Free The Zinn Reader by Howard Zinn

maintain a friendly relationship with SCLC and other organizations but to remain independent. This urge for freedom from adult fetters and formal ties had marked the student movement from the beginning, so the decision was important, reflecting a mood which has continued in SNCC to this day. The conference set up a temporary committee, which would meet monthly through the spring and summer, and would coordinate the various student movements around the South. Ed King, who had ben a leader in the Frankfort, Kentucky sit-ins, was asked to serve, at least temporarily, as administrative secretary.
    The first meeting after the Raleigh Conference was held in May, 1960, on the campus of Atlanta University. About fifteen of the student leaders were there, as were Martin Luther King, Jr. , James Lawson, Ella Baker, Len Holt (a CORE lawyer from Norfolk, Virginia), and observers from the National Student Association, the YWCA, the American Friends Service Committee, and other groups. They now called themselves the Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and elected Marion Barry, at this time doing graduate work at Fisk, as chairman. A statement of purpose was adopted, of which the first paragraph states the theme:
We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of non-violence as the foundation of our purpose, the pre-supposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the first step towards such a society...
    It was decided to set up an office, hire a secretary to man it over the summer months, begin to raise money, plan non-violence institutes for the summer, print a newsletter, and try to coordinate the various student activities throughout the South. Marion Barry told reporters that the sit-in movement "demonstrates the rapidity with which mass action can bring about social change. This is only the beginning."
    They called Jane Stembridge at Union Theological Seminary in New York and asked her if she would serve as SNCC's first office secretary. In early June, 1960, she arrived in Atlanta. Bob Moses, recalling his first trip South that summer of 1960, described later how "SNCC and Jane Stembridge were squeezed in one corner of the SCLC office.... I was licking envelopes, one at a time, and talking—Niebuhr, Tillich and Theos—with Jane, who was fresh from a year at Union.... Miss Ella Baker was in another corner of the office."
    In June, the first issue of The Student Voice appeared. Three years later it would be beautifully printed and designed (though still small, direct, terse) and illustrated by remarkable photos of SNCC in action. At this time it was crudely mimeographed, carrying news of the Raleigh Conference and the May meeting. It was not so intensely organizational that it could not find room for a poem, written by one of the founders of SNCC, later to be its chief writer of press releases and editor of The Student Voice, Julian Bond:
I too, hear America singing

      But from where I stand

      I can only hear Little Richard

      And Fats Domino

      But sometimes,

      I hear Ray Charles

      Drowning in his own tears

       or Bird

      Relaxing at Camarillo

      or Horace Silver doodling,

      Then I don't mind standing

       a little longer.

      
    The new SNCC organization, that summer and early fall of 1960, found that "coordinating" was not easy. Jane Stembridge later recalled:
A great deal of time was spent trying to find out exactly what was going on in the protest centers.... Response was next to nil.... This was because the students were too busy protesting and because they did not understand the weight of the press release (thank God some still don't).... No one really needed "organization" because we then had a