"We Were Black and White Together": The Dis-Integration of Women in SNCC

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was one of the most diverse branches of the Black Freedom Movement, with more women and white members than almost any other Civil Rights organization at the time. From its founding in 1960, SNCC operated as a loving, egalitarian community. By the late 1960’s, however, many SNCC women were working in the Women’s Liberation Movement, but doing so separately; largely segregated by race, many of these former “sisters” were no longer on speaking terms. My thesis explores the breach between women in SNCC. I survey the impact of the personal and collective histories that Black and white women carried with them into SNCC, the race and gender dynamics within the organization, and two feminist manifestos produced by white SNCC women in 1964-65. These documents went on to be canonized as founding documents of second-wave feminism, but they were rejected by their Black SNCC colleagues, widening a gap between women that still exists today.