And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi

2. "To 'Uncover What Is Covered' "

TWO "TO 'UNCOVER WHAT IS COVERED' " Twenty-five year-old Robert Moses arrived by bus in Georgia early in the summer of 1960 to find only three full-time workers in the Atlanta SCLC headquarters . The office was in transition, the publicity-seeking Wyatt Tee Walker replacing as executive director of SCLC the older but more radical Ella Baker. She had become a prime force behind the recently formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was a leading early figure in the effort to make the left politics of the sixties radically democratic not only in objectives but in conduct. Only weeks before, on Easter weekend, about three hundred Southern students joined by another hundred, 20 U TO IUNCOVER WHAT IS COVERED' " 21 mostly white Northern students had convened for the Southwide Youth Leadership Conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.! Brought on by the successes of the sit-ins and more tangibly by eight hundred dollars from SCLC, the conference was the work of Ella Baker. Meeting at her alma mater, where she had been valedictorian, the conferees listened to her encourage them to form their own organization and to work on broader issues. She has explained her convictions, HIf I had any influence, it lodges in the direction of the leadership concept that I believe in ... instead of having ... a leader-centered group, you have a group-centered leadership." 2 Even in this birth of what first was named the IITemporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee," there were two student contingents vying for leadership: one from Nashville, the other from Atlanta. As a compromise, Marion Barry, a young graduate student studying chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville (and future mayor of Washington, D.C.) was selected as chair, but the new group's office was placed in Atlanta with SCLC.3 From the start the marriage between SNCC and SCLC was at best an uneasy one. King's biographers debate whether he envisioned SNCC as a youth arm of the older organization or as an independent entity. Julian Bond, one of the students from Morehouse College in Atlanta attending the conference, recalls that representatives from SCLC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the NAACP Hwanted us, the students, to become a part of them ... [as] ... youth chapters."4 Ella Baker has said of SCLC's intentions: HThey were interested in having the students become an arm of SCLC. They were most confident that this would be 22 liTO 'UNCOVER WHAT IS COVERED' " their baby, because I was their functionary and I had called the meeting." 5 Instead she zealously guarded SNCC's independence and set it on its leftward course. From the beginning, SNCC was resistant to the leadership of King and SCLC, or more precisely to leadership itself. In the style that they were soon to adopt on a public scale, the young SNCC workers came to differ from the prominent, solemnly ministerial spokesmen of the older organization. Moses himself, spare and understated in address and often clad in overalls well before proletarian clothing became a fad, was a stark contrast to King, a natty dresser with a magnetic public persona and enormous eloquence. The differences between King and Moses came to epitomize the differences in style between the two organizations. But SCLC and SNCC had noticeable similarities as well. SCLC's discipline of nonviolence, informed by a religious ethic, was directed inward. It was akin to the conscience that Moses cultivated in his introspective self. Even in the pre-SNCC civil rights movement, the act of rebellion was both a means to freedom and a personal enactment of freedom by each participant: leaders, footsore black domestics, politely defiant students . And that empowerment of individuals was what Robert Moses would come to envision for black Mississippi . When Moses arrived that June at the tiny SCLC office King was away and no one knew quite what to do with the young New Yorker. Moses had expected to find a room full of people organizing and training, or at least stuffing envelopes and collating reports.6 Instead, he settled into the reality of a small Southern organization , understaffed and underfunded. At first, he was put U TO 'UNCOVER WHAT IS COVERED' " 23 to work preparing fund-raising packets for SCLC.7 But he soon found the newly formed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to be more compatible with his maturing political philosophy. In addition to a secretary...