Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- SNCC Organizing Presence in Alabama: A Partial Timeline

SNCC Organizing Presence in Alabama: A Partial Timeline

May 1961 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Riders arrived in Anniston. The KKK threw firebombs on the bus, which forced the Freedom Riders out of the bus into the violent arms of the KKK, who wielded bats and chains upon the Freedom Riders.
Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, and after meeting with unabated KKK assault, the bus challenge was aborted.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) resumed the bus challenge and arrived in Montgomery into the awaiting brutal KKK assault, which became known as the Mother's Day Massacre.
Freedom Riders were escorted by the local leadership of Rev. Solomon S. Seay, Sr. to safe refuge in the historic Madison Park community, named after Black patriarch, Eli Madison, who bought the Mays Plantation of 634 acres in 1881.
Freedom Riders and over 1,000 Montgomerians at a Mass meeting were held hostage in Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy's church, First Baptist, for 16 hours while the KKK menacingly encircled the church, burned cars and threw fire and stink bombs into the church.
CORE's James Farmer arrived in Montgomery and stayed in the home of SNCC supporter, Mrs. Idessa Redden. A strategy was determined for the Freedom Ride to continue to Jackson, Ms.

1963 SNCC organizers, under the leadership of Bernard and Colia LaFayette, were sent to Selma to assist with the local on-going Black Movement for 1st-Class Citizenship, symbolized by the Right to vote.
The organized struggle for the right to vote by Black Alabamians began in the 1930s. By 1960, a state-wide movement was in motion with Voters Leagues and Citizenship Schools to prepare Blacks in filling out literacy tests in counties with significant Black populations.

1964 A large, mainly Black, SNCC contingent came to Tuskegee (Institute) University, which became the RRR (rest, relaxation and retreat) for SNCC planning and Movement Building. Tuskegee students formed the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL), which entered into equal coalition with SNCC.
SNCC and TIAL organizers fanned out into the Black Belt counties of Macon, Bullock, Lowndes, Wilcox, Dallas, Greene and Sumter for Movement Building.

1965 The Dallas County Voters League invited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organizers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as violent, White resistance mounted against SNCC and local organizers.
At a night voting rights march in adjacent Marion County, Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot by state troopers when he attempted to aid his 80 year old grandfather who had been beaten by state troopers, and to protect his mother from the troopers billy clubs. When Jackson died from gun-shot wounds on 2/26/65, a decision was made to march from Selma to Montgomery, the seat of the State Capitol, to petition for unfettered voting rights and for a redress of the deadly wrongs perpetrated by the state.
Thousands of Americans, Black and White, came to Selma to join the march after seeing on television the brutal and savage attack of state troopers upon Blacks as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge en-route to Montgomery. This sad event became known as Bloody Sunday, 3/7/65.
On 3/11/65, Unitarian Minister James Reeb, a White Chicagoan who came to support the march, was beaten to death by KKK sympathizers.
The marchers finally began on 3/21/65 and arrived in Montgomery on 3/25/65, covering 54 miles.
That night, Viola Luizzo, a march supporter, while driving her car, was murdered by the KKK with FBI complicity.
On 8/6/65, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law.
On 8/20/65, Episcopalian seminary student Jonathan Daniels, who remained in Selma after the March, was murdered by a deputy sheriff in Lowndes County. Jonathan was attempting to protect Tuskegee coed, Ruby Nell, when he caught the fatal bullet.
(On 11/12/1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the law initiated by U.S. Congressman and SNCC organizer John Lewis [and earlier pushed for such a recognition by SNCC organizer Bob Mants who remained in Lowndes County since the March and raised his family in the county], designating the March route as the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail.)
Additional, mainly White, SNCC workers came to Tuskegee. After a tour through the Black Belt, White SNCC workers commented on the beauty of the cotton-fields, now high in the peak of the cotton-picking season. These SNCC workers lacked the insightful appreciation that cotton represented neo-slavery for Black people, including children who were forced to pick cotton until the end of October, and then taken out of the county-training schools in March to plant cotton. Throughout the spring and summer, Black people were forced to weed, hoe and chop cotton in order to eke out a miserable living.
TIAL unanimously agreed that it would not be productive for White SNCC organizers to work in Alabama s Black Belt. SNCC s Executive Committee agreed.

