Thinking Big

"When a baby is little, it needs someone to teach it how to eat," said an official of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee last week. "This baby is now big enough to eat by itself." S.N.C.C., he also made clear, is now tall enough to look down upon older, less militant civil rights organizations, and strong enough to purge most whites from its own councils.

Born in the sit-ins of 1960, S.N.C.C.--commonly known as SNICK--immediately became the most aggressive of the civil rights groups, sometimes appalling older outfits by its sheer bullheadedness. As legal barriers to Negro freedom dropped some S.N.C.C. leaders appeared to reject cooperation with whites as a kind of treasonous collaboration. Before the Alabama primary earlier this month, they even urged Negroes to boycott the election and to give their votes to independent Negro candidates in November.

Last week, at a secret meeting outside Nashville, Tenn., S.N.C.C. charted an even more lonely and combative course. Ousted were Chairman John Lewis, 25, and Executive Secretary James Forman, 37, both of whom welcomed white members and ventured some cooperation with less militant civil rights organizations. Elected in their place were two leaders who appear eager to drop whites from their organization: Stokely Carmichael, 24, as chairman, and Mrs. Ruby Smith Robinson, 25, executive secretary.

Carmichael, a founder of Alabama's all-Negro "Black Panther" Party, rejects the charge--raised by one of the Rev. Martin Luther King's top aides--that an all-Negro party is a kind of "reverse racism." He says that Negroes can no more join the Democratic Party of George Wallace than Jews could join the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler. The Southern Negro, he argues, would be dwarfed in either of the major parties, and can command the attention of whites only when he has shown his strength in his own party.

It is an emotional and possibly persuasive argument to many Negroes--yet it could only lead to even greater isolation and bitterness for the Negro in the South. For if the Alabama primary proved nothing else, it demonstrated the futility of minority-bloc voting that only coalesces whites into a far stronger bloc of their own.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.