Introduction
In several senses, the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 was SNCC's supreme, all-out effort. An effort that left a good number of the organization's long-time leaders and organizers exhausted and at odds over future strategy and direction. The summer campaign had proven both the effectiveness and the limits of voter registration as a strategy of community organizing and achieving a share of political power. The MFDP challenge to the Democratic convention in Atlantic City had mobilized a mass movement, but LBJ's opportunism and the betrayal by party-loyalist liberals sowed fierce anger, deep bitterness, and strategic dissension among many Freedom Movement activists. Now, in the Fall of 1964, there was no consensus about what to do next — and hostility from pro-Johnson establishment liberals was seriously undermining SNCC's fundraising abilities.
As Freedom Summer ended, a significant number of new activists — many of them white — were added to the SNCC staff, and though the organization remained overwhelmingly Black, internal debates over race and racial roles fermented. As did issues related to gender and gender-roles.
Competing visions over what kind of organization SNCC was, and should become, were emerging more forcefully than ever before. Some argued for continuing as a decentralized organization of community organizers empowering autonomous local groups, others advocated for a disciplined centralized organization capable of waging broad, effective campaigns. And those were just two of many contending views. Inherent in these debates were competing goals for SNCC as an organization, opposing concepts about the roles SNCC field secretaries, local leaders, and local groups, and divergent assumptions about what it meant to be activists, organizers, and freedom fighters.
A meeting of the SNCC Executive Committee in September failed to resolve these issues so all SNCC members were summoned to a multi-day retreat in a Waveland MS church to thrash them out. Somewhere between 75 and 150 attended some or all of the conference. SNCC member Mary King later recalled:
[A] call went out from Jim [Forman] and a committee in Atlanta inviting all of the staff flung across the South, from Arkansas to the Eastern Shore [of Maryland], to a staff meeting to take place in Waveland, Mississippi, in November 1964. And each of us was invited to prepare a position paper on anything we wanted to write about. In SNCC's radical egalitarian tradition, we could say anything we wanted to say, write about any topic, challenge the staff to anything we wanted to challenge them to. And these position papers were gathered and mimeographed in Atlanta and sent out. There were, as I recall, 37 position papers as we convened for the staff retreat. These papers were not to be the central defining question on the agenda, but they were to inform the overall environment of the meeting. — Mary King, A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC.
Organizational Documents
Retreat Minutes (Summary). James Forman Keynote Speech. Summary Report, Campus Travellers, Joyce Brown & Bill Hall. Organization of Friends of SNCC in the Bay Area, Mike Miller Persons at Waveland conference (partial list), unsigned Papers that Should be in your Packets, Unsigned SNCC. November 6, 1964
Individual Position & Working Papers
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