1965-66 With the passage of the 1965 VRA, Blacks, especially tenant farmers and sharecroppers, registered in record numbers in 90% Black Belt Lowndes County. As a result, plantation landowners evicted Black farmers and their families.
SNCC, which had organizers in the country, procured tents, and with the leadership of local Blacks, erected Tent City on land owned by Blacks.
Concurrent with this development was the crystallization that Black people had a right to defend themselves against racist perpetrators and the right to self-determination. This philosophy was the foundation for the formation of the independent party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization with the Black Panther as its symbol. This was the first Black Panther Party (BPP) in the country.
Eldridge Clever visited Lowndes County to write about the BPP for Ramparts magazine. Cleaver carried the concept back to Oakland, CA, whereupon he and others established a BPP in that city. Immediately thereafter, the BPP took on a national character and established chapters throughout the nation, particularly in urban cities in South, North, East and West. The quest for Black Power as A means for self-determination to govern their own lives in Lowndes County was the quiet, rallying call of the people.

1966 On January 3, TIAL/SNCC organizer Sammy Younge, Jr. was shot and Killed for daring to us the white-only public toilet in a Tuskegee gas station by the White attendant, Marvin Segrest.
After the Home-going Services for Sammy Younge, Jr., attended en-masse by SNCC organizers, Tuskegee students demanded a shut-down of the university and declared a moratorium, the first-ever held on a USA university campus. (Read James Forman's Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement.)
May, 1966. Several Tuskegee students and faculty members joined SNCC Staff in Atlanta.
Summer, 1966. SNCC supporter, Mrs. Idessa Redden, organized a Montgomery contingent to join SNCC s Kwame Ture (aka Stokley Carmichael) and Mukasa (aka Willie Ricks) and SCLC's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy and Bernard Lee in the Mississippi March Against Fear. (Redden's photos of the March are in her collection at Trenholm Tech Archives.) Black Power! shouted by Mukasa and Kwame on the March became a household goal in the national Black community.
November 1966. Lowndes County BPP held its first independent political Election for local offices. SNCC organizers assisted in political education and get-out-the-vote workshops. US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy pleaded with local residents to forfeit their independent thrust and to join the Democratic Party. The sell-out of the Democratic Party and the insult to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party were still vivid in the minds and hearts. Kennedy's request was soundly rejected by the local leadership and the people.

1967 February, 1967. SNCC called the first Black Power! Conference, which was held in Tuskegee.
December 1967. SNCC organizers attended the trial which found Sammy Younge, Jr. s murderer not guilty. Tuskegee University students shut down the campus and a second moratorium of the University was declared. Students painted a yellow strip down the back of a Confederate statute in the downtown square of Tuskegee and attributed the deed by painting Black Power! at the base.

