Julian Bond
Chairman, NAACP
Professor of History, University of Virginia
From the "Explorations in Black Leadership" series
"What We Did: Young Leadership in the 1960s"
April 2, 2002

Julian Bond: We generally imagine leadership to be a neutral attribute possessed by individuals who can use it for either good or evil purposes. It can inspire others to follow the leader’s wishes. It can imbue them with his or her qualities. It can create in them the will to do what they otherwise would not do.

Now, I occupy a leadership position today. I am chairman of the board of the NAACP. I was elected to that position. I was elected to the Georgia General Assembly. But, leadership is not always elected.

In black America as in the larger society, it is sometimes self-selected or appointed. Unlike the larger society in black America, leaders are sometimes anointed by whites to speak for blacks. Leadership in black America has commonly fallen into three categories.

The majority of these figures have been mainstream typified by the leadership of America’s civil rights organizations. Persons like Martin Luther King, Jr. and today’s political class, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, figures like General Colin Powell. These individuals generally accept the assumptions of the American social order. They generally accept the values of American society with one pronounced exception. They insist on an end to white supremacy and all of it’s manifestations in American life. These people are assimilationists or pluralists demanding equal participation in the mainstream society which excludes them usually without demanding any major change beyond an end to their exclusion.

The second is a minority whose members draw their inspiration from Marxism and reject American capitalism while generally accepting the larger culture. But, they also firmly reject white supremacy. In the 1930s, the 1940s, they would have been members of the socialist or communist parties.

The third category is smaller still. It’s members are conservative, sometimes reactionary who embrace the capitalist system but are indifferent to or hostile to Democratic politics and who do not accept the prevailing culture. They don’t believe the dreams of the assimilationist or the pluralist will ever come true. They don’t believe different groups can live together in harmony. They want separation from the dominant group and they insist on cultural and political autonomy. They challenge American norms. They create black substitutes in diet, in religion and group identity. The Nation of Islam is an example of this third group.

Now there is frequently movement between these groups. At various times and places, members of each group could appear interchangeable. I want to talk about leadership in a different vane. Leadership which followed a communal model.

In my early years, it found expression in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was based on a community of brothers and sisters, black and white. And it structure and approach to leadership, it took it’s cues from Ella Baker, a lifelong activist and organizer. She encouraged us to found this organization but she also cautioned strong people don’t need strong leaders. She believed in group-centered leaders rather than leader-centered groups.

Our organization was always highly decentralized. It had an ideological aversion to leadership viewing it as a form of manipulation. SNCC was founded in 1960 by southern students engaged in sit-in demonstrations against lunch counter segregation. Now, there had been sit-ins before 1960. The Howard University NAACP had staged sit-ins at Washington restaurants in 1943. NAACP chapters in Kansas, Oklahoma, North Carolina carried out such demonstrations in the late 1950s.

But, suddenly beginning on February 1^st, 1960 one of them caught fire spreading from Greensboro through the Carolinas and across the Upper South. These protests from Greensboro forward provided a technique through which traditional patterns of white supremacy could be attacked by ordinary people, not just by lawyers, not just by ministers, not just by social scientists. These young people were college students, almost all of them black. Most were southerners, the generation born during the Second World War, raised in segregation, educated in segregated public schools, and now attending segregated black public or private colleges. All of them aware that racism would cheapen the worth of their college degrees.

They had been encouraged by the ’54 Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. Board of Education. They had been terrified by Emma Tills murder in 1955. They had been thrilled by the marching feet in Montgomery that same year. They had been uplifted by the stirring rhetoric of young Martin Luther King. And they had been given a high standard of bravery and courage by the Little Rock Nine in 1957. They were exposed to the Movement for African Independence led by college trained Africans only a few years their senior. And they witnessed the beginning of the worldwide destruction of colonialism.

Between February 1960 and February 1962, thousands of lunch counters and other facilities in a hundred and fifty southern cities were integrated either by non-violent action or by it’s threat. Over 7000 people eagerly went to jail. Over 100,000 participated in this new movement at southern lunch counters or non-southern sympathy demonstrations or in some other supportive role. New groups were formed. Old groups were given new life.

