SNCC in Mississippi: the student organizers who reached the Delta

How did SNCC begin?

SNCC grew out of the lunch counter sit-ins that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. That April, Ella Baker, then working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, invited student protest leaders to a conference at Shaw University, her alma mater, in Raleigh. She encouraged them to form their own organization rather than become a youth wing of an older group. The new committee was meant to coordinate local student movements, and it valued decisions made by the people doing the work.

Why did SNCC go to Mississippi?

Local Black leaders in Mississippi asked for help with voter registration, and a young SNCC worker named Bob Moses listened. In 1960 Moses traveled through the state on Ella Baker's referral and met Amzie Moore in Cleveland, who told him that the vote, not lunch counters, was what the Delta needed. In 1961 SNCC began a voter registration project in McComb, in southwest Mississippi, where violence was swift: Herbert Lee, a farmer who had worked with the project, was shot and killed that September. Our page on Amzie Moore and SNCC tells that part of the story.

By 1962 SNCC was working in the Delta, around Greenwood and in Sunflower County. Civil rights groups in the state, including SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP and SCLC, worked together under the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), with SNCC providing most of the staff.

What did SNCC field secretaries do?

They lived in local communities, went door to door, held mass meetings and drove people to the courthouse to try to register. Field secretaries were often in their late teens or early twenties and earned very little. They taught people how to fill out the long Mississippi registration form, helped families who lost jobs or homes in reprisal, and wrote reports of every arrest and threat to the SNCC office.

The method SNCC used in Mississippi is often called organizing, as opposed to mobilizing. The goal was to find and support local leaders who would keep the work going after the organizers left. Fannie Lou Hamer was exactly the kind of leader the method aimed to find.

How did Fannie Lou Hamer fit into SNCC?

She was older than most of the staff, a local woman with deep roots in Sunflower County, and her singing and speaking made her one of SNCC's most effective organizers. Charles McLaurin, who had begun SNCC's project in the county in August 1962, became her close partner and later managed her 1964 campaign for Congress. The SNCC Digital Gateway notes that SNCC first noticed her because of her voice. Within a year of her first registration attempt she was a field secretary herself.

She traveled with SNCC well beyond Mississippi: to the Atlantic City convention in 1964, to Guinea with a SNCC delegation that September, and to campuses and churches in the North to raise support. See the Guinea trip.

What happened to SNCC later?

After 1964 SNCC moved away from integrated organizing toward Black Power, and by the early 1970s it had largely dissolved. John Lewis chaired it from 1963 to 1966; Stokely Carmichael, who succeeded him, popularized the phrase "Black Power" in 1966. Many Mississippi organizers, including Hamer, kept working locally through the Freedom Democratic Party, Head Start and economic projects. Our page on the MFDP follows that political work.