On I've Got the Light of Freedom

This is a really admirable study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi. Charles Payne, following in the footsteps of some other scholars, argue that there were two major, intertwining traditions within the Civil Rights Movement. The first was the community-mobilizing tradition, which focused on moving enormous numbers of people to bring attention to large (although short-term) events. This is the tradition that Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr. belong to. The second tradition is the “community organizing” tradition, which focused on developing ordinary people to lead long-term institutions in favor of Civil Rights. Today, we generally only remember former.

To participate in any sort of Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi before the 1960s was suicide. If a black worker showed an interest in the NAACP or the SNCC, they could lose their job. Those who joined would have the full weight of white supremacist terrorism thrown at them, including being shot at, having churches burned, and having their homes razed. In many ways, rural Mississippi was still worse-off in 1959 than it was in 1866 in terms of race relations. However, with this backdrop, numerous leaders began a community organizing tradition that really took off in 1962. In 1960, less than 2% of black adults were registered to vote, so activists involved with the SNCC made their way across Mississippi to register people to vote, at large risk to themselves—something I think Stacy Abrams’s movement in Georgia is very much a part of.

Although early activists faced some skepticism among black citizens in Mississippi, community members increasingly came to believe in the necessity of organizing themselves for long term solutions. Here, it was everyday people who made changes within Southern society. While we can give the community mobilizing tradition some credit for the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it was everyday people within the community organizing tradition that transformed the state of Mississippi, and the South more broadly, and institutionalized some of the greatest reforms.

After the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, SNCC and other associations dedicated to community organizing lost much of their momentum. The climate of relationships between peoples shifted, and the organizing tradition largely declined—to me, it seems that most Civil Rights activists fall into two camps today: those who demonstrate in favor of movements like Black Lives Matter, and those who seek to litigate their way to equality. Both are extraordinarily useful methods, but it seems that there’s something to SNCC and the community organization tradition that is largely missed—the closest examples I can think of today are Stacy Abrams’s push for protections of voting rights and registering black Americans to vote, and a seemingly small movement in Florida dedicated to reinstating voting rights to felons (it’s metaphorically criminal that states can strip felons of voting rights).

Today, the community organizing tradition is largely forgotten, to the point that Payne points fingers at some black conservatives who have co-opted the Civil Rights Movement and claimed that all earlier black movements for civil, political, and social equality have had outside help, meaning that the 1990s was their moment to reform from within—along conservative lines. Payne believes that claims made by these conservatives as nonsense and can only be sustained by ignoring the grassroots traditions so essential to the Civil Rights Movement.

This book made me think about the Civil Rights Movement in a very different way, and that makes it worthwhile.