The sit-ins challenged cherished beliefs most whites held dearly. That black people were satisfied with the Jim Crow system and had no desire to see a change. These young people demonstrated clear dissatisfaction and a firm unwillingness to wait for a time to pass or hearts to change. They wanted action and they wanted action now.

The sit-ins struck at the notion expressed by whites in authority, by mayors, governors, and presidents that racial troubles were caused by outsiders, by northerners, by communists or by the Supreme Court. These students represented a homegrown local product, raised, nurtured, and educated in the towns and cities where they protested. There was seldom an outside agitator among them. These protests gave black people a new sense of their own power and their own ability in what had previously seemed to be immovable white power. They upset the traditional conduct of race relations rejecting the established way of negotiating racial progress behind closed doors to consultations between powerful whites and frequently handpicked blacks. And they began to upset the NAACP’s nearly unchallenged dominance as the single organization that fought for racial progress.

Although these protests manifested themselves against segregated lunch counters, they were really about much, much more. A Howard University student wrote years later, "I still carry with me the feeling of those days. Black people in motion against white supremacy. White people never gave the sit-ins that definition probably because the thought of that frightens them. They always talked about the sit-ins in terms of lunch counters and desegregation and civil rights bills." So, if the 1954 Brown decision had theoretically ended segregation through court action, the hostile reaction to Brown paradoxically began to tilt the movement away from dependence on the courts and toward greater extra-legal activism.

The sit-ins combined non-violence and confrontation. For the participants, they fused personal faith and social justice activism peacefully demanding equality now. Not from the court room, not from the pulpit, but in the most public sphere where everyone black and white, was witness. And for many of the witnesses who were white, the sit-ins precipitated a crisis between belief and reality, a conflict that could only be resolved in one of two ways: a further retreat into Negro-phobia or an acknowledgment however grudging and reluctant of the justice of the students’ demands.

The sit-ins, unexpected and therefore all the more challenge moral claim to extend fairness to everyone not just the racially favored caste for some southern white leadership into an adjustment they had promised never to make. That the claim was demanded in the common Judeo-Christian language of whites and blacks made it seem all the more irresistible. The Civil Rights Movement as it had existed until February 1^st, 1960 would never be the same.

It began for me as it did for many more. About February 4^th, 1960, I was sitting in a café near my college campus in Atlanta, Georgia…a place where students went between or instead of classes. A student named Lonny King approached me. He held up a copy of that day’s black newspaper, The Atlanta Daily World. The headline read, "Greensboro Students Sit-In For Third Day." The story told in exact detail how black college students from North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro had for the third day in a row, entered a Woolworth’s Department store and asked for service at the Whites-Only lunch counter. It described their demeanor, their dress, their determination to come back the following day. And for as many days that it took if they were not served.

"Have you seen this?" he demanded. "Yes, I have", I said. "What do you think about it?" he inquired. "I think it is great." "Don’t you think it ought to happen here?" "Oh", I responded, "I am sure it will happen here. Surely someone will do it here."

Then to me it came as it came to others in 1960, a query, an invitation and a command. Why don’t we make it happen here? We canvassed the café, talking to students, inviting them to a meeting to discuss the Greensboro event, and to begin to plan to duplicate it in Atlanta. The Atlanta student movement had begun.

With our recruited students, we formed an organization and reconnoitered downtown lunch counters. Within a few weeks, seventy-seven of us had been arrested. In an early 1960’s freedom song, those who joined together to create the southern movement described themselves and their cause in this way…I want you to help me with the chorus. The chorus goes like this… "Heed the call Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride." Okay. So, I am going to read the first verse and you come in on the chorus. (laughter) "The time was 1960, the place the USA, February 1^st became a history making day. From Greensboro, across the land, the news spread far a wide. As quietly and bravely youth took a giant stride. Heed the call Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride. From Mobile, Alabama, to Nashville, Tennessee, From Denver, Colorado, to Washington, DC, there rose a cry for freedom, for human liberty. So, come along my brothers and take a seat with me. Heed the call Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride. The time has come to prove our faith in all men’s dignity, we serve the cause of justice of all humanity. We are soldiers in the army with Martin Luther King. Peace and love are weapons, non-violence is our creed. Heed the call Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride. This is the land we cherish, a land of liberty. How can Americans deny all men equality? Our constitution says we can’t and Christians, you should know, Jesus died that morning so all mankind could know. Heed the call Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride. And the last verse…No mobs of violence or of hate can turn us from our goal. No Jim Crow laws or police state shall stop my free brown soul. Three thousand students bound in jail still lift their heads in sing, we’ll travel onto freedom, like songbirds on the wing. Heed the call Americans all, side by equal side. Sisters sit in dignity, brothers sit in pride."

