Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) grew out of student-led sit-ins in Greensboro North Carolina in 1960. As the sit-in movement galvanized college students across the Southeast, SNCC was organized at a Conference in Raleigh in April of 1960. Originally founded to act as an umbrella organization to help organize the efforts of college students in different towns across the South, it was unique because of the way it both had paid field organizers, volunteers, and elected officers while also maintaining informal affiliations with students and groups of college students, such as TIAL at Tuskegee Institute. SNCC’s strategies included nonviolent demonstrations, grassroots organizing and empowerment of local communities, voter registration work, and an emphasis on Black Power. They often found themselves at odds with civil rights organizations run by older activists (such as the SCLC or Tuskegee’s TCA) because of their preferred techniques and tendency toward increased militancy.
SNCC became well known in Alabama during 1961’s Freedom Rides. Through witnessing the violence and racism in Alabama firsthand, they decided to become more active in the state. SNCC leaders established voter registration and community organizing projects in the rural Black Belt’s Dallas County- using their existing program models in efforts to increase grassroots leadership in those Black communities and increase Black political power and participation. They also established literacy programs there.
SNCC supported and provided assistance to the planned March 7 demonstration in protest of the murder of Civil Rights worker Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion and to spur the government to extend voting rights to Blacks in Alabama. When the marchers came to Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers beat them and teargassed them in what became known as Bloody Sunday.
When the Selma to Montgomery march finally happened on March 21 under federal protection, SNCC marchers saw firsthand the poverty and economic and political inequity in rural Lowndes County. Soon after, SNCC members moved to Lowndes County to register Black voters, and with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, Lowndes County’s new voters and their SNCC allies created a new political party, The Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Symbolized by a black panther, the LCFO worked to educate and register voters, as well as running its own slates of candidates for political office.
Photo: Poster of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, also known as the Black Panther Party. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)
