Clay Carson’s In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s uses the trajectory of
SNCC’s radicalism in the 1960s both to analyze the black civil rights movement
as a historical struggle and to draw conclusions based on this struggle about
social movements more generally. He
divides SNCC’s history into three broad segments: formation of a grassroots
organization around the dual foci of non-violent protest strategies and
socioeconomic programs to help poor rural Southern blacks; organizational
centralization and internal strife related to a deepening understanding of the
extent of structural racism in the United States and conflict over whether
separatism or interracial collaboration would best address it; and a turn
toward generating black power ideology and away from social programs that
resulted in the failure of SNCC and a dissipation of the civil rights movement
more generally. As Carson assembles oral
histories, meeting transcripts, newspaper accounts, and other sources into this
general narrative, several historically contingent conclusions emerge. First and foremost, Carson argues that the
black civil rights movement (as SNCC) was most successful at effecting social
change early in the movement, when it was able to balance individual interests
with collective rights – hence Ella Baker’s “group-centered leaders” instead of
“leader-centered groups.” Further, developing an ideology is important for
sustaining a mass movement, but this ideology has to come from the ground up,
not from the top down. Hence, SNCC lost
its constituency when it moved away from localized social and economic programs
and toward flashy Black Power rhetoric.
And finally, Carson argues that radical separatism will not achieve
social equality as well as interracial cooperation or cooperation with more
liberal groups, both because it overemphasizes individualism and because it has
little basis in the material reality of most potential constituents. Carson’s history thus makes a compelling
argument for grassroots activism and a federated structure as two
characteristics of a successful social change organization.
