The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formally organized in October 1960, in Atlanta, Georgia, after a spring and summer of sit-ins and meetings between other protest groups. One representative from each Southern state and the District of Columbia was included on the Committee. SNCC's grass-roots approach was designed to recruit college students in the North to be sent to work in Southern rural communities. Efforts were directed not only toward helping rural blacks, but toward building a trained leadership and active, unified communities among urban and town black populations. Specific activities included voter education and registration, Freedom Schools, and Freedom Centers. Students received subsistence salaries while they lived and worked with the people they helped. They were often targets of Southern white hostility, and in each state, SNCC headquarters maintained a “WATS” telephone network for communications and emergency assistance purposes.
The Arkansas Project of SNCC was initiated in the fall of 1962, at the request of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, which was concerned about segregated lunch counters in downtown Little Rock. State Project headquarters were located in Little Rock, and other centers of activity were Gould, Pine Bluff, Helena, and Forrest City (St. Francis County). In 1965, the Arkansas Summer Project was begun, to assist in registration of black voters.
A series of sit-ins and mass marches by SNCC workers and students from Philander Smith College resulted in the desegregation of Little Rock lunch counters, theaters, and hotels in January 1963. During the same period, SNCC workers William W. Hansen and Ben Grinage went to Pine Bluff “to begin developing a comprehensive voter registration drive in East Arkansas,” among the “black belt” delta counties. A lunch counter desegregation campaign was conducted by students from Arkansas A & M College and the local high school, and weekly mass meetings began. These initial efforts met with limited success until an effective boycott of the entire Pine Bluff downtown shopping area, demonstrations, and jailings, brought desegregation of the lunch counters and theaters. Out of these demonstrations was formed the Pine Bluff Movement.
Within the Pine Bluff Movement, an executive committee made all local policy decisions and initiated programs, which were then ratified or changed by the membership. Other officers were elected, and the chairman of the Pine Bluff Movement held a seat on the Arkansas Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
SNCC workers were also sent to Forrest City (St. Francis County) early in 1963, but soon had to be recalled and placed elsewhere in the state. In May 1965, a group of Forrest City young adults who were concerned about the problems of African American residents, provided the impetus for the formation of the St. Francis County Achievement Committee (SFCAC). Its initial efforts were to obtain equal employment, and that spring demonstrations occurred at a local employment office and at various businesses which refused to hire blacks. That summer and fall the movement spread to students at Lincoln High School, who petitioned the
school board and demonstrated in front of the school building to protest inferior conditions there. The work of the SFCAC grew with its espousal of other SNCC programs; a Freedom School and Center was established in Forrest City and voter registration began in St. Francis County. In 1965 and 1966, SFCAC staff numbered at least ten. Mervin Barr served as president.
The early history of the Gould Citizens for Progress is somewhat obscure, but the group was in operation by July 1965. Apparently, this organization was initiated and run by local citizens to a greater extent than other SNCC-supported groups in Arkansas. Its projects included school desegregation and improvement, voting registration and education, and assistance to individuals in getting or keeping welfare payments.
