The Wisdom of the Pinched Toe and the Empty Belly

By the time the Albany Movement and SNCC started working on C.B. King’s congressional campaign, Charles Sherrod had assigned his position as project director of the Southwest Georgia Project to Donald Harris, a Rutgers graduate from New York who had been working in the Americus since August 1962. Harris later recalled how Sherrod’s departure changed the interracial character of the movement, because the majority of the white people drifted out, and the local SNCC leadership “just didn’t take any others in.” Before he went to New York to attend Union Theological Seminary, Sherrod spent part of the summer supporting the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an instrument of “grassroots

empowerment” aimed at challenging the seating of the regular delegates at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). He assisted Ella Baker with contacting delegates “to get their states to pass resolutions supporting the MFDP.” He was also present in Atlantic City during the convention, and, like the rest of the SNCC staff, supported MFDP’s rejection of the final compromise, regarding it as an empty gesture rather than a meaningful concession.99 MFDP’s rejection reflected a new mood within SNCC. Writing after the convention, Sherrod noted that the time had come for black America to demand a real “share in the power,” if not “in reconciliation,” then through “rioting and blood.” He argued that the refusal of the Democratic Party to meet the demands of the MFDP delegation exposed the deep roots of racism beyond the South. Sherrod: “We are a country of racists with a racist heritage, a racist economy, a racist language, a racist religion, a racist philosophy of living, and we need a naked confrontation with ourselves.” Referring to the crucial role of black people from the grassroots of the Deep South, he concluded that “it is only now that a voice is being heard in our land. It is the voice of the poor; it is the tongue of the underprivileged;

99 _{Harris, interview by Stoper; Biographical info on Donald Harris, File #0140, Reel 56, Subgroup C, Series I,}

Administrative Files, SNCC Papers; WATS Report, July 28, 1964, Freedom Information Service, WATS Reports, July 1964, http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15932coll2/id/47177/rec/5. Carson, In Struggle, 127. According to Donald Harris, the departure of whites “had no great effect” on SNCC’s work in southwest Georgia, except reducing the risk of violence, and the level of tension that came with their presence. He did believe however, that the departure of whites in southwest Georgia might have lost them “some of the technical and skilled kind of things,” like in Mississippi where students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set up a radio station. (Harris, interview by Stoper).

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it is from the lips of the desperate. This is a voice of utter frankness.”100

During the Waveland retreat in Mississippi, in November 1964, Sherrod was amongst those members of the field staff who had come “to see themselves as local leaders rather than as outside organizers.” In a position paper, written for the occasion, he argued that “the new society of Democracy” that SNCC was trying to realize should be based on

knowledge of the people at the grassroots, whose understanding of their own predicament he described as “the wisdom of the pinched toe and the empty belly.” When James Forman launched his appeal for a more centralized organizational structure during the same retreat, Sherrod, together with Robert Moses, insisted that their activism should be governed by the very people they were trying to organize. He urged his fellow organizers to always be sure that the “concern, and aspirations” of the people were in accordance with what they, as an organization, wanted to do. As Wesley Hogan pointed out, Sherrod insisted that “rank-and file southerners be included in any community decision-making” associated with the organization. If only SNCC, a joined effort of “the sons of farmers and maids, janitors and preachers, teachers and doctors,” would succeed in formulating a program that allowed them to “stay loyal to its people, it could do what was necessary.”101

Despite the growing resentment about the role of white volunteers in the southern movement, and the recent criticism that their presence undermined the position of people at the grassroots, Sherrod’s faith in the necessity of interracialism remained strong. In his Waveland paper he warned that there was “no place for race hatred” among them, and reminded those present not to forget that as human beings they all shared the same need for recognition, fulfillment, and status. Like Bayard Rustin, who warned in 1966, that “a multiracial world demanded multiracial solutions,” Sherrod was aware that, since

“communities did not exist within total racial isolation from one another,” Black Power could only go so far: “Whatever the solution to the problem of race in our country, it’s got to be a

100 _{Carson, In Struggle, 127; Charles Sherrod, “Mississippi at Atlantic City,” Grains of Salt, (Union Theological}

Seminary, October 12, 1964).

101 _{Carson, In Struggle, 143; Charles Sherrod, “From Sherrod,”}

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black and white solution.” And if the solution was to be a black and white one, then, “going towards the solution,” should equally be a shared effort.102