Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas

39. “Ex-workers for SNCC Tell Why Group Faded in State” (1967)

39. “Ex-workers for SNCC Tell Why Group Faded in State” (1967) The following article by Jack Baker appeared in the Arkansas Gazette on February 26, 1967. Baker is seeking to discover why SNCC, which had been an active presence in the state since 1962, had all but vanished. Baker blames Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power” and the 1966 expulsion of white members from the group for its disappearance in Arkansas. This explanation is partially persuasive. Bill Hansen, a white man and SNCC’s most constant representative in the state, resigned from SNCC in deference to African American calls for self-determination . However, SNCC faced other challenges as well as it charted a new direction after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Having achieved desegregation and federal protection of voting rights, two of the civil rights movement’s earliest and most tangible goals, SNCC was left with the problem of charting a new more revolutionary agenda. The organization had to do so from a precarious financial position as donations had disappeared from former supporters who were either leery of the new agenda or convinced that the goals of the movement had already been achieved. Ex-workers for SNCC Tell Why Group Faded in State By Jack Baker of the Gazette Staff Robert Cableton has been convicted in the Mayor’s Court of Gould on charges of obstructing justice, assaulting an officer, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest and public drunkenness. 247 Source: Arkansas Gazette, Sunday, February 26, 1967, 8A All the charges stem from altercations with the police in 1965 and 1966 when Gould was the target of Civil Rights activism—or “aggravation ,” as a Gould school board member called it. Hanging over Cableton, a Negro, are $671.50 in fines and costs and a nine-month jail term. Cableton, 25, has seen his latest appeal rejected in Lincoln County Circuit Court, but he plans to try once more to have his case heard by a federal court. Robert Cableton is the last vestige in Arkansas of the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee. SNCC is still in the Little Rock phone book but the number doesn’t answer. The office at West Ninth and Gaines was closed in the summer of 1966, in a manner which William W. (Bill) Hansen, now 27 and a prelaw student at Little Rock University describe like this: “We just moved everything out and tried to sneak out of sight as quietly as possible.” Carmichael Remarks Brought Troubles Though SNCC, both in Arkansas and elsewhere, had always had financial troubles, its roof did not begin to cave in until SNCC’s firebrand national chairman Stokely Carmichael joined the James Meredith March on Mississippi in June 1966. He then began what was a new slogan: “Black Power.” Carmichael, who had defeated SNCC’s perennial chairman, John Lewis, at an election in Nashville, Tenn., in May 1966, personified a new approach to race relations that alarmed the public, many SNCC members and the organization’s primary financial backers, white liberals. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was found in 1960 in Greensboro, N.C. by a group of Negro college students, who, with white sympathizers, had begun the first of the lunch counter “sit-ins.” Although SNCC did not disdain legal maneuvers, it emphasized activism. Members organized demonstrations and boycotts, led marches, opened “Freedom Centers” in rural Negro neighborhoods and showed themselves willing to face clashes with the police, beatings from mobs, teargassings and imprisonment. Four Big Projects Were Started By 1964, there were four major SNCC projects: Southwest Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Operating in state headquarters first at Pine Bluff and later in Little Rock, SNCC organized Negroes in such places as Gould, Star City, Forrest City, Pine Bluff, Marvell, Helena, and West Helena. 248 “EX-WORKERS FOR SNCC TELL WHY GROUP FADED IN STATE” (1967) Projects included school and store boycotts, voter registration and sit-ins. After President Johnson began sending sizeable numbers of American troops to Vietnam early in 1965, SNCC leadership shifted to the left and added opposition to the Vietnam war to its list of projects. This caused the first tremor among the suppliers of SNCC money and contributions fell off. Howard Himmelbaum, 26, was present when Stokely Carmichael was elected in Nashville on May 14, 1966 and was one of those who voted for Carmichael. Himmelbaum, who had been...