What Was the Role of the SNCC During the Civil Rights Movement?

The SNCC, or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, performed an important function in the civil rights activities during the 1960s. The SNCC's role was to promote and organize non-violent student protests. These programs took a number of different forms. 

To understand the role of the SNCC, it is helpful to look at some of the things the SNCC did.

• The SNCC was one of the principal organizations to arrange sit ins and freedom rides.

• Another primary role the SNCC played was in their efforts to increase voter registration in the South. They concentrated specifically in the Southern states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The SNCC also played a major role in many other well known organized functions during the civil rights movement as well. Some of these organized events included:

• The 1963 March on Washington
• The Mississippi Freedom Summer
• The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party

Evolution of the SNCC

Stanford University provides an overview of the SNCC, its formation and some of the work that was done by the organization. A brief summary of this information is found below and more details can be found at Stanford.edu.

• The SNCC was born out of several 1960's meetings held by Ella Baker at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. While there were other civil rights groups at this time, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Ella and the students kept the SNCC as a separate, autonomous organization.
• The SNCC grew to have many supporters that helped them to raise funds for their work that they arranged in the South for the Civil Rights Movement.
• All of the early organized events arranged by this organization were known to be nonviolent.
• However, in the late 1960s, as they continued to fight for civil rights, the group's leadership changed. The new chairman, Stokely Carmichael, who was elected in 1966, did not fully support the "non-violent" ideology that had been at the heart of the groups initial mission. He also advocated "black power" instead of interracial cooperation as had been the mission of the early organization.
• While Carmichael's activism garnered national attention for the organization, internally the SNCC was very divided among those who remained true to the original purpose of non-violence and interracial cooperation and those who followed Carmichael's "black power" ideologies.

Despite the internal strife and a decline in membership,  the SNCC continued to exist for a number of years after the civil rights movement.

Lasting Role of the SNCC

Chapters of the SNCC had been located all over the United States during the heyday of the organization. However, the organization essentially disappeared in the early 1970s. Although some of the chapters continued to arrange protests for different occasions, they did this on their own without support from the original organization.

One of the best known chapters to continue beyond the disbandment of the SNCC was the chapter in San Antonio, Texas where the group was part SNCC and part Black Panthers. This chapter held protests as recently as 1979 to raise awareness for the freedom of Nelson Mandela. Today the SNCC is making a comeback at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky.