Free At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch

refused for a time to speak with white people and was disappearing into Alabama—away from the extra, prodigal distractions of holdover white volunteers. Five of them, including Dennis Sweeney of Stanford and Ursula Junk of Germany, had just been jailed with forty Negroes in McComb, Mississippi, and reports to SNCC headquarters indicated that the arresting officers “roughly handled the white workers” with special abuse.
    Almost alone at Frazier’s, SNCC chairman John Lewis spoke in favor of the march to Montgomery. Steadfast and unassuming, Lewis was respected within SNCC and had been elected national chairman for three consecutive years. Yet opinion crystallized against him as though Lewis somehow personified contradictory arguments about SNCC’s nature. He had been a founder of SNCC five years earlier at the age of twenty, coming from a Nashville chapter so steeped in nonviolent commitment that it embodied SNCC’s upstart boast through the sit-ins and Freedom Rides into Mississippi—that students stepped forward to risk their lives where King hung back to preach. Bernard Lafayette, Lewis’s roommate at ministerial school in Nashville, had established a Selma project for SNCC back in 1962, first sleeping alone in cars when no Negro family would house a civil rights worker. Lewis had been arrested before King in Selma, and more often, and he came from a sharecropping family of ten children in nearby rural Alabama. Lewis was the ideal SNCC representative to oppose King’s strategy, but he turned grassroots credentials against his exhausted cohorts instead. “If these people want to march, I’m going to march with them,” he insisted. “You decided what you want to do, but I’m going to march.”
    Rancor surged on both sides. SNCC members accused Lewis of defying and misrepresenting his own organization. Wounded, Lewis argued that SNCC was “abandoning these people” in violation of its cardinal commitment to stand with them in danger. Some retorted that King could hoodwink the masses into false moves, and suggested that it was better to melt back among the people as organizers, like trade unionists. While a few called it an ideological retreat to dedicate themselves blindly to the material ambitions of the poor, saying many Negroes wanted only “a house on a hill and two Cadillacs,” others said SNCC now embraced transforming goals from outside the American system. One member asked pointedly “why we bother with the vote at all,” which expressed the disillusionment of young SNCC workers who had suffered for the national promise of equal rights and still felt its rawest shortcomings up close. To hope for fundamental change only “sets the stage” for another letdown, one executive committee strategist wrote in preparation for the meeting. They were still being jailed because of an “emasculated” 1964 Civil Rights Act, added SNCC’s research director Jack Minnis, who foresaw no chance that a strong voting rights law could be passed, signed, upheld, and enforced. “Therefore,” he concluded, “I think it illusory to the point of fatuity to suppose that any purpose we avow would be served by trying to get still another voting bill passed by Congress.” Such skepticism about government was the dominant new mood within SNCC, making Lewis too earnest and steadfast by contrast—too much like King—and the religious optimism of his nonviolence had worn too thin to invite another beating in Selma.
    Still at an impasse, the executive committee voted toward midnight to disapprove of the march officially but allow workers to participate “as individuals,” so long as they did not imply SNCC’s sanction. The committee stopped short of voting Lewis out of the chairmanship, which would have advertised an internal split, and the members knew better than to try to restrain him by persuasion or edict.