Article 9: White Involvement In The Civil Rights Movement: Motivation and Sacrifices

In 1964, the Freedom Summer Project brought nearly one thousand volunteers to the South, most of which were northern white students, to facilitate Black voter registration. Allowing northern Whites to take part in the Movement created a tension within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as “two principal concerns were whether they would in some way undermine or usurp less confident Black leadership and whether their mere presence would provoke local Whites to more acts of violence” (Ransby 2003, 321). These concerns did not rest solely on the fact that most of the volunteers were White, as “whites had been involved from the beginning” (Ransby 2003, 321) with a small number participating in the sit-ins and in SNCC’s founding conference, while “some of the most active and visible Whites were southerners” (Payne 2007, 381) such as Bob Zellner and Mary King, had been involved with SNCC for three or four years by Freedom Summer.