Amzie Moore, Bob Moses and SNCC's turn to voter registration

What did SNCC look like in 1960?

In its first months SNCC was a network of student sit-in groups, and most of its members expected to keep working on desegregating public places. Ella Baker, who had organized NAACP branches across the South in the 1940s, believed the students could do more. She suggested that Bob Moses, a young New York teacher who had volunteered in SNCC's Atlanta office, travel through the Deep South that summer to find local leaders, and she gave him names. One was Amzie Moore.

What did Moore tell Moses?

Moore argued that voting was the issue that mattered in the Delta, and that SNCC should send young people to help register Black voters. He knew the region, its plantations and its sheriffs, and he had spent fifteen years building contacts through the NAACP and the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In the fall of 1960, at SNCC's second conference in Atlanta, Moore invited SNCC to join his voter registration work and promised to support its workers. The Mississippi Freedom Trail marker in Cleveland says he persuaded Moses to recruit students, setting the stage for Freedom Summer.

Why did the work start in McComb instead of the Delta?

Moore's plan needed people and money SNCC did not yet have, and when Moses returned in 1961, local leaders in McComb invited him first. The McComb project met fierce violence, including the killing of farmer Herbert Lee that September. In 1962 SNCC moved into the Delta, working first around Greenwood and in Sunflower County, with Moore's house in Cleveland as a base. See our page on SNCC in Mississippi.

How did this lead to Ruleville?

In 1962 Moore introduced Charles McLaurin, Charlie Cobb and Landy McNair at a church in Ruleville, and within weeks the Sunflower County project had held the mass meeting at William Chapel that brought in Fannie Lou Hamer. McLaurin became Hamer's closest partner in the movement. Moore also took Moses and Dorie Ladner to recruit Willie Peacock, a Rust College student from Charleston, Mississippi, who became a SNCC field secretary.

What did Moore teach the young organizers?

The SNCC Digital Gateway says he taught field workers how to operate in rural communities. He also connected them to the network of local leaders he had built across the state since the 1940s. This address, a_mooreI.html, comes from an earlier site on this domain; Moore's full biography is on amzie_moore.html.