policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
from uppermiddle class northern homes, (who probably had not been exposed
to ghetto-living and racism as it existed in the North) went to the South
to participate in the project.
That experience brought these young whites
face-to-face with the brutal reality of Southern racism. Three of the
participants were murdered. That experience became a turning point for
many of these youths. It also became the root experience from which many
of the activists in the antiwar movement would come to view government as
corrupt and immoral.15/
Many of the young enthusiasts who participated in
the project took with them a nascent radicalism that rejected the respect
for authority that had been part of their upbringing.
The project also marked the beginning of the end of close cooper-
"ation between whites and blacks in the civil rights movement.
The whites
brought to their work superior organizational experience, yet the blacks
sought to remain in control of their own struggle for freedom.
From the
time of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, the tension that had been
building between blacks and whites was increasingly resolved by the blacks
pulling away
orqanizations.
from the whites and asserting their identity in their own
The split of SNCC
from the interracial, nonviolent approach of
Martin Luther King occurred over the year following the 1965 Selma march.
In the eyes of the SNCC participants King was found wanting in courage to
confront governmental power. The whole approach of peacefully joining
hands with whites was questioned. Following the Selma March, radicalism
was sweeping through SNCC
approach.
unchecked by adherence to King's civil rights
SNCC was also resolving the question of whether whites could
participate in the essentially black struggle.
The separation within SNCC
between whites and blacks was effected especially by Stokely Carmichael,
who
argued in 1966 that the whites in the civil rights r.ovement were an
extension of white colonialism.
The new radicalism of the SNCC members found audiences as the
blacks in the cities outside the South began their annual summer riots. In
2-8
W~'. 14