SNCC separates from SCLC
Though the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee tapped the resources and knowledge of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the students' group organized independently from the other.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ella Baker, April 19, 1977. Interview G-0008. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SUE THRASHER:
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Was SCLC anxious to have that student meeting in Raleigh?
- ELLA BAKER:
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No, not especially, but they didn't evidence too much anxiety
about having it. I'm sure they saw the potential, but they
were perhaps assuming that it would be an automatic transfer from that
meeting to this, to the SCLC. They had, in this little thing, said that
so-and-so from Virginia, so-and-so from Alabama, so-and-so from
Georgia…. In other words, they assumed that these
so-and-so's, young leaders, could, by making a pitch for
becoming an arm of SCLC, that it would automatically happen, and it
didn't. But they came to the meetings that were held that
summer once a month, the representatives that had been elected by the
different states or whatever groups came to Atlanta, and out of this
dialogue and what-have-you, this led then to the calling of a fall
conference. And out of the fall conference came the cementing of the
idea of a SNCC, although we'd had the office of the all
summer. The little place that Jim described.
- CASEY HAYDEN:
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little skylight.
- ELLA BAKER:
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Oh, yes, it was like that, all right. We were only able to get it,
though, because I think the same guy who got the office for me was willing to do that. And we paid Mr. Alexander
whatever we paid him, forty dollars a month or twenty-five.