Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-ckgrl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-17T17:00:07.208Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tell It Like It Isn't: SNCC and the Media, 1960–1965

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2014

MARK JOSEPH WALMSLEY
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In recent decades, revisionist challenges to the traditional “declension hypothesis” have generated a much more nuanced and positive approach to the Black Power movement. However, attempts to explain the narrative's initial popularity have too often focussed on the latter half of the decade and blamed a media-assisted white backlash or the inflammatory rhetoric of Black Power activists. Concentrating instead on the earlier half of the decade, this article examines the media strategies of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and demonstrates how its public approach to nonviolence and interracial organizing purposefully hid developments within the movement that were seen to be at odds with the dominant discourse. By highlighting the ways in which the early media strategies of a militant organization like SNCC strengthened and legitimized a misleading movement narrative, this article challenges scholars to be more critical of early movement rhetoric and re-examine how and why Black Power was portrayed as a fundamental break with the past.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 291 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See “Black Power Is Black Death,” New York Times, 7 July 1966 (hereafter NYT); “As Negro Militants Challenge Moderates,” NYT, 16 July 1967.

2 M. S. Handler, “Rights Unit Bars Truce in Battle,” NYT, 29 Nov. 1963; “The Politics of Frustration,” NYT, 7 Aug. 1966.

3 “Mobilization of Black Strength,” Life, 6 Dec. 1968; “Civil Rights: Ahead of Its Time,” Time, 30 Sep. 1966 (from the online archive at http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,836425,00.html, accessed 19 Nov. 2013); M. S. Handler, “Wilkins Says Black Power Leads Only to Black Death,” NYT, 6 July 1966.

4 Wilkins's portent of “black death,” for example, is often cited in early works, including the first major monograph on SNCC: Carson, Clayborne, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 220.

5 Gitlin, Todd, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Toronto and New York: Bantam Books, 1987)Google Scholar.

6 Van Deburg, William L., New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–75 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ogbar, Jeffrey O. G., Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Joseph, Peniel E., “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 96 (2009), 751–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Tyson, Timothy B., Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Theoharis, Jeanne F. and Woodard, Komozi, eds., Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Countryman, Matthew, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Joseph, Peniel E., Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006)Google Scholar; Wendt, Simon, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jeffries, Hasan Kwame, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

8 Joseph, “The Black Power Movement: A State of the Field,” 755, 751.

9 Gritter, Elizabeth and Bond, Julian, “Interview with Julian Bond,” Southern Cultures, 12, 1 (2006), 76–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Murphree, Vanessa, The Selling of Civil Rights: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Use of Public Relations (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar; Raiford, Leigh, “‘Come Let Us Build a New World Together’: SNCC and Photography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Quarterly, 59 (2007), 1129–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Julian Bond in John Neary, “Julian Bond, A Militant Inside the System,” Life, 8 Nov. 1968, 46; Raiford, 1140.

12 Ross, Susan Dente, “‘Their Rising Voices’: A Study of Civil Rights, Social Movements, and Advertising in the New York Times,” Journal of Mass Communication, 75 (1998), 518–34, 519Google Scholar.

13 For an example in literature on the feminist movement see Barker-Plummer, Bernadette, “News as a Political Resource: Media Strategies and Political Identity in the U. S. Women's Movement, 1966–1975,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 12, 3 (1995), 306–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; For the LGBT movement see Valocchi, Steve, “Riding the Crest of a Protest Wave? Collective Action Frames in the Gay Liberation Movement, 1969–1973,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 4, 1 (1999), 59–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the New Left see Gitlin, Todd, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, 2nd edn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

14 This flaw is not limited to historians. See, for example, Hon, Linda Childers, “‘To Redeem the Soul of America’: Public Relations and the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of Public Relations Research, 9, 3 (1997), 163–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 John Lewis in Grimes, Charlotte, “Civil Rights and the Press,” Journalism Studies, 6 (2005), 117–34, 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 John Lewis in “Ex-Chairman Quits ‘Black Power’ SNCC,” Washington Post, 1 July 1966.

17 Roberts, Gene and Klibanoff, Hank, Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Vintage, 2007)Google Scholar.

18 Melvin N. Coffee in Grimes, 125–26.

19 Mantler, Gordon, “‘The Press Did You In’: The Poor People's Campaign and the Mass Media,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, 3 (2010), 33–54, 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights; Straughan, Dulcie M., “‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’: The Public Relations Efforts of the NAACP, 1960–1965,” Public Relations Review, 30, 1 (2004), 49–60, 49–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Mantler, 47 fn 9.

22 Murphree, 10.

23 James Lawson, “SNCC Statement of Purpose,” Student Voice, June 1960, in Carson, Clayborne, ed., The Student Voice, 1960–1965: Periodical of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Westport, CT: Meckler, 1990)Google Scholar.

