Most movements have a moral philosophy that motivates participants, and the Civil Rights Movement was no exception. The idea of nonviolence espoused so eloquently by Martin Luther King, Jr., was the ethos underpinning much of the Black struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Along with King, one of the movement’s best philosophical minds belonged to a young man from New York named Robert Moses. As the key intellectual figure in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Moses combined philosophy with action in a way that made him a legendary figure within the civil rights movement.

For Robert Moses, nonviolence was the perfect answer to the question facing all resistance movements: how to overcome oppression without using your newfound power to oppress others in turn. Or, in the words of Albert Camus, how to cease being a victim without becoming an executioner. Through nonviolence, civil rights protesters could challenge the unjust segregationist society of the South. Furthermore, in these public confrontations they held the moral high ground. At the same time, protestors avoided the taint of using force to coerce others into a predetermined course of action.

People like Robert Moses and King also understood how radical the philosophy of nonviolence is. Most people today do not. Today, most equate nonviolence with being peaceful, orderly, and nonthreatening. In the South in the 1960s, nonviolent protest was none of those things. Any protest with which White authorities disagreed was an existential threat to society. Protests threatened segregation, and, by extension, Southern life itself. Anyone who protested was probably a communist, or, equally bad in Southern eyes, favored miscegenation. Southern newspapers at times ran photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., at “communist training schools.”

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Robert Moses and Leadership

Espousing a philosophy is one thing, living that philosophy, another. Moses consistently did both during his time in Mississippi in the 1960s. His goal of registering voters in rural Mississippi was, to say the least, daunting. The rural sharecroppers of the Magnolia State were among the poorest, least educated, and violently disenfranchised people in the nation. The South’s unique combination of byzantine literacy tests and Ku Klux Klan terrorism prevented all but a handful of the bravest Blacks from even attempting to register to vote.

Robert Moses decided, however, he must work in “the middle of the iceberg.” This would prove to all, White and Black, that the Civil Rights Movement was there to stay. Whites must realize they could not intimidate civil rights workers into abandoning their goals. Blacks must realize they could trust civil rights workers to help them stand up to white authorities. As Moses once said,

“Farmers came over and were very anxious to try and register and you couldn’t very well turn them down; one, just from the human point of view . . . secondly, from the psychological point of view where the whole problem in Mississippi is pervaded with fear. The problem is that you can’t be in a position of turning down the tough areas, because the people then, I think, would simply lose confidence in you; so, we accepted this.”

In 1960s Mississippi, “accepting this” meant accepting the risk of being mobbed, lynched, shot, or bombed, any hour, day or night. Yet, Moses and other SNCC workers persevered, despite the beatings, arrests, and intimidation. Through it all, he never lost sight of the idea of promoting local leadership, once stating, “These people know what is needed to make a decent life for themselves, not the national leaders who know how to solve every problem the country faces except how to live on $30 a week.”

Another time, at a rally promoting an upcoming appearance by Martin Luther King, Jr., the speaker tried to warm up the crowd with a paean to King’s singular qualities of leadership. Moses asked, “Why do you keep saying one leader? Don’t you think we need a lot of leaders?” He believed that, once educated, sharecroppers and other impoverished people could operate their own movements and learn to lead themselves.

Leading by Refusing to Lead

This approach to leadership was at odds with the style employed by most national leaders. Often, at SNCC meetings, Robert Moses would intentionally withdraw from conversations. He feared people would look to him for answers rather than working out their ideas for themselves. If he became too vocal a leader, others would depend on him, rather than realizing their individual potential for leadership. True leadership included the realization that the individual must be less important than the ideas they advocated. Only then, through nonviolent tactics and putting ideas and morality before the individual, could the civil rights movement escape the dilemma of how to overcome oppression without becoming an oppressor in the process.

This philosophical approach to creating change remains one of the great intellectual legacies of the Civil Rights Movement. It was how SNCC could persuade its workers to face arrest and possible death day after day. When an organization allows all its members a say in determining the organization’s actions, morale stays high even in the face of setbacks. This was essential in the Civil Rights Movement because the setbacks were much more numerous than the victories. Morale stayed high, at least, until the year 1965. After Moses took a leave from SNCC due to five years of constant stress, things changed in the organization. But that is a story for a later post.

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