Peace and Freedom. Simon Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ which Mitchell Zimmerman joined with Chris Hobson of SDS to present the antiwar case.⁴³ The SNCC activist recalled that a crowd of around 800, a quarter black, had been supportive.⁴⁴ Then, in Little Rock on February 12, a tiny crowd of 19 protesters demonstrated against the war. The action was supported by six people with links to SNCC, including William Hansen and Jim Jones (a black student at the University of Arkansas and former SNCC activist).⁴⁵

      During late 1965 and early 1966 civil rights workers with SNCC’s Arkansas Project were struggling with how to deal with the war in Vietnam. It is clear that, at the very least, the activists felt discomfort over it. However, antiwar sentiment was tempered by concerns about harming the local civil rights movement—as evinced by the comments made both by Hansen during the furor caused by SNCC’s January statement and by O’Connor over the planned NCC action in Pine Bluff. This is a good example of how the “national” affected the “local.” In January 1966, not all SNCC activists were enthusiastically embracing radical positions or emphasizing internationalism. Those in Arkansas, for example, were trying to focus on local grassroots organizing. The story of the Virginia Students’ Civil Rights Committee (VSCRC) also reveals how local and national concerns often conflicted.

      The VSCRC’s founding in December 1964 illustrates the inter-related nature of much of the progressive activism of the 1960s. Howard Romaine, a veteran of SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer, enrolled at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1964, where he met David Nolan, who was active in the University Young Democratic Club. At one YDC meeting, Archie Allen, campus traveler with the Southern Students Organizing Committee (a Nashville-based student group founded in 1964 that sought to bring progressive change to the South) spoke.⁴⁶ He persuaded some of the students to attend an organizing conference in Atlanta. When the delegates returned, they gave a talk to the Virginia Council on Human Relations (VCHR), during the time when the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was headline news. Howard Romaine, who had met Mario Savio during Mississippi Freedom Summer, urged that a sympathy demonstration be staged at the University of Virginia campus. The consensus within the VCHR was that a new group would be needed for non-civil rights movement activities, and the Students for Social Action (SSA) was formed, with Romaine as its chair. At a subsequent SSA meeting it was announced that a civil rights conference, sponsored by SNCC, was being held at Hampton Institute in December 1964.

      Several people who would play important roles in the VSCRC (including Nan Grogan, Bill Towe, Betty Cummings, and Nolan) attended the conference, where they heard a number of SNCC activists recall their experiences as civil rights workers and pass on some of their expertise. Indeed, although many scholars have emphasized SNCC’s retreat from the laborious and exhausting work of nurturing local projects in the aftermath of Freedom Summer and Atlantic City, it is clear that the group did not simply give up on organizing. According to David Nolan, “there was a missionary zeal in the air, and the rather clear desire to bring the Mississippi experience to bear on the Virginia Black Belt.” James Forman told the conference that “you don’t have to go to Mississippi to find these conditions.”⁴⁷ At an evening party during the conference hosted by Virginius Thornton, a history teacher at Hampton, “people kept talking about the need to have a summer project in Virginia.” On the final morning of the conference, a continuations committee was set up to carry out research on race relations in the Virginia black belt and to plan future conferences. The committee chose the name Virginia Students’ Civil Rights Committee.

      The organization’s purpose was to attack “the roots … of poverty, deprivation, and segregation” in the Old Dominion. The group’s former chairman, Ben Montgomery, recalled that they “decided we didn’t need to go to Mississippi to find work that needed doing. We had problems right here.” Drawing on the example of SNCC’s 1964 Summer Project, the young black and white activists, drawn from a dozen Virginia colleges, made plans for a summer of civil rights work during 1965. Their activity would be focused on Virginia’s Southside, a bloc of agricultural counties stretching from Norfolk to Lynchburg, which made up the fourth and fifth congressional districts. The area’s African American residents lived in poverty under a strictly segregated system, and were denied political power by local whites.⁴⁸

      William Faulkner wrote that the whole land of the South is “indubitably, of and by itself, cursed,” and that “all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse.”⁴⁹ Certainly the “bleak country of red clay and scrub pine” that was the Virginia Southside was plagued by the “race problem … as no other section” of the state. Indeed, for more than two centuries the “cursed” land of the black belt, soaked in the blood of slaves and Confederates alike, was inextricably bound up with what James Baldwin termed America’s racial nightmare. Slaves had outnumbered whites in the antebellum period, which made Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection in Southampton County during 1831 particularly terrifying. In 1865, the war to free the slaves had left the region desolate and the plantations plundered—facts which “the lowland [white] South has never forgotten.”⁵⁰ During Reconstruction the area provided the heart of black political power in the state, electing John M. Langston to the House of Representatives in 1888. He was the only African American to represent the Old Dominion in the hallowed halls of Congress until the election of Bobby Scott in 1994. By the mid-twentieth century a rigid caste system, relying on custom and law rather than Klansmen and rope, kept the black population of the Southside firmly “in their place.” African Americans earned about three-fifths the income of whites, and averaged just five years of schooling.⁵¹

      In the years following the Second World War, the region witnessed the rise of the modern black freedom struggle. A long and painful campaign to desegregate Prince Edward County’s public schools eventually made it all the way to Washington, DC, where, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the case as part of Brown v. Board of Education.⁵² In 1960, in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins, protests were held in Richmond, Norfolk, Newport News, Hampton and Suffolk.⁵³ Three years later, the tobacco and textile city of Danville saw mass protests against Jim Crow segregation, which were met by a response violent enough to inspire a SNCC freedom song.⁵⁴

      The Southside counties targeted by the VSCRC proved that no activist needed to travel to Mississippi to find serious problems that needed addressing. Lucious “Duke” Edwards explained that many people believed that “Virginia Negroes are free just because nobody is shooting at them every few nights.” But Edwards, a black activist and student at Virginia State College, pointed out that the Old Dominion was actually a “controlled society” in which African Americans were denied basic civil, economic and political rights.⁵⁵ The fourth congressional district was impoverished, and its black residents lacked political power. The median annual income of the district in the mid-1960s was $3,532, which gave it a ranking of 405 out of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. In most Southside counties, between a quarter and a third of African American families earned less than $1,000 a year, and 86 percent of the adult black population of the Southside had not completed high school.⁵⁶ Most of those who managed to find employment worked as unskilled laborers, and many lived on tenant farms.⁵⁷

      Like countless communities across the South, economic deprivation went hand-in-hand with political impotence. While African Americans made up 47.9 percent of the fourth congressional district’s population, only 18.6 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote.⁵⁸ As W. Lester Banks, executive secretary of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP noted, though Virginia did not use violence to the same extent as Mississippi or Alabama to prevent blacks from voting, “registrars in the Black Belt Counties of Virginia do effectively discourage registration by Negro citizens.” They did so by being uncooperative about opening hours and by requiring blacks to answer questions not required under the state constitution.⁵⁹

      The VSCRC, though an independent organization, was heavily influenced and aided by SNCC. Stanley Wise, a native of North Carolina who had been active in Howard University’s Nonviolent Action Group and the Cambridge civil rights movement, was pivotal in the group’s founding and attempted to pass on СКАЧАТЬ