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Civil Rights Groups Organize Separate Projects for Summer

SNCC

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emphasizes that local people, rather than civil rights workers, must make the decisions for the movement. But SNCC is distrustful of the established Negro leadership--the ministers, school principals and professionals--and when SNCC moves into a new area, it seeks to discover and develop grass-roots leaders who will challenge the conservatives. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, used to be a sharecropper.

The MFDP itself is a product of SNCC's belief in the necessity for basic changes in the society. Instead of just organizing locally, SNCC helped to build a state-wide third party, which would provide a liberal alternative to the rigid segregationist policies of both major parties in Mississippi. Currently the MFDP is challenging the recent Congressional elections in Mississippi.

Because of its desire to keep control of the movement in the hands of local leaders, SNCC is not renewing the massive Summer Project, which last year brought nearly 1000 workers to the state. Instead, it will concentrate on the Congressional challenge, and will recruit between 1000 and 2000 volunteers to lobby in Washington, D.C., during the last two weeks of June.

After that, some of the volunteers will probably remain in Washington, doing community organizing and working for home rule. Many of the others--perhaps 500 in all--will head south, about 400 to Mississippi, 50 to Arkansas, and a handful to projects in Southwest Georgia, Alabama, and Cambridge, Md. Details on the exact nature of each project and the number of volunteers needed are still vague, and are now being worked out by "people's conventions," meetings of local Negroes in each area. Most projects will probably include community centers, freedom schools, and voter registration drives.

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Although lobbying for the challenge is open to all, students who were in Mississippi last summer will receive preference in going south later. All volunteers will be expected to be self-supporting. For further information, applications, and interviews, contact: SNCC 1555 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge.

SCLC

Until recently the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had never recruited outside volunteers; Martin Luther King, Jr., its dynamic chief, and his several dozen staff members have led local Negroes in some Southern cities in brief but dramatic campaigns, aimed usually at integrating accommodations.

But prodded by the gains of the Mississippi Project, SCLC is planning a ten-week summer program this year which may transform the organization. Its Summer Community Organization and Political Education Project (SCOPE) aims to send some 600 volunteers into about 70 rural Black Belt and urban counties in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida to conduct programs in voter registration, adult literacy, and political education.

The volunteers will work in small teams, cooperating closely with existing local Negro civic improvement associations. At the moment, SCLC is trying to recruit about 250 fulltime staff members to help direct the program, but it appears likely that many projects will lack such guidance. A five-day orientation program will begin June 14. Volunteers are expected to support themselves.

Despite the broadening of its program, SCLC will probably remain divided on many ideological issues from groups like SNCC and CORE. Because of its own composition, for example, (a large number of the present staff are ministers) SCLC relies heavily on local clergymen as leaders, even though it recognizes that they may be conservative and may slow down their more radical followers.

While speaking at Winthrop House Saturday, SCOPE director Hosea Williams explained why SCLC had cancelled Ala. "The people were ready I decided not to march because you can't go faster than the local leadership. The SNCC kids said that leaders would come out of the people, but I couldn't take that gamble."

Furthermore, SCLC does not think it necessary to organize a third political party, like the MFDP, believing that a county organization but the ministers were enough. "We're not interested whether they vote Democratic or publican," Williams said Saturday. "Myself, I just vote for who ever is ahead in civil rights."

For further information, contact: SCOPE Project, SCLC, 334 Ave, NE, Atlanta, Georgia

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