Eye for an Eye: The Role of Armed Resistance ... - Freedom Archives

to be a force in the Southern movement . The Nashville Student Movement,
considered to be the vanguard of nonviolence and multi-racialism in SNCC, was
so concerned by RAM's conference that it invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak
in Nashville the same weekend . King blasted the RAM conference as "hate in
reverse ." After a meeting to resolve the tension between RAM and SNCC, John
Lewis agreed to allow RAM organizers, including its Field Chairman Max
Stanford, to participate in the SNCC project in Greenwood. 13
In the late spring of 1964, Stanford and activist and writer Roland
Snellings went to Greenwood to participate in the SNCC project and to wage
ideological struggle within the ranks of the SNCC field staff. RAM's objective in
the Mississippi Movement was to win the Black field organizers over to Black
nationalism and armed resistance, particularly armed struggle . In Greenwood,
Stanford and Snellings found SNCC organizers had already established an armed
watch of the Freedom House and were ready "to establish a state-wide self-
defense system ." They also came into contact with indigenous Black Mississippi -
ans who were interested in meeting white supremacist violence with armed force.
Many of the SNCC field staff were receptive to RAM's Black nationalism . Con-
cerning the field staff's relations with RAM, MacArthur Cotton remembered "the
majority of the local SNCC people didn't have a problem with RAM ." According
to Cotton, to most of the Mississippi-born field staff "that other philosophy
(integration and nonviolence) was foreign," not radical Black nationalism .''
On the other hand some Black organizers, particularly Bob Moses, op-
posed Black nationalism and believed RAM's Black nationalism and advocacy of
armed resistance was a disruptive force in Mississippi SNCC . RAM's revolution-
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