The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC Book

Super interesting book ' gets into the divisions between different black organizing institutions during the civil rights movement and really emphasizes the degree of pure violence really young black organizers faced. I knew/understood on some level that people were threatened, beaten, and demoralized by white people and state forces in the civil rights movement but the first person account detailed in this book made it more real than any other text has.

This book is pretty much all about SNCC. How to started, how it struggled and failed, how it compared to and fought with the NAACP and eventually the SCLC. In the last few chapters it gets into SNCC's relationship to Black Power ideologies and eventually, the Blank Panthers. It sheds light on how John Lewis was viewed by his young black peers and the rationale (or lack thereof) behind SNCC's organizing projects. The book is talks directly to the tensions that grew overtime between young and older black Americans, and black and white organizers within SNCC.

The downsides of the book are not surprising: women are fairly invisible in the book, except for 2-3 organizers that are described first and foremost by their looks. Men are consistently described as frustrated, while women chapter after chapter are described as hysterical. MLK and the men leading SNCC are all described at length, while other women are basically invisible. The author also writes about physically lashing out on his wife out of rage at another man's actions. Another failing of the book is that it really centers the organizers and dwells very, very little on what was learned from the Black people SNCC organized. I learned a lot about the organization and almost nothing about the communities it organized which was a bummer. In my opinion, too much time was spent on MLK and not enough on other prominent civil rights organizers like Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hammer, or Ella Baker. Lastly, there is almost too much detail in this book for
it be be believable ' the language is too flowery. Sellers gives pretty detailed descriptions that I had to take with a grain of salt.

Over all, I enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it. I'd recommend to anyone interested in learning about the things I highlighted up top. It's a relatively short, pretty digestible book.