Walking with the Wind

At a SNCC leadership workshop held in July 1961 in Nashville, Lewis and other Nashville activists heatedly debated “voting versus marching, registering versus ‘riding,’ moving beyond the direct action of protests and demonstrations to the mainstream political process of voter registration” (179). Attorney General Kennedy endorsed the voter registration campaign and promised financial support to SNCC if they shifted their focus. Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, and Bernard Lafayette opposed this shift and spoke firmly in defense of sticking to SNCC’s roots at the workshop. To them, direct action had helped raise national awareness of racial violence in the American South. They did not see a compelling reason to switch focus to voter registration.

Ella Baker, a civil rights activist who organized the founding SNCC conference, proposed the creation of two SNCC branches: one led by Diane Nash and focused on direct action and the other focused on voter registration. The SNCC members accepted the compromise, though Lewis notes that they would soon learn “there was no separation between action and voter registration” (180). Voter registration was just as threatening as sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the White establishment in the American South and elicited the same level of violence.