At first, almost all of SNCC’s members had been southern blacks and a few southern whites from non-middle class backgrounds. Within a year, SNCC had evolved from a coordinating agency to a hands-on organization helping local leadership in southern rural and small town communities participate in a wide variety of protests and political and economic organizing campaigns. Setting SNCC apart from the civil rights mainstream of the 1960s. It’s members, it’s youth and it’s independence enabled SNCC to remain close to grassroots currents that rapidly escalated the southern movement from sit-ins to freedom rides to voter drives to political organizing. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

In 1960 the dominant organization fighting for civil rights was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It’s preferred method was litigation. It had achieved it’s greatest in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in public schools. It lobbied Congress and Presidents to adopt anti-segregation measures. It’s local branches were often the main civil rights outpost in most communities. The NAACP and similar groups and many, many individuals fought against a tri-partheid system of racial domination, which whites had solidified over time. The system protected the privileges of white society and generated tremendous human suffering for blacks. In the cities and the rural areas of the south, blacks were controlled economically, politically and personally relegated to the worst jobs, prevented often by force and terror from free participation in the political process, denied due process of law, and personal freedoms all whites routinely enjoyed.

A consequence of the segregation system, indeed a reaction to it was the development of institutions in close knit communities: churches, schools, organizations, which nurtured and encouraged the fight against white supremacy. The young people who began the 1960s student sit-in movement lived and learned in such institutions. Their goals were described to the Democratic Conventions platform committee in 1960 by SNCC’s first chair, Marion Barry, as seeking a community in which man can realize the full meaning of self which demands open relationships with other. He declared that southern students wanted an end to racial discrimination in housing, education, employment and voting. The organizations goals were similarly broadly described in 1961 as working full time against the whole value system of the country. And working toward revolution. And in 1963 as a program of developing and building and strengthening indigenous leadership. And by SNCC’s third chairman, John Lewis, at the 1963 March on Washington, as building a serious social revolution against American politics dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation.

SNCC pioneered first time races by blacks in the 1960s Deep South. It added foreign policy demands to the black political agenda. And it broadened the acceptable limits of political discourse. It was in the vanguard in demonstrating that independent black politics could be successful. It’s early attempts to use black candidates to raise issues in races where victory was unlikely, nonetheless expanded the political horizon. It’s development of independent political parties mirrored this philosophy the political form must follow function and that non-hierarchical organizations were demanded to counter the growth of personality cults and self-reinforcing leadership. For much of it’s early history, it battled against the fear, which it kept southern rural blacks from aggressively organizing, acting in their own behalf. It strengthened, bolstered or built aggressive, locally led movements in the communities where it worked.

While organizing grassroots voter registration drives, SNCC workers offered themselves as a protective barrier between private and state sponsored terror and the local communities where they lived and worked. The rural south SNCC entered in 1961 had a long history of civil rights activism. But, in many instances, SNCC staffers were the first paid civil rights workers to base themselves in isolated, rural communities daring to take the message of freedom into the areas where the bigger civil rights organizations feared to tread. SNCC workers were more numerous and less transient than those from other organizations. And their method of operation was different as well.

The NAACP was outlawed in Alabama in 1956, although NAACP activists continued there under other sponsorship. In 1962 the NAACP had one field secretary each in South Carolina, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi and a regional staff headquartered in Atlanta. For SCLC one historian wrote, "It had to adopt a strategy of hit and run, striking one target at a time." Their willingness to run as well as hit provoked consistent criticism from SNCC, which organized the same communities for years rather than months and weeks. "SCLC mobilized," someone said, "SNCC organized."

