revolutionary action movement (ram) - Michael Schwartz Library

45
from a student group to a professional civil rights organization .
Attorney General Robert F . Kennedy, embarrassed by the freedom Rides,
suggested the civil rights organizations jointly sponsor a campaign to
register Southern black voters .
When the Justice Department seem to offer
federal protection for registration workers and white liberals procured
foundation money to finance costs, civil
rights groups agreed to develop
the project .
SNCC soon became the main focus of organizing mass voter registration
drives in the rural South . Between 1961 and the fall of 1962, SNCC workers
conducted many courageous drives in Mississippi .
In December of 1962, SNCC made a major breakthrough . It managed
to work with the Albany movement to mobilize hundreds of blacks
to fill the jails . The protests were against the city's segregation
laws . Later Dr . King was brought in and national attention
came to the issue . This was the first time SNCC, a student
group, had moved masses of poor blacks in the rural South . Albany
soon became a prototype for later actions in 1963 . 38
In the North, another type of mass movement was developing .
It was
the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad . The Nation of Islam, branded
by the white press as the Black Muslims, believed the white man was the
devil, advocated racial separation, a black nation in the South and practiced
unarmed self-defense .
It was a religious movement created by Wallace
D . Fard in 1930 .
Fard began organizing the "Nation" in Detroit . In two years the
Nation had acquired a membership of about 8,000 and
had developed a University
of Islam, an alternative elementary and secondary school . After con
tinuous harrassment from police and school authorities, W . D . Fard and his
38 Muhammad Ahmad, "On the Black Student Movement, 1960-1979 ." The
Black Scholar, Vol . 9, No . 8, (May/June 1978), p . 4 .