What the Climate Movement Can Learn from the Most Successful Civil Rights Organization

To realize a just transition, we need more organizing projects that connect political goals and the economic self-determination of local communities. To do that, climate groups should learn from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s.

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Some sects of the climate movement have come to accept a simple reality: the movement needs radical new strategies. While for some this means throwing pies at paintings, slashing the tires of gas-guzzling cars, or even blowing up pipelines, these all face one fundamental challenge. Those tactics may fray the fabric of the fossil fuel economy, but they do nothing to weave together a clean, regenerative economy that prioritizes people and planet.

The big names of today – 350.org, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and the Sunrise Movement – are inspiring actions and organizing efforts across nations and around the world. But they all have two common shortcomings: they wait for communities to come to them, and when they do, the organizations often aim to establish new chapters that adhere to the same strategies as other chapters. Those strategies largely involve engaging in nonviolent direct action or organizing for policy changes. There’s no doubt that these tactics have brought each organization their fair share of wins, but to achieve the speed and scale demanded by the climate crisis, a new approach must emerge. 

To do that, and to give rise to the new breed of climate radicals the movement needs, we must learn from the successes of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “Snick”). SNCC made a tremendous impact during the Civil Rights Movement. It sent field organizers into contentious communities, encouraged them to act, trained them in various tactics, helped them to establish their own independent organizations, and left them to pursue self-identified goals via self-defined strategies. The climate movement must study this approach and seek to replicate it by creating its own SNCC-like organization that pursues both political and economic goals.

What was SNCC?

SNCC was unique among civil rights organizations, from the way it was founded to the way it organized. SNCC emerged in 1960 following a string of semi-spontaneous sit-ins that spread across the American South protesting segregation. The sit-ins were organized by Black college students tired of being treated like second-class citizens. They were tired of the slow progress toward integration of the previous decade. And they were looking for an outlet for their anger.

Only two and a half months later, Ella Baker – a lifelong community organizer who had worked with the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization headed by Martin Luther King Jr. – convened a conference for the sit-in movement’s student leaders at Shaw University in North Carolina. There, the students agreed to form SNCC to coordinate further student-led direction action protests. Before long, SNCC’s mission expanded, and in a few short years, SNCC became the most influential grassroots organizing body in the Civil Rights Movement.

SNCC quickly rose to prominence due, in no small part, to its disenchantment with the large, centralized, top-down, bureaucratic institutions like the NAACP and SCLC. SNCC’s organizers were fed up with the slow, drawn-out court battles that the NAACP pursued and the publicity-focused protests of SCLC. For instance, it took three years from when Linda Brown was denied entrance to an all-white elementary school in 1951 to when the famous Brown v Board decision was reached by the Supreme Court in 1954. At that time, most future SNCC leaders were in middle and high school, but it took years before school segregation “ended.” Most Black students still attended segregated schools throughout the 50s and 60s. This slow, chafing progress made the SNCC organizers yearn for a different approach. They wanted something new that emphasized a bottom-up strategy that, as much as possible, reflected the organic desires of local communities defined and led by their people.

At first, however, SNCC organizers went only where they were called or where reinforcements were needed. They hopped on the 1961 Freedom Rides, a campaign organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to protest the southern bus stations that remained segregated even after interstate buses had been integrated. After CORE’s initial cohort was firebombed off their bus, SNCC packed buses with its own freedom riders. SNCC went on to coordinate their own campus-spanning protests and add their weight behind others when segregationists turned violent. But before long, they recognized that if a change was going to come, they needed to help it come faster – especially in the parts of the Deep South where Black people had been terrorized into submission and needed support from bold, Black organizers if they were to believe in their ability to fight for their rights.

So, in 1962 when Robert Moses joined SNCC as their first full-time field secretary, he set out to launch SNCC’s first voter registration project in McComb County, Mississippi, where literacy tests and other restrictions meant only a handful of Black residents were registered to vote. But he and his fellow organizers didn’t content themselves with voter registration alone. They trained local youth in nonviolent direct-action tactics as well. But following repeated jailings and escalating violence that left one man dead, SNCC’s efforts stalled before they gained meaningful momentum. Still, despite their limited success, McComb became a lesson that would inform their other efforts, like those in Albany, Georgia.