By the spring of 1963, SNCC had eleven staff members in southwest Georgia and twenty staff with six offices in Mississippi alone. By August, SNCC had projects and permanent staff in a dozen Mississippi communities in Selma, Alabama, in Danville, Virginia, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. There were twelve workers in the Atlanta headquarters, sixty field secretaries, and a hundred and twenty-one full time volunteers. Typically SNCC began campaigns by researching the economic and political history of a target community. Field workers were supplied with detailed information on a community’s economic and financial power. Tracing corporate relationships from local bankers and business leadership in a white citizen’s councils to the largest American banks and corporations. Other research provided the economic and political status of the state’s black population.

SNCC organizers spent their first weeks in a new community meeting local leadership, formulating with them an action plan for more aggressive registration efforts, recruiting new activists through informal conversation, painstaking house to house canvassing and regular mass meeting. "Registering rural southern blacks", one worker wrote, "would greatly liberate American politics as a whole. At the very least, these new voters would defeat the powerful, high bound southern Democrats who are holding the reigns of Congress and the Senate on the basis of being elected year after year from districts where black citizens were denied the franchise." These southern Democratic legislators weren’t just holding up civil rights laws, they were a serious impediment to any kind of liberal, social or economic changes. SNCC and other organizations fought white terror and helped create a willingness to risk danger to register and vote. By one estimate, a majority of the unregistered had at least been confronted with registration challenge by 1965.

SNCC’s broader definition of the civil rights movement’s purposes was obvious from it’s beginnings. At it’s founding conference in April 1960, an executive committee predicted, "This movement will affect other areas beyond lunch counter services such as politics and economics." A report from the conference concluded with a warning about America’s false preoccupations in the early 1960s. It said, "Civil defense and economic power alone will not ensure the continuance of Democracy. Democracy itself demands the great intangible strength of the people able to unite in common endeavor because they are granted human dignity. That challenge cannot be met unless and until all Americans enjoy the full promise of our Democratic heritage, first class citizenship." Another recommendation noted, "Students have a natural claim to leadership in this project. They pioneered in non-violent direct action. Now we can show we understand the political implications of our movement. That it goes far beyond lunch counters. We are convinced of the necessity of all areas joining in the campaign to secure the right to vote. No right is more basic to the American citizen, none more basic to a Democracy."

The organization planned a student staff voter registration project in all black mountain bayous in the Mississippi Delta for the summer of ’61. And the state of Mississippi soon became a laboratory for SNCC’s unique methods of organizing. It’s work began in southwester Mississippi in 1971. But, when it’s workers were driven from the area by violence, state suppression and federal indifference, the organization regrouped in Jackson in Mississippi’s delta counties in early 1962.

Earlier in 1961, SNCC’s Nashville affiliate had continued the freedom rides into Mississippi when Alabama violence threatened to bring them to a halt. After their release from Parchment Penitentiary many freedom riders joined the movement in Macomb. Several became part of the organizing cadre for the Mississippi movement that followed.

Unencumbered by allegiances to the National Democratic Party, which frequently constrained other older organizations, SNCC encouraged two black candidates to run for Congress. A SNCC staffer served as their campaign manager. They ran he said, "To shake loose the fear among Mississippi blacks." And through their progressive platforms gave their intended constituents an expanded notion of what meaning politics might have to their lives. They talked of matters which white Mississippi politicians had never dreamed of mentioning, ideas which resonate today: legislation improving the school the system, a broader plan of medical coverage, special training facilities to develop industrial skills among the great mass of Mississippians who lacked these completely.

