Introduction:

In 1964, veteran fieldworkers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a cohort of northern volunteers met in Waveland, Mississippi. The 1964 Mississippi Summer Project, or what has become popularly known as the Freedom Summer, just ended and those that played a key role in organizing the summer reflected upon next steps for both the organization and the movement. In his memo, titled “What is SNCC?” James Forman sough to remind those gathered in Waveland about the roots and structure of SNCC. “The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee owes its very existence to the colleges campuses,” he explained, “and no matter how we may be organizing in communities, no matter how deep our roots may go into the people in the Black Belt, we started growing this little tree of protest in the college communities, we were supported by the Northern college communities, and in fact our name implies that we were intended primarily to be some coordinating body of students of the South.”1 Indeed, the 1964 Freedom Summer was the most expansive expression of SNCC’s organizing geography. In thus taking its name from the memo written by James Forman, The Tree of Protest visualizes the geopolitical reach and scope of SNCC’s organizing network in the 1960s.  

This digital project began as a process to make available my research on student activism. My goal was to ensure that student activists today can access historical resources to help inform political organizing today. Indeed, as historian Wesley Hogan argues, history textbooks rarely provide students “examples of people their age or background changing their communities, much less bringing the US closer to ides democratic promise.”2 Of course, there is an emergent and rich scholarly literature on student activism in the 1960s, with the students who formed SNCC as central actors.3 However, in exploring the field of digital history and what was already made digitally available, I concluded that what was missing was a contextual and analytical frame to explore the connections, tensions, and possibilities of SNCC, student activism, and social protest in the “long sixties.”

With this in mind, I developed the “SNCC Network Dashboard,” which provides interested scholars, teachers, and students an interactive platform to explore the geography of SNCC and social protest in the 1960s.4 The SNCC Network Dashboard constitutes what I call an “activist deep map” of the 1960s.5 For instance, in the SNCC Network Dashboard, visitors can simultaneously explore archive material related to the political efforts and ideologies of Friends of SNCC in Boston while also analyzing the organizing work of SNCC fieldworkers in Mississippi.6 As a multilayered interface, it allows users to analyze the various overlapping and, sometimes contradictory, spatially framed political identities and imaginations that shaped the contours of the student-wing of the civil rights movement and social protest in the 1960s. 

To understand SNCC and social protest in the 1960s, I argue that scholars need to pay attention to the geography of protest and organizing just as much as the tactics and politics. We need to broaden our lens of analysis to include what Judy Richardson, a Swarthmore student who joined SNCC in 1963, described as a “birds eye view” of the movement.7 Indeed, visualizing SNCC’s national network enabled me to revisit old research questions and ask new ones about SNCC and student activism in the 1960s. Take, for instance, a document created by SNCC’s national office that detailed Friends of SNCC chapters. A cursory reading of the document reveals a list or organizational support. It is, in other words, a bureaucratic document, office document. When read as a set of geographic data, the document reveals an important, but often overlooked aspect of SNCC in the first part of the 1960s. As detailed in my first historiographic essay, “A Bridge Between Two Worlds,” geocoding the chapters and layering those locations upon 1960 census data on income levels and population demographics at the county level reveals a sophisticated Friends of SNCC network that linked the financial and political resources of northern and western cities to SNCC’s organizing efforts in Mississippi and across the American south. Or, put another way, I visualized the political geography of SNCC’s fundraising, a key aspect of what Forman defined as The Tree of Protest. Yet, as future work also seeks to show, that network also rested upon ideas of charity and white paternalism that reinforced, rather than challenged, racial ideologies in American political life.

In both structuring the archive material of SNCC and analyzing its organizing strategy through a spatial lens, The Tree of Protest seeks to make a set of methodological and historiographical interventions in the study of postwar social protest and activism. Most digital historical scholarship has taken a structural approach to geospatial analysis, using digital mapping tools to reconstruct the spatial contours of economic, racial, and gender inequities in American political life. Little work has employed new digital tools to explore the spatial agency of social movements. This project employs digital mapping to reveal the political and economic (spatial) agency of social movements while also taking into account the ways place informs political ideologies.

 

 

  1. What is SNCC?” folder 1, box 1, MSS 655, Samuel Walker Papers, 1964-1966, Wisconsin Historical Society []
  2. Wesley Hogan, “Who’s the Expert,” in On the Freedom Side: How Five Decades of Youth Activists Have Remixed American History (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) []
  3. Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Robert Cohen and David J. Synder, ed.,  Rebellion in Black and White: Southern Student Activism in the 1960s (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2013); Jon Hale, The Freedom Schools: Student Activists in the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and Stefan Bradley, Upendng the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (New York, New York: New York University Press, 2018) []
  4. For a location archive of social movements, see Gregory et. al., Mapping American Social Movements []
  5. On “deep maps,” see David J. Bodenhamer, Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2015) []
  6. As noted in the project timeline, in the future, The SNCC Network Dashboard will include the socio-economic context of each geographic area []
  7. “Judy Richardson,” Biography, The History Makers []