Abstract
When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in April 1960 as a coalition of fifty-six southern college groups, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) assumed that the new group would become its student auxiliary, under adult control. But SCLC’ executive director, Ella Baker, was wary of what she called “leader-centered groups” and privately counseled the students to remain independent, SNCC became a self-described “beloved community,” a space for young southerners, black and white, to meet as equals and practice nonviolence. This direction came from the Nashville Action Group, led by the Reverend James Lawson, a former conscientious objector, missionary in India, and field secretary for the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He drafted SNCC’ Statement of Purpose, with its intensely spiritual focus derived from the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi’s politics of nonviolent direct action.
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