1967-1968 Addendum by Michael Wright
The SNCC Project in Macon County was active through June, 1968. At that point I closed the SNCC Office on Fonville Street (which I opened around the summer of 1967) and stopped sending supporting funds to SNCC workers in Lowndes and Dallas counties because there was no more money left and because I left the county with a contract on my life on June 6, 1968.
During the interim from the period December, 1967, to June, 1968:
(1) the local SNCC project met in that office, organized a support mission to the students who were among the wounded at South Carolina State Univ. in Feb. 1968 (four student killed then; Cleve Sellers went to jail; SLED specifically tried to assasinate him.),
(2) conducted some anti-war and anti-draft agitation including physically attacking reps of the US State Dept. visiting Tuskegee in Feb. '68, (
3) organized effective action to stop the Kangaroo courts (I think they called it a "judicial council" hearings) that operated on Tuskegee's campus,
(4) organized in east and south Macon county (voted registration and attempted to get a Freedom Organization off the ground there), and finally,
(5) in late Feb. started the plan (after I returned from So. Carolina full of piss and vinegar) to take over Tuskegee and detain its Board of Trustees which occurred on April 3 or 4th of 1968. MLK Jr. was shot in the middle of that takeover, something that added dire aspects to it, and Lurleen Wallace died the next day; but not until she signed the executive order (at Lucius Amerson's request) to send the Alabama National Guard and 1/2 of its state troopers in on us to take the campus back. The FBI was involved within hours because we took over the telephone switchboard at Tuskegee which also served phones in Macon and Lee counties.
This National Guard contingent also included members of the de-mobilized Special Forces unit that Wm. Pepper Esq.,says supervised the assassination of MLK Jr. that same week (see "An Act of State;" his corrected version of the MLK Jr. assasination).
Most of this is documented in the final chapter of "Sammy Younge Jr." by Jim Forman. During this time SNCC was fragmenting; there were virtually no actual members of SNCC working for SNCC (as formal paid staff) because SNCC was financially bankrupt. Rap [Brown] was still chairman, or Phil [Hutchings] was soon to be chairman.
Wendy Paris [came] back on the same day MLK Jr. got killed and witnessed a part of the take-over of the campus to which I alluded (in fact, he helped me a good deal in the critical hours because he was helping to keep track of the movement of the National Guard toward our position on during the next day and a half)....
Scott B. [Smith], of necessity, fled Macon County (Amerson's deputies were breaking in his front door as he was fleeing into the woods out of the back door) in the second week of April '68; following Jimmy Rogers to California who [went there] as early as Feb. '68.
As I said, I as project director personally closed the last SNCC office to operate in Macon County in June, '68, whereupon I too had to leave. No protection. No officers of SNCC interested except Jim Forman — who was delighted at what we did. My house was raised (literally!) on Fonville Street, I had a pre-ulceritic condition, was banned from John Andrews hospital or any other part of the campus for medical care, and then subjected to a contract to kill me by hit-an- run... (Me and Mr. Woodson found out about the plan, me from a white MD in Tuskegee — and he and his wife paid for a ticket for me to get from Columbus., GA to Atlanta and then to San Francisco). That's how I got to west coast.

