Inside Snick

No civil rights group puzzles the U.S. press more than S.N.C.C. (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), the young militants who go by the acronym "Snick." While some commentators applaud Snick's success in helping Southern Negroes on a grass-roots level, others fret that Snick is being infiltrated by extremists and Communists. In this month's Commentary, Novelist Robert Penn Warren digs deeper into Snick than anyone to date. In probing interviews, Warren draws out two leading Snickers (as they are called by Southern cops), who give some surprising--and reassuring--reasons for belonging to Snick.

Subjugating Others. Harlem-born Bob Moses, 30, is probably the most battle-scarred of all Snickers. In his efforts to register Negro voters in Mississippi, he has been beaten, burned, stabbed and shot at; he is now so hardened to it all that he can take a snooze in a car that is being chased by rednecks. Who is Moses' revolutionary mentor? Marx? Mao Tse-tung? No, it is Albert Camus, who preaches a form of rebellion that never loses sight of individual values. "It's important to recognize in the struggle certain humanitarian values," Moses told Warren, "to recognize that you have to struggle for people, and at the same time--if it's possible--you try to eke out some corner of love or some glimpse of happiness within. And that's what I think more than anything else conquers the bitterness.

"The dichotomy," continues Moses, who earned an M.A. in philosophy at Harvard, "is whether you can cease to be a victim any more and also not be what Camus calls an executioner. The ideal lies between these two extremes --victim and executioner. For when people rise up and change their status, usually somewhere along the line they become executioners, and they get involved in subjugating other people. The problem is whether you can move Negro people from the place where they are now the victims of this kind of hatred to a place where they don't in turn perpetuate this hatred. In the end, the Negroes and the whites are going to have to share the land, and the less overlay of bitterness, the more possible it will be to work out a reconciliation."

Discarding Dogma. Stokely Carmichael, 23, born in Trinidad but raised in Harlem, used to be a doctrinaire socialist. During National Student Association conferences, he remembers from his high school days, "I took the floor and said just any ridiculous thing. Here were students from all over the country, and they never would have attacked me no matter what I said, because I was a Negro. The whole thing has shifted so much, if you're a Negro and among a white group, you're good, you're great, you're--but I am sure you know Negroes are bastards too."

When Carmichael read of the 1960 sit-ins that created Snick, he dismissed them: "Niggers are just like monkeys --one do, all do. I was distressed. You know, you don't want a revolution; you want to be intelligent." But he finally took part in a Virginia sit-in, which cured him of his economic dogmatism. Class warfare, he decided, did not sufficiently explain the sit-ins. "I realized that a lot of kids weren't talking about what I thought they would be talking about. They said, simply, 'We have the right to human dignity.' "

Carmichael, who has no more use for black racism than for white, deplores civil rights opportunists. "I don't think the Reverend Milton Galamison* is a very intelligent leader. The trouble is that you get an opportunist and he becomes a rhetorician; he says things that are going to appease people; he's not going to really look for solutions."

Converting Enemies. Carmichael recalls his emotions during a sit-in one night in Parchman, Miss., one of the roughest of all Southern rural towns:

"When you get alone, and you're sitting on the stool by yourself and somebody's behind you, and you hear the knife clicking, hot coffee being poured down your back, and you're alone--you really begin to feel: Why am I here? When is it going to end?

"It's not that the struggle necessarily brings us closer together and makes us love each other," says Carmichael in answer to Martin Luther King's admonition to love the enemy. "But it does in certain cases; I'm not going to deny this." He cites the case of the white youth from Cambridge, Md., who beat him up during a sit-in, then came around to apologize and joined the movement. "Last summer he was the fellow a white restaurant owner was smashing eggs over and kicking--he was the same fellow."

* The Brooklyn Presbyterian who led last year's two one-day Negro boycotts protesting "racial imbalance" in New York City public schools. Galamison, who drives a white Lincoln Continental, sends his own son to a private school.

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