60 years after sit-ins, Shaw University celebrates SNCC civil rights heritage
RALEIGH, N.C. — David Forbes was there when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staged its inaugural conference at Shaw University in April 1960, two months after a peaceful protest on Feb. 1 at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina gave birth to a national sit-in movement.
At the time, Forbes was a 19-year-old sophomore and student leader at the private Baptist liberal arts college in Raleigh.
Today, Shaw has an enrollment of about 1,240 students. On April 3-4, the school will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of SNCC and the committee's contributions to society.
Perhaps it was only fitting that the student-led social movement that would help alter the arc of American history was founded at the oldest institution of higher learning for blacks in the southern United States. Established on Dec. 1, 1865, Shaw educated a generation of leaders who went on to found other historically black institutions in the South.
“Our university is one of the touchstones for justice,” said Valerie Ann Johnson, 61, dean of the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities at Shaw.
Shaw spokeswoman Lucera Parker put it this way: “It’s part of our DNA. It is real. We have a high percentage of first-generation college students, and many of those students when asked why they chose Shaw — its history ranks very highly.“
In the early ’60s, SNCC — employing strategies and tactics out of Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign of nonviolent resistance — organized peaceful protests and demonstrations to speed up desegregation in the South. In 1964, the committee sponsored the Mississippi Project, in which about 800 volunteers helped thousands of African Americans register to vote.
John Lewis, now a congressman from Georgia, was chairman of SNCC at the time. He traveled to college campuses throughout the country to encourage students to come to Mississippi during the summer of ’64 to help register voters.
Two years later, in 1966, SNCC became the first civil rights organization to oppose U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. Stokely Carmichael, who became the committee’s leader that same year, called for a Black Power campaign to fight the “white power” that continued to oppress African Americans.
“Shaw is known as the historical origin of SNCC,” said Forbes, 79. “It was founded on the campus of Shaw in April 1960. I was on the steering committee that planned the first meeting that grew into SNCC. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta decided to host a meeting of the college students who had become active in the sit-ins.”
Determination from the start
Forbes said there was total agreement at the Shaw meeting that the United States could not continue as it had on the race issue.
“If they had not done the Civil Rights Act, there likely would not have been the Voting Rights Act,” Forbes said of the major pieces of civil rights legislation enacted by Congress in the middle 1960s. “If there was no Voting Rights Act, nobody would ever have heard of (President) Barack Obama. I am sure ... without SNCC and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, things would be pretty much as closed and racist as during my growing-up years.”
Until his graduation from Shaw in May 1962, Forbes represented SNCC in central and eastern North Carolina. He later served as dean of the Shaw University Divinity School and founding pastor of the Christian Faith Baptist Church in Raleigh.
“I am extremely proud of Shaw’s central role in the civil rights movement,” Forbes said. “SNCC was the catalyst in the modern civil rights movement. It shook the foundation of racial segregation in the South. Up to that time, there had been little desegregation in public education, public accommodations and employment."
Looking back six decades later, he called the experience “exciting. It was scary. It was dangerous. It had to be done.”
Wilson Lacy, a 72-year-old Shaw graduate from Fayetteville, N.C., and a member of the university’s Board of Trustees, said, “I think it was the black institution of the time to make the civil rights movement relevant. I don’t think any school was that relevant..”
Ella Baker's role
Shaw alumna Ella Baker, a longtime civil rights activist and mentor to such pivotal figures as Carmichael and Rosa Parks, organized SNCC. The group is regarded as one of the most significant of the American civil rights movement.
“We often focus on the men who participated in the civil rights movement, but she positioned herself to help give voice to the young people,” Johnson said. “Part of why SNCC came to be, it’s the young people’s way of being part of the civil rights movement."
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Baker graduated as valedictorian from Shaw in 1927. Next to the church, it was “the most influential institution in Ella Baker’s early life,” according to her biographer Barbara Ransky.
She moved to New York City and launched her career as a writer, editor and activist with the NAACP. Baker earned a reputation as a great recruiter and organizer. As the 1960s arrived, she became aware of the energy that black college students were bringing to the civil rights movement with the sit-ins at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro.
Baker urged students to take action, while providing them with resources and training.
“SNCC starts over spring break in ’60 after the sit-ins and they look to find a place to have a meeting and bring people together at Shaw,” said Tom Hennessey, a former African-American history professor at historically black Fayetteville State University.
About 300 students, including a contingent of 50 to 60 from Shaw, met over Easter weekend in the Greenleaf Auditorium on campus and in the nearby Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, according to Forbes.
That’s around the same period when Lacy attended Shaw as a freshman.
“I got there during Shaw’s 100th anniversary, which was 1965. They just passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” he recalled, “and we were being admonished to get what we needed to get ready to vote. Take strong advantage of it. That was the push then.”
Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the Voting Rights Act aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented blacks from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment.
A few days before King visited a church in Raleigh, Lacy was among the Shaw students who marched to show their appreciation for the passing of the Voting Rights Act.
“We’re proud of that being just a little, small, black liberal arts school,” he said, “and we were able to put a dent into the civil rights movement.”