May 1961	Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Freedom Riders arrived in Anniston. The KKK threw firebombs on the bus, which forced the Freedom Riders out of the bus into the violent arms of the KKK, who wielded bats and chains upon the Freedom Riders. Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham, and after meeting with unabated KKK assault, the bus challenge was aborted. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) resumed the bus challenge and arrived in Montgomery into the awaiting brutal KKK assault, which became known as the Mother's Day Massacre. Freedom Riders were escorted by the local leadership of Rev. Solomon S. Seay, Sr. to safe refuge in the historic Madison Park community, named after Black patriarch, Eli Madison, who bought the Mays Plantation of 634 acres in 1881. Freedom Riders and over 1,000 Montgomerians at a Mass meeting were held hostage in Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy's church, First Baptist, for 16 hours while the KKK menacingly encircled the church, burned cars and threw fire and stink bombs into the church. CORE's James Farmer arrived in Montgomery and stayed in the home of SNCC supporter, Mrs. Idessa Redden. A strategy was determined for the Freedom Ride to continue to Jackson, Ms.
1963	SNCC organizers, under the leadership of Bernard and Colia LaFayette, were sent to Selma to assist with the local on-going Black Movement for 1st-Class Citizenship, symbolized by the Right to vote. The organized struggle for the right to vote by Black Alabamians began in the 1930s. By 1960, a state-wide movement was in motion with Voters Leagues and Citizenship Schools to prepare Blacks in filling out literacy tests in counties with significant Black populations.
1964	A large, mainly Black, SNCC contingent came to Tuskegee (Institute) University, which became the RRR (rest, relaxation and retreat) for SNCC planning and Movement Building. Tuskegee students formed the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL), which entered into equal coalition with SNCC. SNCC and TIAL organizers fanned out into the Black Belt counties of Macon, Bullock, Lowndes, Wilcox, Dallas, Greene and Sumter for Movement Building.
1965	The Dallas County Voters League invited the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organizers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as violent, White resistance mounted against SNCC and local organizers. At a night voting rights march in adjacent Marion County, Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot by state troopers when he attempted to aid his 80 year old grandfather who had been beaten by state troopers, and to protect his mother from the troopers billy clubs. When Jackson died from gun-shot wounds on 2/26/65, a decision was made to march from Selma to Montgomery, the seat of the State Capitol, to petition for unfettered voting rights and for a redress of the deadly wrongs perpetrated by the state. Thousands of Americans, Black and White, came to Selma to join the march after seeing on television the brutal and savage attack of state troopers upon Blacks as they attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge en-route to Montgomery. This sad event became known as Bloody Sunday, 3/7/65. On 3/11/65, Unitarian Minister James Reeb, a White Chicagoan who came to support the march, was beaten to death by KKK sympathizers. The marchers finally began on 3/21/65 and arrived in Montgomery on 3/25/65, covering 54 miles. That night, Viola Luizzo, a march supporter, while driving her car, was murdered by the KKK with FBI complicity. On 8/6/65, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) into law. On 8/20/65, Episcopalian seminary student Jonathan Daniels, who remained in Selma after the March, was murdered by a deputy sheriff in Lowndes County. Jonathan was attempting to protect Tuskegee coed, Ruby Nell, when he caught the fatal bullet. (On 11/12/1996, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the law initiated by U.S. Congressman and SNCC organizer John Lewis [and earlier pushed for such a recognition by SNCC organizer Bob Mants who remained in Lowndes County since the March and raised his family in the county], designating the March route as the Selma-to-Montgomery National Historic Trail.) Additional, mainly White, SNCC workers came to Tuskegee. After a tour through the Black Belt, White SNCC workers commented on the beauty of the cotton-fields, now high in the peak of the cotton-picking season. These SNCC workers lacked the insightful appreciation that cotton represented neo-slavery for Black people, including children who were forced to pick cotton until the end of October, and then taken out of the county-training schools in March to plant cotton. Throughout the spring and summer, Black people were forced to weed, hoe and chop cotton in order to eke out a miserable living. TIAL unanimously agreed that it would not be productive for White SNCC organizers to work in Alabama s Black Belt. SNCC s Executive Committee agreed.
1965-66	With the passage of the 1965 VRA, Blacks, especially tenant farmers and sharecroppers, registered in record numbers in 90% Black Belt Lowndes County. As a result, plantation landowners evicted Black farmers and their families. SNCC, which had organizers in the country, procured tents, and with the leadership of local Blacks, erected Tent City on land owned by Blacks. Concurrent with this development was the crystallization that Black people had a right to defend themselves against racist perpetrators and the right to self-determination. This philosophy was the foundation for the formation of the independent party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization with the Black Panther as its symbol. This was the first Black Panther Party (BPP) in the country. Eldridge Clever visited Lowndes County to write about the BPP for Ramparts magazine. Cleaver carried the concept back to Oakland, CA, whereupon he and others established a BPP in that city. Immediately thereafter, the BPP took on a national character and established chapters throughout the nation, particularly in urban cities in South, North, East and West. The quest for Black Power as A means for self-determination to govern their own lives in Lowndes County was the quiet, rallying call of the people.
