extracted by S.8iley from 'Workers' World!
The newly-elected leadership of .the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee started off on a militant note in late hay by pulling out of the President's Council on Civil Rights with a sweeping denunciation of the Council's forthcoming conference as a "useless endeavour" and with a sharp attack on the Johnson Administragion for attempting -” tuse black Americans to recoup a loss of prestige internationally". "Regrdless of the proposals which stem from this conference we know that the Exeutive Departinent and the President are not serious about insuring Constitutional rights to black Americans." "For example, murderers of civil rights workers and black citizens roam free in this count.y with the desire to kill more freedom fighters; and the national government claims it is impotent...For example, police chiefs sheriffs, and state officials who have victimised black people, beaten and gaoled them and furth:r suppressed our dignity are fully aware they were in effect given a blank check by the executive department of the g vernment to inflict these lawless acts upon negroes." "Our organisation is opposed to the war in Vietnam and we cannot in good conscience meet with the chief policy maker of the Vietnam war to discuss human rights in this country when he flagrantly violates the human rights of coloured people in Jietnam." — The militant tone of the SNCC statement caused considerable concern among the ruling class "friends" of the civil rights movement, particularly since it came on the heels of a change in the SNCC leadership, Stokely C.rmichael was elected the new chairman, He is one of the chief organisers of the Lowndes County Freedom Urganisabign, better lmown, because of its symbol, as the Black Panther Party. The new all-black organisation has been organisi.g Afro-Americans at the grass roots level in the Black Belt to seek political power in opposition to the Democratic and Republican Parties, Durin; the recent Democratic primary in Alabama, when the "liberal" ruling class was working overtime to get the oppressed black people of the south to join the party of their oppressors, SNCC drew a tirade of indignation from the capitalist press for urging newly registered black voters to stage electoral boycott and sgye their votes for indepmdent black candidates, At that tine, Stokely Carmichael attacked the fraud of asking Afro-Americans to vote for tne party of Eastland and Wallace by stating in an interview that "to ask negroes to join the Democratic Party is like asking Jews to enter the Nazi Party." This created near-hysteria among rich liberals like the publishers of the ew York Post and alarmed reactionary sections of the ruling class even more. The statement denouncing the President's Council ended with this same note of militant determination to break irrevocably with the ruling class political machine by calling on"... all black Americans to begin building independent political, economic and cultural institutions that they will control and use as instruments of social change in this country. "