Notebook: The First Generation of SNCC

Right now John Lewis is a homeless man. Chairman of SNCC during its most active and heroic period, one of the first Freedom Riders, arrested innumerable times in the Deep South, and a vividly radical speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, Lewis now lives in New York City, privately employed and not prominently involved in any of the Negro organizations. Nor is he alone in this respect. Within the past two or three years there has appeared a generation of SNCC “graduates,” young men and women once completely caught up in that organization but now either inactive or entirely out. They work for the poverty program, they go to school, or they simply drift. They retain a strong feeling for SNCC, which remains the center of their emotional life; but at least for them, the SNCC mystique has been broken and that painful process of self-questioning which seems to follow the crest of all political movements, has begun. Lewis himself grasps the fact that he is in a dilemma. He sp...