1966	On January 3, TIAL/SNCC organizer Sammy Younge, Jr. was shot and Killed for daring to us the white-only public toilet in a Tuskegee gas station by the White attendant, Marvin Segrest. After the Home-going Services for Sammy Younge, Jr., attended en-masse by SNCC organizers, Tuskegee students demanded a shut-down of the university and declared a moratorium, the first-ever held on a USA university campus. (Read James Forman's Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement.) May, 1966. Several Tuskegee students and faculty members joined SNCC Staff in Atlanta. Summer, 1966. SNCC supporter, Mrs. Idessa Redden, organized a Montgomery contingent to join SNCC s Kwame Ture (aka Stokley Carmichael) and Mukasa (aka Willie Ricks) and SCLC's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy and Bernard Lee in the Mississippi March Against Fear. (Redden's photos of the March are in her collection at Trenholm Tech Archives.) Black Power! shouted by Mukasa and Kwame on the March became a household goal in the national Black community. November 1966. Lowndes County BPP held its first independent political Election for local offices. SNCC organizers assisted in political education and get-out-the-vote workshops. US Attorney General Bobby Kennedy pleaded with local residents to forfeit their independent thrust and to join the Democratic Party. The sell-out of the Democratic Party and the insult to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party were still vivid in the minds and hearts. Kennedy's request was soundly rejected by the local leadership and the people.
1967	February, 1967. SNCC called the first Black Power! Conference, which was held in Tuskegee. December 1967. SNCC organizers attended the trial which found Sammy Younge, Jr. s murderer not guilty. Tuskegee University students shut down the campus and a second moratorium of the University was declared. Students painted a yellow strip down the back of a Confederate statute in the downtown square of Tuskegee and attributed the deed by painting Black Power! at the base.
1967-1968	Addendum by Michael Wright The SNCC Project in Macon County was active through June, 1968. At that point I closed the SNCC Office on Fonville Street (which I opened around the summer of 1967) and stopped sending supporting funds to SNCC workers in Lowndes and Dallas counties because there was no more money left and because I left the county with a contract on my life on June 6, 1968. During the interim from the period December, 1967, to June, 1968: (1) the local SNCC project met in that office, organized a support mission to the students who were among the wounded at South Carolina State Univ. in Feb. 1968 (four student killed then; Cleve Sellers went to jail; SLED specifically tried to assasinate him.), (2) conducted some anti-war and anti-draft agitation including physically attacking reps of the US State Dept. visiting Tuskegee in Feb. '68, ( 3) organized effective action to stop the Kangaroo courts (I think they called it a "judicial council" hearings) that operated on Tuskegee's campus, (4) organized in east and south Macon county (voted registration and attempted to get a Freedom Organization off the ground there), and finally, (5) in late Feb. started the plan (after I returned from So. Carolina full of piss and vinegar) to take over Tuskegee and detain its Board of Trustees which occurred on April 3 or 4th of 1968. MLK Jr. was shot in the middle of that takeover, something that added dire aspects to it, and Lurleen Wallace died the next day; but not until she signed the executive order (at Lucius Amerson's request) to send the Alabama National Guard and 1/2 of its state troopers in on us to take the campus back. The FBI was involved within hours because we took over the telephone switchboard at Tuskegee which also served phones in Macon and Lee counties. This National Guard contingent also included members of the de-mobilized Special Forces unit that Wm. Pepper Esq.,says supervised the assassination of MLK Jr. that same week (see "An Act of State;" his corrected version of the MLK Jr. assasination). Most of this is documented in the final chapter of "Sammy Younge Jr." by Jim Forman. During this time SNCC was fragmenting; there were virtually no actual members of SNCC working for SNCC (as formal paid staff) because SNCC was financially bankrupt. Rap [Brown] was still chairman, or Phil [Hutchings] was soon to be chairman. Wendy Paris [came] back on the same day MLK Jr. got killed and witnessed a part of the take-over of the campus to which I alluded (in fact, he helped me a good deal in the critical hours because he was helping to keep track of the movement of the National Guard toward our position on during the next day and a half).... Scott B. [Smith], of necessity, fled Macon County (Amerson's deputies were breaking in his front door as he was fleeing into the woods out of the back door) in the second week of April '68; following Jimmy Rogers to California who [went there] as early as Feb. '68. As I said, I as project director personally closed the last SNCC office to operate in Macon County in June, '68, whereupon I too had to leave. No protection. No officers of SNCC interested except Jim Forman — who was delighted at what we did. My house was raised (literally!) on Fonville Street, I had a pre-ulceritic condition, was banned from John Andrews hospital or any other part of the campus for medical care, and then subjected to a contract to kill me by hit-an- run... (Me and Mr. Woodson found out about the plan, me from a white MD in Tuskegee — and he and his wife paid for a ticket for me to get from Columbus., GA to Atlanta and then to San Francisco). That's how I got to west coast.