public.”i

In Montgomery, Alabama the riders were again attacked.

The Freedom Riders were headed for Mississippi.

The Riders were unaware that their fate had been decided in an agreement between Attorney General Robert
Kennedy and Mississippi Senator James Eastland. Freedom Riders would not be assaulted by a crowd in the
state of Mississippi if they could be taken immediately to prison. When the protestors arrived in Jackson,
they were ushered quickly through an eerily silent bus terminal to the county jail. The stream of
Freedom Riders soon strained the city and county facilities, and were taken to Parchman. The first group
was released after serving thirty-nine days. The Reverend C.T. Vivian, remembered, “The feeling of people
coming out of the jail was not that they had triumphed, [but] that they had achieved. Nonviolence was
proven in that respect. It had become a national movement and there was no doubt about it, for common
people in many places in the country. And there was a new cadre of leaders.”

The Freedom Ride Coordinating Committee morphs into COFO in MS. (Congress of Federated
Organizations,
which eventually becomes the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party).

1962 (Jan - August) Evers participated in the planning sessions of COFO and urged the NAACP national
office to support the coalition. Although Aaron Henry of the state NAACP was COFO’s president, the
national office never officially endorsed the organization.

1962 (summer) Charles Cobb received a grant from CORE to participate in a workshop in Houston. On his
way to Texas he traveled through Mississippi, and met the SNCC staff in Jackson—and stayed, to become a
SNCC field secretary in Sunflower County in the Mississippi Delta.

1962 SNCC’s third general conference, Atlanta, James Forman takes over the position of Executive
Secretary and the task of reorganizing SNCC to accommodate full time workers who would be paid
subsistence wages.

1962 December. a group of student activists, led by Tougaloo professor John Salter, organized a holiday
boycott of stores on Jackson’s (MS) Capitol Street.

1962 The National Lawyers Guild had offers its services to SNCC

1963 (spring) James Forman arrested during the protests in Greenwood, Mississippi.

l963, a coalition of civil rights workers and ministers initiated political action in Jackson, capital of the
state, hoping to create an organized city-wide campaign modeled on those in Birmingham and Montgomery.

1963 May 31, over four hundred black students from Jackson’s high schools gathered at the Farish
Street Baptist Church for prayer and training in nonviolent resistance. In pairs, many carrying small
American flags, the group proceeded toward Capitol Street. They were promptly arrested by the
Jackson police.

1963 June 12 Evers was shot in the back in the driveway of his home by Byron DeLa Beckwith, a self-
proclaimed “rabid racist” and vocal member of the White Citizens Council.

1963 James Chaney becomes interested in joining civil rights movement after watching Freedom
Riders on TV -- Joins CORE.

1963 (June) David Dennis establishes a CORE base in Canton, MS

l963 (July), Moses met Allard Lowenstein. Lowenstein, based on his experiences in Africa, suggested a
protest vote (re: Evers death) for the black population of Mississippi. A group of law students uncovered a
Mississippi state law under which voters who felt that they had been unfairly excluded from the official
election could cast votes which would be set aside until their protest had been investigated. Applying this
law, in August, l963, COFO workers organized black voters in Jackson and Greenwood to enter protest votes
in the August Democratic primary.

1963 (summer) ‘The President’s Committee,’ a group of lawyers formed from a White House conference
called by John F. Kennedy in the summer of l963.

1963 august 22 Fannie Lou Hamer fired and evicted from the plantation she worked as a sharecropper for
registering to vote.

1963 (November) Freedom Vote in MS -- more than 80,000 blacks vote.

1963 (December) December of 63, Charles Cobb writes a proposal for the Freedom Schools.

1964 (January) first Freedom Day was held in Hattiesburg, MS. John Lewis, James Forman, Aaron Henry,
and Ella Baker spoke at the rally the day before 200 blacks and whites converged on the county courthouse
to picket in protest of black disenfranchisement. Moses announced plans for a “Freedom Registration”,
the beginning of the creation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

1964 (January) Louis Allen, the Mississippi resident who had requested federal protection to testify against
the murderer of Herbert Lee, had been found shot in his front yard.

1964 (January) Mickey and Rita Schwerner go to MS and meet up with James Chaney.

1964 (February 15) in Brookhaven, Mississippi, Samuel Bowers, a self-proclaimed minister and owner of the
Sambo Amusement Company, founded The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi.

1964 (April 26) the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was officially formed at the Masonic
Temple in Jackson, Mississippi

1964 (spring) the National Council of Churches sponsored a conference in New York to plan for the
Freedom Schools.

1964 (May 31) Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney spoke to members of the congregation of the Mount
Zion Methodist Church to encourage them to allow the Church to be used for a Freedom School.

1964 (June 2) Mississippi Democratic primary.

1964 (June 7) SNCC begins registering summer volunteers for the Mississippi Summer Project

l964 (June 14) The first group of summer volunteers settled into the dormitories at Western Women’s
College in Oxford, Ohio

1964 (July) Bob Moses issued an “Emergency Memorandum” to all SNCC workers that the
Mississippi Challenge would replace the regular voting registration work.

1964 (June 21) Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey claimed he released Goodman, Schwerner and
Chaney from jail at approximately ten p.m.

l964 SNCC Chairman John Lewis announced SNCC’s plans to shift its national headquarters to
Mississippi.

1964 (summer) the Free Southern Theater toured Mississippi, presenting two plays: Martin Duberman’s In
White America, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Also, the Caravan of Music

1964 (July 2) Johnson signs Civil Rights Act

1964 July 18 Harlem riots

l964 (July 28) the Mississippi Democrats hold their state convention at which they reaffirmed their
commitment to segregation; resolving, “that the Southern white man is the truest friend the Negro ever had;
we believe in separation of the races in all phases of life.”

1964 (August 4) bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman,had finally been discovered.

1964 (August 6) the MFDP held its own state convention at the Masonic Temple in Jackson to select sixty-
eight delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
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