SNCC always stayed one step ahead of what was popularly palatable, both attracting and molding great organizers. Members took organizing lessons from the Black church and the social knowledge of migration from South to North and Caribbean to United States. It was this sense of internationalism, born of experience and awareness, that defined SNCC. Indeed, as its founding statement proclaimed: “[W]e identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern of all mankind.”
The young militants were inspired by the move to decolonize Africa. As Julian Bond observed in a reflection on SNCC’s legacy, the group was addressed early on by the brother of the Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya, Alphonse Okuku, and Kenyan leader Oginga Odinga. Speaking for SNCC at the 1963 March on Washington, John Lewis proclaimed “‘One man, one vote’ is the African cry. It is ours too. It must be ours!” When the dramatic showdown at the 1964 Democratic National Convention ended with the Democratic Party refusing to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democrats, Harry Belafonte paid for eleven SNCC organizers to recuperate in newly independent Guinea. Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper whose dynamic presence in Atlantic City exemplified SNCC’s moral force, was among the group. As Keisha Blain quotes Hamer saying of the trip in a new intellectual biography, “I felt a closeness in Africa.” That closeness was embodied in subsequent actions, including SNCC’s March 1966 anti-apartheid protest outside the South African consulate.
SNCC confronted the limits of establishment commitments to civil rights, leading many in the organization to forgo a seat at the table while aiming to sweep out its legs. In Atlantic City, Hamer said “we didn’t come all this way for no two seats at the table when all of us is tired. SNCC’s legendary executive secretary James Forman, an Air Force veteran who served in Okinawa, best expressed this sentiment in a 1965 speech (an excerpt of which was aired at the conference). Broad shouldered and wearing SNCC’s uniform of overalls (that of the Southern Black farmer), Forman stood at a lectern crowded with microphones and declared: “If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off.” The point was not to be destructive, but to build alliances with liberation movements the world over. The invitation behind an early SNCC poster—“come let us build a new world together”—was primarily understood as interracial, but the “us” became increasingly global and anti-imperialist.