Customer Reviews

In Struggle : SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s

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This book traces the rise and fall of SNCC:the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. At the time Carson wrote it, it was one of the few books on the Civil Rights Movement that didn't focus on Martin Luther King and SCLC, and as such provided a welcome addition, even corrective, to the mainstream narrative of the movement. It is also a brilliant analysis of the dynamics of a reform movement and the tensions between leader centered and group centered styles of leadership. The analysis of Bob Moses and his approach to grass roots empowerment is right on target and provides a whole new way for thinking about Freedom Summer and organizing in Mississippi. This book is not for the fainthearted--its academic prose is dense at times and details can be a little confusing for those unfamiliar with SNCC personnel, hence four stars and not five. Nonetheless, it's worth taking time with, and I assign this book regularly for upper level directed studies and recommend it to students for research papers. Whether or not SNCC's achievements were compromised by the antics of former members in the 80s and 90s, Carson's book is a great analysis of its formation, tactics, and dissolution.

This book is a great account of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, which was started in 1960 in regard to Segregation on Americas buses and in the Woolworth dining room. This book leaves out no account, and anyone who had anything to do with the movement and SNCC is mentioned in this book. Carson went all out, and I think this book should be required reading in every Civil Rights History course.

In Struggle recounts the progression of the SNCC from its early days of assimilationism and conventional middle class values, through its radical and militant period, its separatist and provocative period, and then back again into conventionalism and low-level activism. Many SNCC members during its radical period, debated whether the victim should become the executioner. Instead, the victim becomes part of the system, such as Marion Barry's accession to the mayor's office in Washington, D.C. And the idealism of the movement went out the window as well, when in the 1990s much more mundane pursuits took over Barry's life, including crack cocaine and prostitutes. One reason for the winding-down of the SNCC may stem from the conditions that spawned it. Under an oppressive system of the Jim Crow South, the SNCC had a common enemy to fight, and clear goals to achieve. Once the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed, and subsequent advances were made at the legislative level, the goals and mission became less clear and less defined. Now that so much had been achieved, the SNCC began to fight amongst itself as each faction attempted to secure ever smaller slices of the revolutionary pie. The cautious liberalism of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations proved fatal to the more ambitious fervor of the SNCC; the legislation acted almost as a safety valve, relieving the pressure that had encouraged the formation of the SNCC. SNCC students were, in their heyday, overcompensating for all the resentment they had from being historically marginalized and held down. SNCC members had discovered their voice and used it passionately, but once people started listening to them, SNCC found itself in the position of not knowing what to say.