Writing Up a New Day

SNCC: The New Abolitionists
by Howard Zinn
Beacon Press, 1964, $4.95

“SNCC is Willie Shaw in jail in Belzoni, Mississippi!” So a veteran staff worker triumphantly ended a five-minute soliloquy during a SNCC conference last November. The inevitable applause burst out, to dissolve into the hand-clap of a freedom song for Willie, whose confinement kept him away from the meeting.

It had been called to discuss everything important about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee— its new and expanded goals and program and the necessity for a more complicated structure. But could the tribute to Willie Shaw still define a group that in...