The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

History Colloquium: Waldo E. Martin – “A Dream Deferred”: The Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Politics of Historical Memory.

Don’t forget to Add event to your bCal. A small reception will follow. Please see the abstract below.

Dr. Waldo E. Martin

ABSTRACT: 

The history of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; 1960-1968),  a key element of the student wing  of the Modern Civil Rights Movement, is well-known and widely discussed. However, the history of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC; 1937-1948), critically important in its own right as part of the student wing of the Black Freedom Movement of the 1930s and 1940s, is  little known and little discussed. This paper analyzes why, how, and with what consequences this is the case. SNYC was an extraordinary Black-student led organization with Communist Party affiliations.  SNCC’s positions on its era’s virulent anti-Communism varied, though a strain of anti-Communism dominated.  My thesis: The Great Repression (anti-Communist repression)  is a necessary but insufficient explanation for why SNCC is storied and SNYC is largely forgotten. In the paper, I suggest that a fuller, more cogent explanation must encompass anti-black racism, the very different historical contexts — most importantly, the mass movement of which SNCC was a part and the global media world within which that movement operated —  combined with The Great Repression.