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14. Arkansas SNCC Memories LAURA FONER Laura Foner was born into a family of politically active leftists in New York City. She earned a degree from Brandeis University and did graduate work at Rutgers and Columbia Universities. Foner spent almost a year working for SNCC in Gould, Arkansas. She then continued her activism by joining Students for a Democratic Society, becoming involved in the 1968 student strike at Columbia. She later was involved in the women’s and labor movements . Today she is a children’s librarian and an active member of City Life / Vida Urbana, a radical community organization dedicated to promoting social justice and affordable housing. Forty-four years have passed since I worked in Arkansas SNCC. I carry the experience with me daily, but trying to put myself back into what it was really like has been both difficult and very rewarding. I have tried to be as truthful as my selective, faulty sixty-five-year-old memory will allow. Background Growing up in a left-wing family during the height of the Cold War, I learned a version of U.S history never taught in school. At home I learned a story of U.S. slavery, which stressed the history of the slave revolts and the work of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass. Feeling isolated from American “mainstream” culture and politics, I longed to be part of a movement for fundamental change. During high school, some of my friends and I joined the NAACP youth group in a neighboring town. And we spent our Saturdays picketing the local Woolworths, in support of the boycott that followed the first south148 ern sit-ins. Something was stirring in this country, something really important and inspiring. I wanted to be part of it. I first learned about SNCC in my sophomore year of college when one of the early leaders spent several weeks at Brandeis. He organized a group to travel to Georgia during spring break of 1963. Fearful, but excited, I signed up. I was disappointed (and relieved) when the trip was canceled at the last minute; someone had decided it was too dangerous. The following fall, I left for a year of study in Paris. Just before my departure, I attended the 1963 D.C. Civil Rights March. I felt the power of hundreds of thousands of black and white people, from unions, churches, and schools, all marching together. I was in France when the three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. I knew people who were there. I both feared for their lives and envied their participation in Mississippi Freedom Summer. I vowed to “go South” when I finished college the next year. The Friends of SNCC chapter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had contacts in Arkansas SNCC. A Brandeis graduate, Arlene Wilgoren, was already in Arkansas. Arkansas SNCC had decided to sponsor a Summer Project targeted to the communities in eastern Arkansas. Hopefully, bringing in some northern college students, black and white, would bring national attention to these organizing efforts and help the local people feel part of a national movement and less frightened about joining in. As I set off on my journey, my parents said goodbye with very mixed emotions; they were proud, nervous for my safety, and very disappointed (especially my father)1 that I had turned down a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard to work with Arkansas SNCC. Arkansas I landed in Arkansas after a week of training in Washington, D.C. SNCC veterans taught us nonviolent tactics: how to protect ourselves and each other if we were being beaten, and how to nonviolently resist arrest. We role-played being taunted and spat on and watched them demonstrate how to convince an elderly southern black person to get up off the porch and come to a meeting. And then we were put on a bus. My first two weeks in Arkansas were spent in Pine Bluff. Ben Grinage asked if I would be willing to move to Gould, Arkansas. Ben, who later became the Arkansas SNCC project director, was the AME church minister of Gould and knew the community well. Local activists, including experienced organizers like Mrs. Carrie Dilworth and Mr. Bynum, had invited SNCC to Gould. Both had organized with the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union in the 1930s and the NAACP in the 1950s and early 1960s. They were impressed with SNCC’s youthful energy and willingness to take risks. ARKANSAS SNCC MEMORIES 149 [18.188.61.223] Project MUSE...

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