Understanding Mississippi and the Nature of Oppression in the 1960s
In June 2018, SNCC veterans came to Duke University for critical oral history sessions to discuss how to confront systems of power in Mississippi and beyond. In the following selections, SNCC veterans reflect on their understanding of the development of these systems, the strategies they employed to overcome the challenges they faced, and how it shaped them and the world. Visit the finding aid to the SNCC Critical Oral History Conference Interviews at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library to access full videos and transcripts from the sessions.
A Picture of the South
We grew up as defenders of ourselves, and I’ve been a defender since that time. – Dorie Ladner, Session 1 page 8
Those who came to join SNCC learned about the experience of Black Americans in Mississippi in different ways: some through lived experience, some through word of mouth, but many through Black media. Known as the “Emmett Till generation,” this group of young people were forever changed by the September 1955 issue of Jet magazine. “Black media played a vital role in expanding our consciousness of a variety of struggles going on in the South,” remembered Charlie Cobb.
I grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham, and we knew that our situation was really bad. That Alabama was an awful place but we thought that right next door, Mississippi, was far worse and there were people who were, just even the word, the name of the state was frightening to them because of what we have seen with the murder of Emmett Till and knowing of other lynchings before that. – Jennifer Lawson, Session 1 page 9
For Hollis Watkins, one of the first young people from Mississippi to join the Movement, this understanding came from lived experience. He witnessed discrimination at a young age and was taught how to survive in a society where white people unjustly commanded the levers of power.
Being forced to have a survival mentality was not unique to Black Americans living in Mississippi. Dave Dennis recalled, “There was two protocols around survival…everybody in the Black community, I think, owned guns…but then there was the other protocol of how to survive moving from that space to another space.” There was a mindset of self-defense, and people also looked out for each other, building a community of safety.
We were the children of the community. Everybody looked out for us. – Dave Dennis, Session 1 page 28
Times were Changing
When Black veterans returned from World War II, they had a different perspective. What did it mean to fight for this country that denied them so much? What would it mean to defeat white supremacy at home? People began building networks, and by the early 1960’s Black folks in Mississippi were starting to break out of the sharecropping economy. The white power structure could sense this, and there was a fear of a power shift, especially in Mississippi’s majority-Black counties. They saw people registering to vote as a serious threat to their way of life.
It blew my mind that there was a whole congressional district that had an overwhelming majority of eligible Black voters that had never sent a congressman, right? –Bob Moses, Session 1 page 40
It was dangerous to be known as a member of the NAACP or someone who was working to register Black voters, so many people kept that part of their identity a secret. However, as the Movement began to gain steam, this network started to become more visible. Hollis Watkins called these folks “sleeper cells,” and remembered when they began to start showing their membership cards.
When SNCC began organizing in Mississippi, they were able to plug into this network. People like Amzie Moore, C.C. Bryant, Web Owens, and E.W. Steptoe would introduce them to people, and together they built support $5 at a time.
I think the whole apparatus of the state was designed and existed to serve white supremacy. The whole apparatus. When you take a little town like Ruleville [Mississippi] where the mayor, Dorrough was not just the mayor, he was also the Justice of the Peace. He was also the president of the White Citizens’ Council and he owned the biggest business in town, the hardware store. And he periodically as Mac [Charles McLaurin] would remember or I remember, patrolled the Black community as police authority. – Charlie Cobb, Session 2 page 3
As more organizations began to work in Mississippi, the lines between each were sometimes blurred. In early 1962, members of SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP came together to reorganize COFO, which later became a way to channel funds to support voter registration work in the state. What was clear was that people needed to be aligned in this work. Bob Moses recalled that Webb Owens, “told me told me every day, the same thing, he said, ‘Bob, I’m in the NAACP, I’m in COFO, I’m in SNCC, I’m in SCLC, I’m in anything that gets this monkey off my back, right?’ He was telling me that he needed us to work together.”
Part 2: Strategies for Organizing and the Importance of Voter Registration