To demonstrate the disenfranchised Mississippi blacks did want to vote, SNCC mounted a freedom vote campaign in November ’63. Over 80,000 blacks cast votes in a mock election for Governor and Lieutenant Governor. One hundred northern white students worked in this campaign attracting attention from the Department of Justice and the national media as black registration workers had never done, paving the way for the freedom summer campaign in 1964. Freedom Summer brought almost one thousand mostly white volunteers to Mississippi for the summer of 1964. They helped to build the new political party SNCC had organized, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. They registered voters and they staffed 28 freedom schools. Over the next several years, SNCC backed candidates for Congress, ran in Albany, Georgia, Selma, Alabama, Danville, Virginia, and Infield, North Carolina.

SNCC helped candidates for agricultural stabilization and conservation service boards in five states. Aided school board candidates in Arkansas in ’65. And worked toward solving the economic problems of the southern Negro by organizing the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and a poor people’s corporation, and mounting economic boycotts against discriminatory merchants.

But among it’s contributions to electoral politics was the formation of two political parties and the conception and implementation of my successful campaigns for the Georgia State Legislature. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party or MVDP for short, challenged the seating of the regular, all white delegation for Mississippi at the 1964 Democratic Convention. And in 1965, it challenged the seating of Mississippi Congressional delegation in Washington. These challenges ended in failure. The convention challenge, when pressures from President Lyndon Johnson erased promised support from party liberals, an offer was made and rejected of two convention seats to be filled not by the Freedom Democrats, but by the National Party. Ms. Fannie Lou Hamer declared, "We didn’t come for no two seats when all of us is tired."

The Mississippi challenges has served as a object lesson for strengthening black political independence and the organizing and lobbying efforts for each laid the ground work for Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Also in 1965, the Macomb, Mississippi MFDP branch became the first black political organization to express opposition to the war in Vietnam. State MFDP officials not only refused to repudiate the Macomb statement, they reprinted it in the state party newspaper giving it legitimacy and wider circulation and laying the groundwork for future black opponents of the war.

The MFDP’s legal efforts against white resistance to political equality proved important to black political efforts across the south. An MFDP directed court suit resulted in the Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 decision in Allen v. The State Board of Elections. "For the first time," a legal scholar wrote, "the Supreme Court recognized and applied the principle of minority vote delusion. That the black vote can be affected as much by delusion as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot." The mid-1960s were a turning point in the southern human rights struggle. Federal legislation passed in 1964 and 1965 accomplished the immediate goals of many in the movement. At the same time, northern urban riots in the late 1960s made the nation and southern civil rights workers aware that victories at lunch counters and ballot boxes meant little to blacks locked into northern ghettoes.

SNCC had long believed it’s work ought to be expanded to larger cities in the south and outside the region. My campaign for the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 was an attempt to take the techniques SNCC had learned in the rural south into an urban setting and to carry forward SNCC’s belief that grassroots politics could provide answers to problems faced by America’s urban blacks. In keeping with SNCC’s style, a platform was developed in consultation with the voters. The campaign supported a two-dollar an hour minimum wage, a repeal of Georgia’s Right to Work Law, and abolishment of the death penalty. When the legislature twice refused to seat me, objecting to my support of a SNCC anti-war position, the additional two campaigns gave us a chance to successfully test our critique of American imperialism at the ballot box. That campaign, like the MFDP enabled SNCC to provide a political voice for the politically impotent and inarticulate black poor.

In 1966 in Alabama, SNCC helped create a black political party called the Lyons County Freedom Organization, an independent political party which would prove to be factor in black belt politics in Alabama for years to come. Concurrent with the organizing efforts of the MFDP and the Lyons County Party and the Bond Campaign, SNCC was reassessing it’s concentration on the south. A retreat in May of ’66 heard arguments in favor of SNCC replicating it’s successful southern political organizing efforts in the north and the staff agreed suggesting that the techniques learned in southern campaigns could be employed to ease SNCC’s passage into northern cities. Organizing for political power and community control could mobilize northern urban dwellers they contended. So, projects were established in Washington, DC, to fight for home rule, in Columbus, Ohio where community foundation was organized, in New York City’s Harlem where SNCC workers organized early efforts at community control of public schools, in Los Angeles where SNCC helped monitor local police and joined an effort in creating freedom city in black neighborhoods, and in Chicago where SNCC workers began to build an independent political party and demonstrated against segregated schools.

That was then, this is now. The struggle goes on.