From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

8. The Sit-Ins, SNCC, and Cold War Patriotism

135 8 The Sit-Ins, SNCC, and ColdWar Patriotism Simon Hall On April 20, 1960, a New York Times editorial commented that the sitins currently sweeping across the South represented a “cry . . . for justice and democracy . . . that cannot be stifled, that must and will be heard, and that all the citizens of this democracy can ignore only at our and the free world’s peril.”1 It was not alone in viewing the protests through the wider context of America’s Cold War struggle against Communist totalitarianism. Segregationists rather predictably blamed Communists and fellow travelers for disrupting the (white) South’s cherished way of life.2 The nation’s political leaders, well aware that their counterparts in the Soviet Union were only too happy to seize on incidents of racial discrimination for purposes of discrediting America’s claims to free-world leadership, depicted the sit-ins as being in keeping with America’s democratic traditions and emphasized that such expressions of dissent would not be tolerated in the Soviet bloc.3 Surprised by the sudden outburst of nonviolent direct action, established civil rights leaders also placed the demonstrations within the broader Cold War fight to defend and extend democracy. On April 16, 1960, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive director Roy Wilkins proclaimed that the student sit-ins were “redeeming . . . [America’s] promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all under government by the consent of the governed.” The veteran civil rights leader continued, “We owe them and their white student cooperators a debt for rearming our spirits and renewing our strength as a nation at a time when we and free men everywhere sorely need this clear insight and this fresh courage.”4 This essay explores the use of Cold War patriotism—the fusing together of rhetorical appeals to Americanism (especially the nation’s founding ideals of freedom, liberty and equality) with arguments that 136 · Simon Hall the country’s Cold War leadership was compromised by Jim Crow racism —from the sit-ins through the early years of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It then examines how and why this tactic was replaced mid-decade with expressions of solidarity with Third World revolutionaries. Finally, it analyzes this organization’s long-standing interest in the international dynamics of the black freedom struggle in the United States. SNCC’s Invocation of Cold War Patriotism Appealing to America’s founding ideals and laying claim to the citizenship rights enunciated in the Constitution had long been central features of black protest. However, the onset of McCarthyism during the 1950s, which dramatically narrowed the space for political dissent and caused serious problems for civil rights organizations and their trade union allies, made strategies of patriotic protest particularly attractive.5 Moreover, America’s desire to win influence over newly independent nations in Africa and Asia to aid its global struggle against Communist expansion offered civil rights activists a valuable opportunity. In arguing forcefully that segregation and the denial of citizenship rights to blacks at home compromised America’s free-world leadership and exposed the gap between its ideals and its practice, civil rights leaders were able to exercise a degree of leverage that encouraged the federal government to take action.6 “Cold War patriotism” thus became a central feature of black protest during the postwar era. In 1947, for example, in testimony before President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights, the head of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall, argued that the systematic denial of constitutional rights to black southerners was “undoubtedly the greatest indictment of our American democratic form of government” and, as such, an obstacle for America’s global leadership.7 Eight years later, in his first major speech as a civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. told a mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association that the bus boycotters were motivated by a “love for democracy and . . . [a] deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.” He also roused his audience by claiming that “certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults. This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation, we couldn’t do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime, we couldn’t The Sit-Ins, SNCC, and Cold War Patriotism · 137 do this. But the...