Freedom is Indivisible: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Cold War Politics, and International Liberation Movements

This transnational history analyzes the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), its relationship with international liberation struggles, and the place of Cold War politics in defining civil rights from 1960 through the early 1970s. Most accounts of SNCC focus on the organization's grassroots work throughout the American South; on voter registration and nonviolent direct action; and on the organization's later turn to Black Power. Yet SNCC's April 1960 founding conference also emphasized solidarity with international struggles, and my work seeks to restore the organization's broad vision to scholarly attention. I place SNCC's creation within the context of worldwide decolonization movements and independence struggles, arguing that these international shifts were crucial to SNCC's formation.;My project highlights the development of SNCC's Cold War critique of U.S. racial practices as part of the organization's push for civil and human rights. SNCC connected many of its activities in the American South – the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, for example – with international ideas and movements, and with the potential of Cold War damage to the United States if the country did not create and enforce an America that reflected its proclaimed global values. My project also reveals how decolonization and African independence defined SNCC's domestic civil rights fight. SNCC sought inspiration and practical strategies from struggles in Ghana, Guinea, South Africa, and elsewhere, and I show how SNCC in turn served as a resource for political movements outside the United States. Even as members devoted great energy to domestic fights for political, social, and economic justice, SNCC also turned outward, connecting racial discrimination in the United States to the treatment of people of color throughout the world. SNCC leaders linked global transformations to changes in the United States, and its organizers and writers emphasized the parallels between domestic racism and colonialism abroad. By 1966, organization leaders called for a Third World alliance to unite black Americans with colonized Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, forging a link between their own civil rights movement and international liberation struggles. Throughout the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, SNCC activists increased their identification with African liberation struggles and independence movements throughout the Third World, realizing the "indivisible nature" of the global struggles against racism, colonialism, and apartheid.;By tracing the internal debates, public pronouncements, and changing organizing strategies that defined this leading civil rights organization, my dissertation fills a critical historical gap. Following scholars such as Mary Dudziak, James Meriwether, Brenda Gayle Plummer, and Penny Von Eschen, who have shown how international connections defined earlier civil rights efforts, and building upon pioneering histories of SNCC by Clayborne Carson and others, I argue that international currents proved critical to SNCC's fight for domestic civil rights and global human rights. My work is part of larger effort by a number of scholars, remapping the chronology and geography of one of the most profound moments in American history. An intellectual, social, and political history of a key decade in United States and world history, my dissertation contends that SNCC demanded social change within and beyond the borders of the United States, and that a better understanding of SNCC furthers the internationalization of U.S. history, and a new retelling of the Black freedom struggle.