Quotes About SNCC

My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.

The most important of these activists was Jimmy Garrett, a member of both the Black Panthers and SNCC. Garrett led discussion groups at which, as he later explained, "we would talk about ourselves seeking identity, and stuff like that. A lot of folks didn't even know they were black. A lot of people thought they were Americans".

Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC's Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots.

I think of Charles Sherrod. He was a SNCC "field secretary" and one of those young people who went into the toughest towns in the deep South to set up Freedom Houses and help local folk organize to change their lives.

Oh, Diane Nash deserves her own film. Diane Nash is a freedom fighter who is still alive and kicking. She was one of the leaders of the desegregation of Nashville, basically. She was a student at Fisk University who was one of the founding members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

There was a deeper problem, and the deeper problem was racism. And how do you picket an attitude? How do you demonstrate against an attitude? And so it was recognized within SNCC that black people lacked power to control their lives, and that having the vote was not going to give them the power they needed to control their lives. And so people started talking about power for black people.