This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement

Foreword

13 Foreword Julian Bond A historian wrote of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): “Central aspects of the social movement embodied by SNCC were its nurture of a media consciousness among its activists and an insistence on the historicity of the struggle itself—a preoccupation of leaving a record as being part of the organization’s collective awareness.1 ” Fifty years after SNCC’s founding, the publication and photo exhibit This Light of Ours: Activist Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement confirms the importance of SNCC’s awareness of image—its own and that of the struggle itself. In providing a visual record of the organization and the ethos in which it operated, these photographs help us understand SNCC as no text alone can. John F. Kennedy said that compared to Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), SNCC workers were “real sons of bitches.” SNCC began in April 1960 at a conference of students , mostly black, called by Ella Baker. Baker, a longtime civil rights activist, became an important advisor to the nascent SNCC, effectively guiding it away from the personality cult that typified King-worship at the SCLC, where she then worked, and the bureaucracy of the NAACP, where she had worked in the past, toward group democracy, with every member having his or her say. SNCC’s “members”2 adopted collective decisionmaking , which took account of every point of view, and organized communities to act in their own behalf rather than depend almost exclusively on the protest strategy of SCLC. This resulted in an organization whose accomplishments and achievements in its short life far surpassed those of older, more conservative organizations. Within a year of its founding, SNCC evolved from a committee coordinating student protests to a handson organization helping local leadership in rural and small-town communities across the South participate in a variety of protests and political and economic organizing campaigns, setting SNCC apart from the civil rights mainstream of the 1960s. Its members, youth, and independence enabled SNCC to remain close to grassroots currents that rapidly escalated the southern movement from sit-ins to Freedom Rides to voter drives to political organizing. By 1965, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization operating in the South. It had organized antisegregation protests and voter registration projects in every southern state. It had built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural cooperatives. It gave the existing movement for women’s liberation new energy. It inspired and trained the activists who began the “New Left.” It helped expand the limits of political debate within black America and broadened the focus of the Civil Rights Movement. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.3 For much of its early history, SNCC battled against the fear which had kept southern rural blacks from 14 aggressively organizing and acting in their own behalf. It strengthened or built aggressive, locally led movements in the communities where it worked. SNCC workers offered themselves as a protective barrier between private and state-sponsored terror and the local communities where SNCC staffers lived and worked. SNCC staffers frequently were the first paid civil rights workers to headquarter themselves in isolated rural communities, daring to “take the message of freedom into areas where the bigger civil rights organizations fear to tread.”4 “Freedom Summer 1964” brought one thousand mostly white volunteers to Mississippi. They registered voters, built community centers, and staffed twenty-eight “Freedom Schools.” Over the next several years, SNCC backed first-time black candidates for Congress who ran in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and North Carolina.5 My campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 was an attempt to take the techniques SNCC had learned in the rural South into an urban setting, and to carry forward SNCC’s belief that grassroots politics could provide answers to problems faced by America’s urban blacks. In keeping with SNCC’s style, a platform was developed in consultation with the voters. When the legislature twice rejected me, objecting to my support of SNCC’s antiwar position, the resulting campaigns gave SNCC chances to successfully test its critique of American imperialism at the ballot box. The campaign enabled SNCC to provide a political voice for the politically inarticulate and impotent black poor. In 1966 in Alabama, SNCC helped to create a black political party called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), “an independent...