In Albany, SNCC’s slowly expanding staff did what SNCC did best: build a grassroots coalition of local leaders and volunteers. As historian Clayborne Carson describes in his book In Struggle, “In Albany, they were able to bring previously dormant elements of the black populace into a sustained struggle for civil rights.” What came to be known as the Albany Movement was a marked success during the second half of 1961 and the first half of 1962, but it was nothing compared to the Freedom Summer of 1964.

SNCC’s Freedom Summer brought hundreds of volunteers to Mississippi for a mass voter registration, public education, and grassroots organizing campaign that culminated in the creation of the Freedom Schools – which practiced a pedagogy of the oppressed years before Paulo Freire published his book. The Freedom Summer also resulted in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to unseat the state’s mainstream, segregationist Democratic Party during the 1964 Democratic National Convention and which earned Fannie Lou Hamer national recognition as a civil rights leader. The Freedom Summer was the pinnacle SNCC project, not only because the organization’s effectiveness quickly declined due to infighting and reduced public support, but also because it exemplified who SNCC was.

Stokely Carmichael, who participated in SNCC as a Freedom Rider, field secretary, and eventually chairman, summarized SNCC’s purpose and methods in his autobiography. “We are a collection of mobile organizers,” Carmichael writes. “We go wherever there is a need, when we are invited, stay only as long as we are wanted, and serve the people’s needs as they tell us.” Though SNCC had their own priorities and opinions, they rarely imposed those on the people they served. “We help the community do as much as they are willing to do, within reason and ‘SNCC principles,’ as long as it serves the struggle,” Carmichael went on to say. What was the struggle according to Carmichael? “To empower the people to represent themselves and liberate the community.”

This made SNCC singular among civil rights organizations. SNCC would go where no one else was, build local movements from the ground up, without any desire to establish a local SNCC chapter. Meanwhile, organizations like the NAACP were exclusively focused on creating new chapters that could build membership and help advance their national strategy. On the other side were organizations like MLK’s SCLC who went not where they were needed but where they could drum up the most media coverage. This distinction was clear as early as 1961 when the Albany Movement was in full swing. “SNCC workers’ close ties to local residents and their deference to local leadership distinguished them from SCLC representatives who came to Albany after the protest movement had begun,” Carson notes. It’s these differences that climate organizers need to heed.

A SNCC for the Modern Climate Movement

Like the NAACP and the SCLC, the climate movement is largely led by organizations focused on gaining publicity while expanding their member base and chapter count. Of course, size and growth are often requirements for organizations that seek philanthropic funding within the non-profit industrial complex, which prioritizes large organizations with broad bases governed by clear hierarchies. And, publicity for the sake of public awareness can be a worthwhile goal for protest movements if it’s embedded within a larger strategy. Despite their shortcomings, climate groups have racked up some small wins with these tactics, but no one can deny that we need to move faster. This is the same dilemma that Civil Rights-era youth confronted when creating SNCC. Given the parallel problems plaguing progress then and now, our climate movement needs an organization like SNCC.

Of course, a few questions remain that a climate-focused, SNCC-like organization would need to answer: How would the work be funded? How do you balance local and global needs? What tactics should be prioritized? Though there are clear goals that need to be pursued if we are to combat the climate crisis — eliminating emissions, rapidly reducing consumption, and regenerating damaged ecosystems — what exactly organizers in an organization such as this would be doing, however, is less clear. Even SNCC struggled with this.

Early on, a debate between nonviolent direct action and voter registration nearly splintered SNCC. But Ella Baker saved SNCC by proposing they pursue both in tandem, creating subcommittees for each pursuit. For the climate movement, however, the debate between political campaigns and direct action rages anew. A SNCC-like solution would mix the both-and of Ella Baker with tactics unique to the needs of our present and our future.

While direct action is great for slowing and stopping fossil fuel projects and other extractive efforts, and while political campaigns can elect climate candidates and push policies that enable a zero-carbon economy, neither of these tactics center the actions communities can take among themselves to enact a just transition, build political power, and establish a degree of self-determination while we push our politicians to catch up. Moreover, much like the unions that advanced mutual aid projects during the Great Depression that became models for many of the programs established through FDR’s New Deal — which labor lawyer Sara Horowitz describes in her book Mutualism —  these new tactics would create frameworks for the just transition policies politicians propose.