24 “Police Are for Protection,” Ebony, May 1964, 56.

25 Charles F. McDew, “Transcript of Charles F. McDew,” n.d., Morland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (copy in author's possession).

26 For an example of such treatment see Walker, Jenny, “The ‘Gun-Toting’ Gloria Richardson: Black Violence in Cambridge, Maryland,” in Ling, Peter J. and Monteith, Sharon, eds., Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 169–86Google Scholar.

27 McDew; Janet Jemmott Moses in Holsaert, Faith S., ed., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010)Google Scholar, 266; Jean Wheeler Smith in Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed., Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 138.

28 Don Harris, “SNCC Staff Meeting Minutes, June 9–11, 1964,” Vertical File, Box 159–14, Folder 7, Civil Rights Documentation Project Material, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University (copy in author's possession).

29 Sam Walker, “Interview with Sam Walker” by Mark Joseph Walmsley, 22 March 2009 (transcript in the author's possession).

30 Baker, Elaine Delott, “They Sent Us This White Girl,” in Curry, Constance, ed., Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 253–88, 276.

31 Joseph Alsop, “Matter of Fact: Murder by Night,” Washington Post, 17 June 1964.

32 Julian Bond, “Letter to the Washington Post,” 30 June 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.1, Slide 496. Whilst the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was officially a coalition of SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP, many projects were entirely staffed and directed by SNCC. Consequently, publicity for COFO events often fell to both local and national SNCC communication workers. This dominance allowed the organization to tailor COFO's publicity to suit its own agenda, much to the ire of Roy Wilkins, who claimed in 1965 that COFO press releases were reproducing “the same phrases today that we heard during the Stalin era.” Fred Powledge, “N.A.A.C. P. to Hold Citizenship Clinics,” New York Times, 5 Jan. 1965, 20.

33 Ruby Dorris, “SNCC Staff Meeting Minutes, 9–11 Jun. 1964,” Vertical File, Box 159–14, Folder 7, Civil Rights Documentation Project Material, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University (copy in author's possession); Julian Bond in Raines, Howell, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (New York: Penguin, 1983)Google Scholar, 267.

34 Bond, Julian, “Nonviolence: An Interpretation,” in Jackson, Esther Cooper and Pohl, Constance, eds., Freedomways Reader: Prophets in Their Own Country (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 72–76Google Scholar.

35 Bayard Rustin, “Nonviolence on Trial,” Fellowship, July 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.1, Slide 518; Julian Bond, “Letter to James S. Best,” 28 Oct. 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.1, Slide 517.

36 James S. Best, “Letter to Julian Bond,” 2 Nov. 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.1, Slide 521.

37 Walker, Jenny, “A Media-Made Movement? Black Violence and Nonviolence in the Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Ward, Brian, ed., Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 41–66Google Scholar.

38 Fred Powledge in Murphree, The Selling of Civil Rights, 59–60.

39 Nancy, “WATS Report to Mike Sayer,” n.d., SNCC Papers, A.VII.7, Slide 97.

40 Melvin N. Coffee in Grimes, “Civil Rights and the Press,” 126.

41 Gans, Herbert J, Democracy and the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, 53.

42 Julian Bond, “Letter to Cynthia Washington,” 14 Dec. 1963, SNCC Papers, A.VII.1, Slide 256.

43 Gans, 50–55.

44 In 1973, Leon Sigal found that 49.5% of New York Times and Washington Post articles depended on such practices. Sigal, Leon V., Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1973)Google Scholar, 115.

45 Julian Bond, “Letter to Bruce Hanson,” 16 May 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.3, Slide 470.

46 Anon. and James Forman in “Staff Meeting,” 13 June 1966, SNCC Papers, A.VI.19, Slide 708. Interestingly the whole passage talking about guns was labelled “to cut,” suggesting that even internally such discussions were censored.

47 Stoper, Emily, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The Growth of Radicalism in a Civil Rights Organization (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Inc., 1989)Google Scholar, 3.

48 James Lawson, “SNCC Statement of Purpose,” Student Voice, June 1960, in Carson, The Student Voice, 3.

49 Carmichael, Stokely and Thelwell, Ekwueme Michael, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003)Google Scholar, 306.

50 Hansen, for example, who had become the second white person in SNCC ever to be promoted to field director when he was chosen to head the Arkansas Project in 1962, soon stepped down from his leadership role and became codirector of the project with local African American leader James Jones in 1964. Zellner, Bob, The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2008)Google Scholar, 123.

51 Ibid., 293.

52 Zellner (ibid., 208), for example, remembers one student from Talladega College believing that his hair would smell like chicken feathers because he was white.

