Emilie’s Reviews > SNCC: The New Abolitionists > Status Update

SNCC's new radicalism comes from nowhere in the world but cotton fields, prison cells, and the minds of young people reflecting on what they see and feel. So it is expressed in no ancient hooks, but in odd bits of conversation, which reflect not a precise doctrine but an emotion.

The history of our country—and indeed of all countries— seems to be a kind of stumbling through the darkness, continually banging into the furniture of the universe, and able to tell where we have been only by counting our bruises. In times of social disorder, however, there are moments of illumination when it becomes possible to see not only the problem at hand, but beyond it. [1/2]

[MLK in an unsurprisingly less well known sermon:]

Our nation's productive machinery constantly brings forth such an abundance of food that we must build larger barns and spend more than a million dollars daily to store our surplus... What can we do? Again the answer is simple: We can store our surplus food free of charge in the shrivelled stomachs of the millions of God’s children who go to bed hungry at night.

The Justice Department man was defensive. He asked Baldwin what he was working on now. Answer: a play. What was the title? Blues for Mister Charlie, Baldwin replied.

[Sherrod to Atlanta office:] "the structure is being shaken to the very foundations ... It is no longer a matter-of-fact procedure for a Negro to respond in "yes, sirs" and "no, sirs." The people are thinking. they are becoming. In a deep southwest Georgia area, where it is generally conceded that the Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect, at least, they sing, "We Shall Overcome." There is hope!"

[Weaver from Mississippi:] The Delta lies vacant and barren all day; it broods in the evening and it cries all night. I get the impression that the land is cursed and suffering, groaning under the awful weight of history's sins. I can understand what Faulkner meant; it must be loved or hated ... or both. It's hard to imagine how any music but the blues could have taken root in the black soil around me.

"But the evidence began to appear, here and there throughout the state of Mississippi, that what Bob Moses had called the
"Mississippi iceberg" was beginning to crack. The evidence was not yet in changes in the social structure of the state, but in the people who emerged slowly, as rocks appear one by one out of a receding sea."

Branton: "The state of Mississippi has repeatedly thrown down a gauntlet at the feet of would-be Negro voters... The time has come for us to pick up the gauntlet. Leflore County has elected itslef as the testing ground for democracy."

Just this afternoon, I was sitting reading, having finished a bowl of stew, and a silent hand reached over from behind, its owner mumbling some words of apology and stumbling up with a neckbone from the plate under the bowl, one which I had discarded, which had some meat on it…I never saw the face. I didn't look. The hand was dark, dry, and wind-cracked, a man's hand, from the cotton chopping and cotton picking.

[Bob Moses from jail]: "This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. Hollis is leading off with his tenor, "Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluia:
Christian brothers don't be slow, Alleluia; Mississippi's next to go, Alleluia." This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg - from a stone that the builders rejected."