Book Review: SNCC’s Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South by Sharon Monteith

Historian Howard Zinn described the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) as ‘the front line of the Negro assault on the comfort of white America’. ¹ The most significant student organisation in the civil rights era South, the group practiced non-violent direct action and coordinated community projects in the region to push for desegregation and to mobilise and register black voters. The organisation is the subject of a large body of scholarly work and this new book by Sharon Monteith is an important contribution to this scholarship.

SNCC's Stories offers an illuminating and comprehensive history of SNCC's print culture which demonstrates the scale and scope of organisers’ literary output and its place in providing a ‘cultural mooring’ for the organisation's internal politics. ² Monteith's innovative use of print culture demonstrates that SNCC's political and creative writing, the organisation's ‘stories’, were a key part of its activism and its interior culture as activists crafted their own movement accounts via a range of imaginative works. Her interdisciplinary methodology complicates the dominant tri-phasic linear narrative of the scholarship by offering a window into the world of organisers and activists. In doing so, she exposes the nuances, networks, and intersections in the organisation's history and shows that SNCC's overlapping ‘story circles’ offer a slightly different narrative, where the edges of the historiographical phases become blurred. ³ This journey into its print and publishing culture offers an experiential history of SNCC, exploring the internal dynamics of the group's activism.

The self-reflexive understanding of the place of print culture in SNCC's archive even in its earliest days is one of the book's key threads. Monteith quotes James Forman telling young SNCC organisers that the organisation needed ‘young writers, storytellers, pamphleteers, our own Tom Paines’; that they needed to ‘[w]rite our own history’. ⁴ The book demonstrates that in carefully crafting their own archival narrative through their creative work, SNCC's writers, both within the movement as it was unfolding and on later reflection, ‘refus[ed] to separate what happened as history from how it was experienced’. ⁵

Monteith approaches SNCC's print culture both chronologically and thematically. Over the course of nine chapters, the book offers fascinating insights into SNCC's creative communication both internally and with the outside world as she traces the organisation's print culture from its campus beginnings through to the end of its organisational life and beyond. This broadly linear narrative is used as a foundation for the analysis of an array of literary works, showcasing the richness and complexity of SNCC's print culture. Indeed, the scope of the works studied here is immense, ranging from novels such as James Foreman's unpublished campus work The Thin White Line, through to poetry, plays, pamphlets, features, and field reports. Chapter two, for example, offers an interesting discussion of SNCC's own tricksters in the form of the cartoon in-joke Supersnick and the more outward-looking Junebug Jabbo Jones. Here Monteith draws on Slavoj Žizěk, in ‘excavat[ing] vernacular traces’ of the two SNCC folk characters in the afterlife of the organisation. She argues convincingly that although they may appear to be marginal in the broader history of the organisation, their persistence in SNCC's internal cultural memory makes them ‘symbolically central’ to the organisation's inner life. ⁶

Monteith returns to the archaeological metaphor of excavation to argue for the significance of print culture in the recovery of organisers and activists, of experiences and events, otherwise lost to history. William Mahoney, the first to publish an SNCC novel, is one such organiser whose rich experiences have been largely forgotten in the dominant SNCC narratives. Monteith's careful analysis of his novel Black Jacob shows how literature can be used to illuminate aspects of the movement's history overlooked in other accounts and to give voice to grassroots experiences. She notes that Mahoney's depiction of a tent city, the ‘makeshift encampments proliferating wherever voter registrants were evicted’, is unique in civil rights literature and demonstrates how he wove his experiences into his fictional re-telling of movement life – his activism made ‘visible through what he published’. ⁷

One of the great achievements of this work is the inclusion of SNCC's women writers whose work is woven throughout the book. Women formed an important part of SNCC's organising cadre and the inclusion of works by, among others, Joyce Ladner, Gloria House, Elaine DeLott, and Dorie Ladner goes some way to redressing the gender balance absent in other works on the organisation. Monteith's analysis of SNCC's fiction also exposes a disconnect between the prevalence of women organisers in the field and their absence in literary renderings of SNCC activists which makes the inclusion of the women's voices here all the more important.

Perhaps the most innovative, and affecting, aspect of the work comes towards the end, when Monteith's forensic analysis of Julius Lester's novel ‘And All Our Wounds Forgiven’ recovers the psychological trauma suffered by SNCC activists during the struggle. The result is a groundbreaking emotional history of the movement which invites further exploration and anticipates a new approach to understanding the movement. Through Lester's narrative, Monteith invites us to confront the human cost of activism, reminding us that behind the headlines and historical milestones are individuals whose lives were profoundly shaped by their experiences. The meticulous archival work at the heart of this book shows how SNCC's print culture became a vehicle for organisers and activists to process and share the impact of their experiences through their writing.

If the work has any limitations, it is in the density of its content. The archival work is so meticulous and extensive that there is sometimes almost too much to take in. However, in its approach, SNCC's Stories serves as a compelling example of the value of interdisciplinary methodologies in historical scholarship. By weaving together archival research with insights from literary studies and cultural analysis, Monteith enriches our understanding of SNCC's interior culture and illuminates broader themes within the scholarship of the civil rights movement. This interdisciplinary lens which uses imaginative works as historical sources, allows for a more holistic exploration of SNCC's activism, exposing the complex connections between print culture, activism, and social change. The result is a fascinating work that offers a new perspective on SNCC's interior landscape and makes an important contribution to the literature on one of the civil rights movement's most important organisations.