Sweet land of liberty? Book

Zinn gives us a wonderful boots-on-the-ground look at SNCC, its operations, people, goal and impact. Each chapter covers a specific zone of SNCC's operations. Typically, a few SNCC people (often fresh out of high school or college) would arrive in a southern town, set up a field office, and begin the difficult work of voter registration. The response was always some kind of violence, although the specifics and extent of this violence varied in each place. One comes away with a jaw-dropping sense of just how mean the South of the early 1960's was: bombings, shootings, beatings, jailings and intimidation followed SNCC everywhere. These did not occur in isolated, discrete events, but in a steady, bloody stream of cruelty and hate.

Zinn's angle (as someone who witnessed first hand and participated in SNCC's efforts) is a nice mixture between journalism, personal involvement and clean history, though he tends to keep himself in the background. He closes with a powerful discussion about the relationship between law, social change and the role of the federal government under Johnson/Kennedy. Like John Lewis, he argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was wholly unnecessary- the Federal Government already had the powers it needed to protect the Constitutional rights of southern blacks and Civil Rights activists, but vacillated to pressure from southern Democrats.

It's a short, easy read that has no boring parts. I highly recommend it to anyone studying history, Civil Rights or political movements. This is a must read for young people interested in movements, and frankly Americans in general. With what Michelle Alexander has dubbed "New Jim Crow", racist policing and excessive jailing, the events in Ferguson and elsewhere, an (re-)examination of the Civil Rights movement is essential.

[Note: this text was written in 1964, so it does not cover the full history of SNCC, say under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, or the tumultuous rise of a black power outlook that coincided with it.]