53 Prathia Hall, “Field Report,” 8 March 1963, SNCC Papers, A.IV.155, Slide 862.

54 Bob Moses in Carmichael and Thelwell, 353–54.

55 Powledge, Fred, Free at Last? The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991)Google Scholar, 560.

56 Charles Cobb, “Field Report,” 8 Nov. 1963, SNCC Papers, A.IV.81, Slide 968.

57 Ibid.

58 Ivanhoe Donaldson in Dittmer, John, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994)Google Scholar, 209. In deference to African American leadership of the movement, whites at the meeting abstained.

59 Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: Open Hand, 1985)Google Scholar, 374.

60 Bob Moses in Carmichael and Thelwell, 355; Moses also advocates this view in Hampton, Henry and Fayer, Steve, eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1991)Google Scholar, 184.

61 Claude Sitton, “Racial Problems Put to President: Negro Student Chiefs Urge Him to Act,” NYT, 18 April 1960; Claude Sitton, “Negro Groups Split on Georgia Protest,” NYT, 18 Dec. 1961.

62 “10 Indicted in Virginia,” NYT, 22 June 1963.

63 Trillin, “Letter from Jackson,” n.d., SNCC Papers, A.VIII.283, Slides 1057–8.

64 McAdam, Doug, Freedom Summer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, 103.

65 Communication Section, “Printed Communication Manual,” summer 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.4, Slide 983.

66 Julian Bond, “Letter to Julie Prettyman,” 12 Sept. 1963, SNCC Papers, A.VII.3, Slide 97–100; Barbara Brandt, “Memo to Coworkers,” 20 Nov. 1964, SNCC Papers, A.VII.4, Slide 841.

67 McAdam, 103.

68 Dorothy Dewberry, “Letter to the Editor,” n.d., SNCC Papers, A.IX.131, Slide 932.

69 Fager, Charles, White Reflections on Black Power (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Cmpany, 1967)Google Scholar, 91.

70 Charles Cobb in Raines, My Soul Is Rested, 287.

71 Dona Moses in “SNCC Staff Meeting Minutes, June 9–11, 1964,” Vertical File, Box 159–14, Folder 7, Civil Rights Documentation Project Material, Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, Howard University (copy in author's possession).

72 Aide to Dr. King in Gene Roberts, “Whites' Role Splits Leaders of March,” New York Times, 12 June 1966.

73 Louis E. Lomax, “The White Liberal,” Ebony, Aug. 1965, 66.

74 Larry Rubin, “Transcript of interview with Larry Rubin, 11 Nov. 1995, Interview conducted by John Rachal,” Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, McCain Library & Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, at http://digilib.usm.edu/u?/coh,9831, accessed 20 Aug. 2011.

75 Kenneth Clark and James Baldwin in “The Negro and the American Promise: Three Perspectives,” PBS, at www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/mlk/sfeature/sf_video_pop_04b_tr_qry.html, accessed 27 March 2012.

76 James Forman, “Staff Meeting,” 13 June 1966, SNCC Papers, A.VI.19, Slide 699; see Dorothy Miller, “Letter to Police Chief Herbert T. Jenkins,” 18 Oct. 1962, SNCC Papers, A.IV.362; “Press Release,” 16 April 1962, SNCC Papers, A.VII.3, Slide 786.

77 Joanne Gavin, “Position Paper: Funds-Sources and Staff Salaries,” SNCC Papers, A.VI.24, Slide 787.

78 James Forman, “Staff Meeting,” 13 June 1966, SNCC Papers, A.VI.19, Slide 699; Good, Paul, “The Meredith March,” in Carson, Clayborne, ed., Reporting Civil Rights, Volume II (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2003)Google Scholar, 495–515, 495.

79 Julian Bond, “Letter to the New York Post,” 17 May 1962, SNCC Papers, A.VII.1, Slides 920–48.

80 Powledge, Free at Last?, 571.

81 In one of the movement's many ironies, David Danzig charges that white NAACP Defense Fund head Jack Greenburg was asked not to attend the NAACP conference at which Roy Wilkins denounced Black Power as racially divisive. David Danzig, “In Defense of Black Power,” Commentary, Sept. 1966, SNCC Papers, A.VIII.134, Slide 837. For a discussion of Black Power within the NAACP see Hall, Simon, “The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966–1969,” The Historian, 69 (2007), 49–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Haines, Herbert H., “Black Radicalization and the Funding of Civil Rights: 1957–1970,” Social Problems, 32 (1984), 31–43, 36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Joseph, Peniel E., “Introduction: Toward a Historiography of the Black Power Movement,” in Joseph, , ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar, 1–26, 3.