The staff conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ended just one week ago in Atlanta, Georgia. At this meeting, which lasted seven days, roughly 250 SNCC field workers discussed and debated the problems which face the civil rights movement in the South. And when the discussion was over, SNCC announced that it would not recruit volunteers for a Mississippi Project as it did last summer.

It took more than seven days of marathon bull-sessions to arrive at the Atlanta decision. Ever since the student movement began with the 1960 sit-ins, the field workers of SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and innumerable local groups have been evaluating and re-evaluating their work. Their goal is destroying the power of an anti-democratic, segregated South and reconstituting this power in the hands of those whom it now oppresses: Negroes and poor whites. Specifically this means integrating the lunch counters, the schools, the ballot box, and the labor market. But there has never been unanimous agreement, either within the movement or within any particular organization, on the tactics that should be used.

I

Almost a year ago, on Easter weekend of 1964, SNCC held its spring conference in Atlanta. There were less than a hundred staff members than, and they gathered to plan what was known as the Mississippi Project. (Although the Project was officially run by the Council of Federated Organizations, SNCC provided at least 80 per cent of the funds and manpower.)

It had taken SNCC a long time to decide that a summer project was needed, and even longer to agree that it would work. Some had felt that white northern students could not relate to the Southern Negro community and carry out the complex work of voter registration. Others had felt that a massive influx of civil-rights workers into Mississippi could only result in murderous reprisals from an inflamed white community. But on Easter Sunday, 1964, SNCC members began leaving for their projects in the Black Belt, carrying with them the preparatory plans for the Summer Project.

Voting was the central focus of the Project. Programs for freedom schools and community centers, while they had special purposes of their own, were all aimed at helping to win the vote for the Negro. Nearly half of the 800 volunteers who went into Mississippi in the summer of 1964 were "voter-registration workers." It was their duty to get thousands of Negroes to court houses all over the state to take the voter-registration test and to organize thousands more into a new political body, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

If the immediate registration of Mississippi Negro voters was the sole purpose of the summer's work, then the Project was a miserable failure. Only about 1100 Negroe were added to the voting rolls during the summer; and over half of that number came from Panola County alone, where a federal court order had abolished the registration test. At this rate, it would take four centuries to register all of Mississippi's Negroes.

But the real effect of the Project is that it changed the attitudes of Negro and white Mississippians, of people across the nation, and of the federal government. Perhaps the most important change of all is the new feeling of courage, hope, and confidence that is now possessed by thousands of Negroes in Mississippi.

The formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was a revolution in itself. For the first time since Reconstruction, Negroes participated in political discussions, political rallies, and political decisions. By the summer's end, 70,000 Negroes had joined the MFDP, even though the mere act of joining often brought danger and harassment. In MFDP precinct meetings, county conventions, and district caucuses, sharecroppers and city laborers stood up and said what they felt.

Even the white Mississippian has noticed the change. He is aware of a new mood in the Negro community, and in a sense has adjusted to the presence of civil-rights workers. Before the summer apprehension gripped many white Mississippians; newspapers printed letters about the legions of Northern "Communists" who were massing to start a violent Negro uprising, complete with the rape of Southern womanhood. When the Red hordes failed to materialize, the fear created by ignorance was soon dissipated. And as the fear and uncertainty of the white Mississippian diminished, so did his inclination towards violence.

A year ago, veterans of the civil-rights movement regarded Mississippi as a stone wall. Demonstrations could be held and victories won in every other state of the South, but the situation in Mississippi was summed up in one of the movement's songs:

The white folk down in Mississippi

Will knock you on your rump,

And if you holler "Freedom,"

You'll wind up in the swamp.