SNCC women were fierce activists

“Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC,” edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young and Dorothy M. Zellner; University of Illinois Press, 2010

The book begins with the personal account of political transformation and consciousness of Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons (aka Gwendolyn Robinson) from Memphis who went from a secure African-American family and community to experiencing racism and segregation when she sought to find summer employment. An incident on a Memphis bus where she refused to move to the back fueled her determination to end segregation.

After winning a scholarship to the prestigious, historically Black women’s college of Spelman, Simmons recounts how SNCC sent recruiters to campus. She remembers SNCC “had some really effective recruiters. One of the best was Willie Ricks, sometimes called ‘Reverend Ricks.’ He’d stand on the campus in his blue-jean overalls (the SNCC uniform) and talk about how the SNCC folk were making history while we studied it.” ( p. 15)

Simmons then joins SNCC, begins wearing her hair natural and demonstrates against segregation and racism in Atlanta. By 1964 she volunteered for the Mississippi Summer Project and faced the dangers of other civil rights workers who organized the Freedom Democratic Party and registered thousands to vote for the first time since Reconstruction.

One of the contributors to the book from the North was Debbie Amos Bell, whose parents were members of the Communist Party. In the section entitled “A Young Communist Joins SNCC,” Bell describes attending the founding conference in Raleigh in April 1960 at the aegis of the CP.

Bell remembers: “The most appealing quality of SNCC for me was that it gave its field-workers plenty of latitude to establish their own style of work to accomplish the stated goals of the organization. Strategy and tactics were collectively discussed, but the individual field secretary had plenty of room to exploit his or her talents.” (p. 60)

Bell continues, “Women were generally accepted for their intelligence as well as their organizational skills. At the same time, it was not unusual for me to participate in a meeting dominated by men where it was impossible to interject a word.”

The book reveals how the escalation of the struggle from civil rights to black power and revolution, formerly ushered in with the election of Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture) as chair in 1966, brought even more repression from the federal government and local authorities. In 1966 and 1967 the federal authorities filed criminal charges against numerous male members of SNCC and placed tremendous strains on the organization as a whole.

In 1970 two leading SNCC organizers, Ralph Featherstone and William H. (Che) Payne, were killed in a car explosion in Maryland. Their killers were never brought to justice. It was during this time that former SNCC Chair H. Rap Brown, now known as Jamil Abdullah al-Amin and a current political prisoner, was waiting to stand trial on trumped-up charges stemming from the 1967 rebellions.

These developments along with other ideological and political differences led to the demise of the organization. However, the authors illustrate that fierce activism continued among most of the SNCC women. They have contributed to many other community, national and international organizations. Young activists will be well served to study this first-hand account of one of the most significant periods in U.S. history.