Ira Grupper irag@iglou.com

May 2010

LABOR PAEANS— May, 2010
Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )

How beautiful were all those gray-headed, and white-headed, and, balding, activists (I among the last group, though maybe not as beautiful). These, veterans of the 1960’s civil rights group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—abbreviated “SNCC,” and pronounced “Snick.”

How magnificent-looking were all the young students--elementary, middle school, high school and college; Black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American--gathered from all over the country to observe our celebration, our continuing in the struggle for a just world. These young folk had much to inform us veterans about how they are progressing today, just as we wanted to let them know our history. They were, to be sure, our teachers.

One of the members of the conference organizing committee, Joyce Ladner, emailed me: “We hoped that we'd be lucky (and get) 400, but we went over 1,100 registrants.” The conferees gathered together April 15-18, where SNCC began in 1960, at the historically-Black Shaw University campus in Raleigh, North Carolina. How generous of the university, in financial trouble itself, to give us use of their facilities for free.

There was a song sung by these (Civil Rights) Movement veterans back in the 1960’s: This May Be the Last Time. Originally a Black Spiritual, popularized by the Staple Singers, and, later, the Rolling Stones, when SNCC and a second group, CORE, sang it, there was a bit of a tremolo in the throat. The made-in-the-U.S.A. apartheid system of racial segregation and fascist terror could mean that this may well be the last time you see the civil rights workers before they are murdered.

This was not hyperbole. So many murders were committed. There was often not enough time to consecrate a tombstone, to properly grieve. The Movement was moving on.

SNCC, that band of brothers and sisters in a circle of trust, went into the rural areas, as well as cities and towns, to speak to the local people, went into all the Deep South states, and Cambridge, Maryland, and Missouri, and more. SNCC was encouraged in its formation and activism by the legendary Ella Baker, who urged the young SNCC workers to separately take the strategic and organizational controls. It took its inspiration from the first lunch-counter sit-in by African-American college students at the Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960.

As the sit-ins began to spread like wildfire, SNCC acted as coordinator. With never more than 200 students, SNCC nonetheless had a deep impact on race relations in the Deep South, validating Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world…”

SNCC formed alliances with other civil rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to conduct Freedom Rides in 1961, was later active in voter registration drives, and Freedom Summer of 1964. SNCC helped to establish the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as an alternative to the official all-white racist Democratic Party, and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama.

When SNCC declared its opposition to the U.S. war against the Vietnamese people, and later began close cooperation with the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, federal and state agencies targeted it for extinction, and it was essentially defunct by 1970. Some of the leaders of SNCC from its early integrationist phase became prominent office holders: U.S. Congressman John Lewis of Georgia and the former Mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry. Both were at this conference.

Julian Bond, former SNCC Communications Director, Georgia state representative, and national Chairman of the NAACP, commented, in his plenary remarks to our gathering: “As former President Jimmy Carter told Mary King, ‘If you wanted to scare white people in Southwest Georgia, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference [SCLC] wouldn't do it. You only had to say one word - SNCC!’

“John F. Kennedy said that compared to Martin Luther King’s SCLC, SNCC workers were ‘real sons of bitches’.” Bond also told us: “Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of Blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.”

There were many concurrent workshops over three days. In one, “Moving on Mississippi,” Lawrence Guyot, former chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, listed many books young people (and others) can use as resources. Activist Willie Blue said: “People were chopping cotton for three dollars a day. Our young people don’t know who (these people) are…”.

In another panel, on the “Impact of SNCC,” historian Taylor Branch spoke about the “broad democratization of…politics” and “high emotion with deep thought.” Tom Hayden told us “We have to stand with the demonized until the demonizing ends.” Your reporter, during the question period, reminded the audience that it was ordinary people, maids and janitors, who were the base of the Civil Rights Movement, that a joint force of the informally and formally educated was what built the Movement.

A moving and poignant session was entitled “SNCC veterans introduce their children”. The children and grandchildren took to the stage to explain what they were doing to make the world a better place. All were highly educated and articulate. Would that some were also involved in labor organizing as well.

CORE veteran Dave Dennis spoke about quality education as a constitutional right. Bernice Johnson Reagon, former Freedom Singer, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, spoke about the significance of Black spirituals, and directed her remarks to the young folk present: “You will not know how to get through your life if you (dismiss) the ground you are standing on.”

I immediately thought of Paul Robeson, and his expounding on this theme in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Julian Bond, Danny Glover, Rev. James Lawson and Harry Belafonte, 83 years old, were particularly noteworthy in their criticism of capitalism (Lawson talked about “plantation capitalism”). Congressman John Lewis, a former SNCC chair, and Joyce Ladner, former president of Howard University and a SNCC stalwart, spoke eloquently. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was good as well.

Bob Zellner, originally from Brewton, Alabama, the son of a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was seated with 35 other authors selling their books on The Movement. Murder Creek, written by Bob and SNCC veteran Connie Curry, tells about Bob being the first white southerner to serve as a SNCC field secretary. His father left the KKK, but his grandfather and uncles remained to fight the Movement. Space does not permit elaboration, nor reference to so many other deserving people.

The conference was glorious, heartfelt, educational, inspirational, so meaningful, and so humbling. Music was a hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement; the many talks were often interspersed with singing the freedom songs, and a concert with the SNCC Freedom Singers, Guy and Candy Carawan, and so many others, sent me soaring. The line in one Movement song stands out: “And before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.”

Please permit me a point of personal privilege. I first got involved in the Movement in the New York City housing project in which I lived, around 1959. Active in rent strikes, anti-racist activities, NYC school boycott (my first arrest), and sometimes in the New York SNCC office in support of the work in the South, I learned early on to recognize that racism spanned the U.S.; it was not just a southern phenomenon.

Yet the main focus of activity, the fulcrum of struggle, the point where the pimple was most visibly bursting and bleeding, was in the Deep South. Hired by the legendary Ruby Doris Smith (Robinson) to join SNCC in Atlanta., I came to see that the work SNCC was doing in the years before I got involved was truly heroic, very much transformative, and that the Movement was a continuum. The song we sang is more eloquent: “They say that freedom is a constant struggle.”

SNCC, and the Civil Rights Movement in general, enabled me to meet, and learn from, some of the most dedicated freedom fighters to have ever walked the face of our part of this earth, helped me understand the nature of racism, and how racism, sexism, age-ism, disability discrimination and homophobia are means to divide poor and working class people, all in the service of Big Money. One cannot understand racism without studying its relation to class oppression, and the international aspects of capital accumulation.

SNCC, and the Civil Rights Movement, provided a purpose to life, the building of the "beloved community". For this, I will always be grateful.

(Note: Several mistakes, due to you columnist’s misinformation, and omissions have been rectified in this email edition of Labor Paeans. They will be referenced in next month’s print edition, since the May print number has already been put to bed. I.G.)

Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com