Book Review: Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC's Dream for a New America by Wesley C. Hogan

Wesley C. Hogan
Chapel Hill:The University of North
Carolina Press (2007)
ISBN 0807830747
463 pp., Hardbound, $34.95.

Scholars, journalists, and even former movement activists have not accurately portrayed the legacies of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) because they have allowed personal and political agendas to obstruct their ability to accurately (re)tell the stories of activists who risked life, limb, and mental health in order to help Black Southerners achieve full political equality. Besides the aggrandizement of certain actors and ideas within the movement, such accounts of the movement privilege academically produced social movement theories. They also have erased the most important aspects of SNCC’s legacy: experimentation with new ideas and methods for achieving democracy and the power of personal experience as the basis for developing theory and strengthening group coherence. Wesley C. Hogan’s Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America explores these two processes and their impact on SNCC’s history in an attempt to counter narrations of the past that have left little room for these kinds of multivalent analyses. In doing so, Hogan is able to investigate some of the negative aspects of SNCC’s history, with a specific interest in its ideological trans- formations and SNCC’s demise between 1960 and 1965 that stemmed from experiences with grassroots organizing.

Many Minds, One Heart opens with an examination of SNCC’s early work in three critical sites: Nashville, Tennessee, Albany, Georgia, and McComb, Mississippi. In these places SNCC activists, under the direction and guidance of Jim Lawson, Charles Sherrod, and Bob Moses, developed an organizing style based on group-centered leadership, supporting practices of listening and patience. Both students and workers conducted hands-on political work, like driving potential voters to registration booths, and to follow up held intense workshops and discussions to process everything they had experienced. Activists debated in people’s homes, in churches, and even in jails, and Hogan argues that the jail experience was one of the most important features of SNCC activists’ development. In her analysis, being jailed offered activists the time to reflect on their motives for political organizing, and most importantly from within ‘‘the belly of the beast.’’ During these experiences, they were subjected to forms of torture at the hands of jail guards for such minor offenses as singing hymns. Hogan’s attention to the experience of being imprisoned allows readers to understand a critical aspect of movement history that standard narratives of the civil rights movement tend to minimize. Many SNCC activists found mental and spiritual focus through their jail experiences and that focus strengthened their resolve to destroy racial oppression in all of its forms. Further, jail gave SNCC workers from different backgrounds a common experience that strengthened their bonds.

Hogan’s argument about the differential power of experience becomes more acute when she contrasts SNCC with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As SNCC workers developed the- ory through experience, the white students who would later form SDS developed theirs by studying Black activists. They interrogated SNCC’s methods in study groups, privileging academic debate. On this point, Hogan’s skillful contrast of Sandra ‘‘Casey’’ Cason and Tom Hayden is useful. Cason began her activist career in the South as an activist with SNCC. She experienced Southern activism and Southern jails and did not find extended debates about ideas that were not based in practice to be important. On the other hand, Hayden, who traveled between Michigan and various locations in the South to document Southern Black struggles, led debates in the North which eventually became the political groundwork for SDS. Hogan allows the two groups’ historical trajectories to demonstrate the differences between experience-driven and academically produced theory.

According to her study, the years 1963– 1964 were a time of tremendous ideological transformation for tiring nonviolent activists. Although they experimented patiently with various organizing methods, living under the constant threat of terror, coupled with the federal government’s refusal to assist them, began taking its toll on the small group of dedicated workers. Exacerbating those issues was the influx of white students during these years for Freedom Summer. Besides having to navigate the dangerous waters of interracial proximity, SNCC activists quickly learned that the patience and listening skills they acquired through their experiences in the South could not be taught to several hundred people in the short time they spent helping during Freedom Summer. Further, they learned that even the death of white activists could not provoke the federal government to support their work. That era in SNCC’s history placed pressure on an already weakened organization and their coherence began to unravel.

Towards the end of her text, Hogan argues that the Atlantic City fiasco and the Waveland Retreat were the final blows to SNCC’s coherence That chapter, appropriately titled ‘‘Vertigo,’’ sums up the impact of those events both on SNCC as a group and on individual activists. After years of patient suffering, suppressing personal ideological leanings, and tolerating the lack of government protection support for their actions, many activists simply could not continue the work. Hogan is careful to frame this as more than just ‘‘burnout.’’ She instead describes what happened to them as ‘‘betrayal.’’

At this juncture, the stakes of Hogan’s narrative become painfully obvious. She seeks to rescue the narrative of the civil rights movement from those that might use the image of Dr. King and cadres of nonviolent activists in the service of right-wing political agendas. Hogan argues that in order to develop a thorough critique from which scholars and activists can both learn and build an effective new social movement, we must be willing to explore every aspect of prior movements, both positive and negative. It is also here that Many Minds, One Heart stands apart from the standard ‘‘declension’’ narratives of the civil rights movement, as well as from the New Black Power Studies On the one hand, Hogan refuses to reproduce a story of the movement that ignores how good-intentioned human beings struggled with nonviolence and integration as they worked toward their vision of a new America. On the other hand, she critiques activists’ moves toward black nationalism, especially when that move overlooked the experimentation and experience-grounded theory that SNCC developed in its earlier moments.

Hogan’s use of secondary material is sometimes uneven and the work might have benefited from updated interviews with activists such as Bob Moses, but besides these questionable methodological choices, Wesley C. Hogan’s Many Minds, One Heart is a welcome addition to the expanding corpus that is Critical Black Studies.