With its radical ideology and effective tactics, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the cutting edge of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. This sympathetic yet evenhanded book records for the first time the complete story of SNCC's evolution, of its successes and its difficulties in the ongoing struggle to end white oppression.

At its birth, SNCC was composed of black college students who shared an ideology of moral radicalism. This ideology, with its emphasis on nonviolence, challenged Southern segregation. SNCC students were the earliest civil rights fighters of the Second Reconstruction. They conducted sit-ins at lunch counters, spearheaded the freedom rides, and organized voter registration, which shook white complacency and awakened black political consciousness. In the process, Clayborne Carson shows, SNCC changed from a group that endorsed white middle-class values to one that questioned the basic assumptions of liberal ideology and raised the fist for black power. Indeed, SNCC's radical and penetrating analysis of the American power structure reached beyond the black community to help spark wider social protests of the 1960s, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Carson's history of SNCC goes behind the scene to determine why the group's ideological evolution was accompanied by bitter power struggles within the organization. Using interviews, transcripts of meetings, unpublished position papers, and recently released FBI documents, he reveals how a radical group is subject to enormous, often divisive pressures as it fights the difficult battle for social change.

About the Author
Clayborne Carson is Professor of History at Stanford University and Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project.

Reviews
Not only an important contribution to the history of the struggle for civil rights; it also enlarges our general understanding of contemporary politics and culture. -- Abigail Thernstrom * New Republic *
To anyone who would understand SNCC, this is an essential book. -- James Polk * Newsday *
This splendid history of SNCC has successfully captured the dynamic interplay of two parallel but contradictory elements... This is a well-researched, balanced, and analytical assessment of the history of a primarily black student activist group that, with all its failings, made its special contribution to the political awakening of American blacks and to the changing of American institutions and practices. -- Abraham Holtzman * American Political Science Review *
In Clayborne Carson SNCC has at last found a scholar capable of probing its radical and fractious nature in a manner both sympathetic and prudently critical... Students of social protest will be deeply in the author's debt for years to come. -- Francis M. Wilnoit * American Historical Review *



Book Information
ISBN 9780674447271
Author Clayborne Carson
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press
Weight(grams) 503g