This approach is akin to the EcoDistrict model, which aims at helping communities to collectively envision and create “just, sustainable, and resilient neighborhoods” through building coalitions of community-based organizations, local businesses, labor unions, and supportive politicians. The goal of a SNCC-like climate organization would be to help establish hyperlocal community coalitions that advance the just transition neighborhood by neighborhood. This could include forming community solar programs to deploy rooftop solar and neighborhood-scale microgrids, promoting regenerative urban agriculture through climate victory gardens, establishing land trusts to develop affordable housing and renovate existing buildings according to the most comprehensive green development guidelines, and creating community investment trusts like the Boston Ujima Project to help fund the aforementioned projects as well as local businesses that promote a circular, zero-carbon economy.

Any new efforts along these lines would need to depart from the EcoDistrict originators in important ways. First off, EcoDistricts had a Field-of-Dreams approach: If you build it, they will come. The nonprofit published a protocol, implemented it in Portland, Oregon, promoted it half-heartedly, and waited for progressive, forward-thinking communities with money to burn to come to them and adopt it. Any organization interested in doing similar work with a SNCC-like model will need to take the initiative, identify communities ripe for green reconstruction in the states, cities, and countries making the slowest progress, build trusting relationships with local leaders and ordinary community members alike, train them (for free), and help them get started.

Free training and technical assistance are another important divergence. EcoDistricts requires interested parties to pay for trainings, conferences, and multiple phases of certification. Between the price tag, the level of sophistication needed to satisfy EcoDistricts’ requirements, and the inability for EcoDistricts’ small staff to provide technical support, the protocol was all but inaccessible, especially for the frontline communities that they purported to support.

Any future effort needs to shift the onus from asking communities to come up with funds and plans, to creating a SNCC-like Just Transition Coordinating Committee that can bring funding, training, and people power to the most vulnerable and under-resourced communities in the slowest-to-act areas and help them build a launch pad that will send them surging toward a self-defined, zero-carbon moonshot sustained by local leaders and organizations. The funds for these efforts could come from a mix of sources. The climate movement could form alliances with labor unions like those that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement. When it comes to microgrids, community solar, urban agricultural, and similar projects, local organizations styled as traditional nonprofits could be spun up to apply for various tranches of government funding. By establishing interdependent nonprofits, communities could pursue political goals through 501(c)4 nonprofits while making use of small-dollar donors and more traditional funding sources from the most progressive foundations to support 501(c)3 nonprofits to further the just transition locally.

Beyond providing a platform on which communities can architect a green reconstruction, an approach like this would help to coordinate communities, build political power outside of election windows, identify local leaders ripe for elected office, and inspire people to turn out for elections. Already, evidence exists that participatory budgeting increases the likelihood of someone voting. But perhaps most importantly, the projects of a Just Transition Coordinating Committee that address social and economic injustice while ushering in a new economy would imbue people with agency and the belief that they can control their destiny and create a new kind of society.

All that said, a climate-focused version of SNCC would have to seek new ways of recruiting community members, organizers, and leaders. During the Civil Rights Movement, the enemies were clear and violent repression could be pointed and opposed, but in our time, the lines are blurred. Our society relies on goods and services that depend on fossil fuels and extraction, and reinventing these systems means changing cultures in fundamental ways. And it’s become something of a truism that people resist change, especially the more radical they are.

To this end, a Just Transition Coordinating Committee would have the benefit of being able to appeal to people’s desire for control, community, and financial security. The projects I’ve mentioned here would help deepen democracy and give people greater control over the day-to-day decisions made in their communities. They’d help reduce the isolation of urban living by bringing people and neighborhoods together through collective action and by creating new community-centered spaces. They’d even increase the financial security of communities by establishing new economic institutions like Cooperation Jackson, expanding the available jobs, and creating more opportunities for mutual aid. Overall, by focusing on how just, equitable climate action improves mental, physical, and fiscal well-being, organizers in a Just Transition Coordinating Committee could appeal to a broad base by proposing solutions to common problems that put the power directly in the hands of the people.

None of the programs I’ve described here are new or untested. All of the pieces of the puzzle exist. The movement just needs a coalitional group devoted to training and uplifting local leadership that can put them together.

Syris Valentine is a Seattle-based freelance writer with a focus on climate change and climate justice. You can follow them @ShaperSyris on most social media.