In the spring of 1960, the momentum from the student sit-in at the Montgomery courthouse cafeteria propelled the leaders—young activists at Alabama State College—into the forefront of the state’s civil rights movement, even as the state government acted to punish the organizers. The Alabama State Board of Education expelled nine male students and placed twenty others on probation “pending good behavior.” The board acted at the behest of Alabama’s Gov. John Patterson, who warned, “If we ever bow to a mob, we are on the way out.” Patterson blamed the students for starting the sit-in at the courthouse cafeteria and a larger demonstration on the steps of the state capitol. The editorial staff of the Montgomery Advertiser concurred, “Let ’em go.”
The move marked a determined attempt by the state to curtail protests in Montgomery. Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan ordered more than four hundred law enforcement officers to break up a “prayer meeting” on the state capitol steps on March 6, though the “small army” spent an equal amount of time and energy restraining a crowd of thousands of white onlookers. Two days later Montgomery police arrested thirty-five students and a faculty member at Alabama State after an on-campus demonstration. Sullivan told reporters that if students continued with their protests and demonstrations, the jail could “accommodate them.” With each attempt at repression, Patterson and Sullivan found that the college students responded more vociferously in favor of social equality; as Charles L. Taylor of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute told a meeting of the Chicago NAACP: “This is something that cannot be stopped. . . .We may be arrested and even taken from jail and lynched, but other students will take our place.”
For the students at Alabama State, and other schools and in communities across the South, the sit-ins served as a call-to-arms. As segregationists moved to restore order, young activists translated the energy of the demonstrations into an organized movement for social change. This spirit was manifested in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), encouraged by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) activist Ella Baker. As her biographer noted, Baker hoped that a student organization might “create the space for [the sit-in leaders] to coalesce into a new, more militant, yet democratic, political force.” Baker met with hundreds of students who participated in the sit-ins spreading across the South, and the young leaders exchanged ideas and strategies and began planning for a coordinated confrontation with the forces of southern segregation.
Through the 1960s SNCC would play an integral role in organizing and sustaining civil rights activism, sometimes in cooperation with Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-funded and highly publicized SCLC, and sometimes in opposition to the group that many younger protestors saw as unwilling to work for real social and economic change. John Lewis, a native of Pike County, Alabama, became the chairman of SNCC in 1963. He remembered the tension that grew between the two groups: “We dug in early, did the groundwork, laid the foundation, then the SCLC came in again with their headline-grabbing, hit-and-run tactics, doing nothing to nurture leaders among the local community.” As more and more Americans chose to participate in the struggle for equal rights, SNCC came to symbolize the future of rights-based activism, mobilized by the energy and enthusiasm of young men and women like those Alabama State students arrested and expelled in Montgomery.
For the students at Alabama State, and other schools and in communities across the South, the sit-ins served as a call-to-arms. As segregationists moved to restore order, young activists translated the energy of the demonstrations into an organized movement for social change. This spirit was manifested in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), encouraged by Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) activist Ella Baker. As her biographer noted, Baker hoped that a student organization might “create the space for [the sit-in leaders] to coalesce into a new, more militant, yet democratic, political force.” Baker met with hundreds of students who participated in the sit-ins spreading across the South, and the young leaders exchanged ideas and strategies and began planning for a coordinated confrontation with the forces of southern segregation.
Through the 1960s SNCC would play an integral role in organizing and sustaining civil rights activism, sometimes in cooperation with Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-funded and highly publicized SCLC, and sometimes in opposition to the group that many younger protestors saw as unwilling to work for real social and economic change. John Lewis, a native of Pike County, Alabama, became the chairman of SNCC in 1963. He remembered the tension that grew between the two groups: “We dug in early, did the groundwork, laid the foundation, then the SCLC came in again with their headline-grabbing, hit-and-run tactics, doing nothing to nurture leaders among the local community.” As more and more Americans chose to participate in the struggle for equal rights, SNCC came to symbolize the future of rights-based activism, mobilized by the energy and enthusiasm of young men and women like those Alabama State students arrested and expelled in Montgomery.