Founded in 1960, SNCC focused on empowering young people, primarily Black college students, in nonviolent direct-action against Jim Crow segregation and racial inequality in the South. During Lewis’s tenure as Chairman, 1963-1966, SNCC led or collaborated on numerous campaigns and actions, including:
- March on Washington (1963): 23-year-old Lewis was the youngest organizer of the 250,000-person March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. By then, he was also the youngest member of the “Big Six” leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, along with Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young. After MLK Jr delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Lewis gave a powerful speech of his own, calling for immediate action on civil rights legislation. (Tomorrow’s post will focus on this event.)
- Voter Registration Drives: SNCC trained a new generation of civil rights activists to focus primarily on Mississippi and Alabama, where Black voters faced the most barriers and intimidation. SNCC volunteers were threatened, beaten, arrested, even murdered by white segregationists including Klansmen. Widespread media coverage of the attacks helped SNCC expose nationwide the systemic disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South while challenging entrenched norms that privileged white people at the expense of Black people.
- Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964): Collaboratively, SNCC and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) bused more than 700 white student volunteers down from the North to help Black Mississippians register Black voters and establish Freedom Schools. While investigating a church burning and beating of church members by the Ku Klux Klan, a Neshoba County Sheriff arrested a Black Mississippian and two white Northerners with SNCC – and then released them to his fellow Klansmen who murdered them.
- Selma to Montgomery March (1965): State troopers cracked down on the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, twice. John Lewis led the voting rights activists the first day, March 7, later called “Bloody Sunday” due to brutal attacks on protestors on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. 58 people were hospitalized. Lewis suffered a fractured skull. The second leg of the march was also halted. The third was aided by a federal court order charging federal troops with protecting marchers until they reached Montgomery.
Under John Lewis’s leadership, SNCC – and the hundreds of thousands of everyday people who joined Lewis’s rallying cry for social and political change – helped awaken America’s consciousness and conscience to the pervasiveness of racial inequity and injustice in the South and played a vital role in paving the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In May of 1966, Lewis was replaced as Chair of SNCC by civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael. While initially involved in SNCC’s nonviolent activism and interracial alliances, Carmichael later advocated for a more separatist “Black Power” ideology, emphasizing Black self-determination and empowerment.
After leaving SNCC, Lewis directed the Voter Education Project. In 1977, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to direct ACTION, a federal agency that preceded AmeriCorps and oversaw more than 250,000 volunteers.
In this video, John Lewis reflects on “Bloody Sunday”
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