Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Statement of Purpose

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Statement of Purpose, written by theology student and civil rights activist James Lawson, Jr., and dated April 1960, emphasizes the organization's commitment to nonviolence in efforts to defeat racial segregation during the civil rights era. On April 15–17, 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The SNCC was the product, in large part, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. That organization's executive director, Ella Baker, organized a conference on the Shaw University campus with a view to bringing together student groups participating in the civil rights movement.

Sparking the movement was the first “sit-in,” which took place at a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. That February, students from nearby North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a predominantly black institution, sat at the whites-only lunch counter and refused to leave. Soon, students throughout the nation were taking part in sit-ins, “kneel-ins” (at churches), and even “wade-ins” (at segregated public swimming pools). The SNCC was a “coordinating committee” because its purpose was to coordinate and encourage these kinds of protests.

Members of the SNCC strictly adhered to the principle of nonviolence at sit-ins and demonstrations, a principle reflected in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Statement of Purpose. The hope was that pacifism would enable student demonstrators to occupy the moral high road and win converts to their cause. Nonviolence was often a challenge. At sit-ins, students were often taunted and even struck. Later, when members engaged in community organizing in the segregated South, they were sometimes greeted with bullets, and many members of the organization were beaten or jailed, if not both. Accordingly, the SNCC relaxed its standards and allowed members to carry guns strictly for self-defense.

Continued violence against African Americans created strains in the civil rights movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference maintained its nonviolent position, but the SNCC became more militant, particularly after 1966, when the activist Stokely Carmichael, credited with coining the phrase Black Power, became the SNCC's chairman. Under his leadership, whites were expelled from the SNCC. Members of the organization began openly to arm themselves. Carmichael's public pronouncements were increasingly inflammatory. The SNCC was attracting the attention of police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the late 1960s financial support for the SNCC began to disappear, and the organization disbanded in the 1970s.