“Violence is Black [Latino] children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years worth of education.”
NUEVO SNCC IS PICKING UP WHERE THE ORIGINAL STUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC - PRONOUNCED "SNICK") OF THE 1960S LEFT OFF.
Former SNCC leader Julian Bond of has said “Violence is Black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years worth of education.” Bob Moses, also a former SNCC leader, has said that education was the "subtext" of the 1960s Freedom Struggle. "We got Jim Crow out of public accommodations; we got it out of the right to vote and the national Democratic Party. We didn't get it out of education. So, I think of it as unfinished business." The current fight, Moses explains, is for free, quality public education as a constitutional right - a human right. Moses often tells the following story, which is critical to knowing where we must go from here:
“I was sitting in the federal district courthouse, I was in the witness stand, and if you remember, this was in the spring of 1963. And at that time, President Kennedy was still alive, Bobby Kennedy was attorney general, Burke Marshall was the assistant attorney general for civil rights, and John Doar was my lawyer. He was the chief litigator in the field. And the judge, Judge Clayton, was a federal district judge. We had taken hundreds of sharecroppers in Greenwood [Mississippi] to register, and then, subsequently, the SNCC field secretaries had been arrested. And Burke had our cases removed to the federal courts. So, Judge Clayton looks over, and he wants to know why we are taking illiterates down to register to vote. And so, in a nutshell, our answer is, "Well, the country can't have its cake and eat it, too. It can't have denied a whole people access to literacy through its political arrangements and then turn around and say, 'Well, you can't access politics because you're illiterate.'" And, we won that struggle. We won it in the courts. And it was Judge Wisdom's decision in the case of U.S. v. Louisiana, where he said, well, we can't allow the state of Louisiana to have authority over the actual qualifications of voting. That has to be moved to the federal system. So the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave the federal government the responsibility of saying who could qualify for the right to vote. But we didn't win the issue of illiteracy, and I think that's the issue that in this evolution of who are the constitutional people -- the children of our country do not have a constitutional right to a public school education. And you have to look at the Rodriguez case, 1971, Mexican Americans who sued in Texas for equity. Their case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said, you can't come here into the federal system for relief, because there's no substantive federal right -- a constitutional right -- to a public school education in this country. And I don't think most people understand that. But following Rodriguez, litigation shifted to the states. So right now in our country, there are 45 cases in 45 different states looking at the question of equity and the funding of our public school system.”
Nuevo SNCC seeks to revive SNCC’s legacy of nonviolent resistance, to create the modern equivalent of SNCC, and to reveal the hidden parts of America to the world with yet another nonviolent movement with, by and for our young people who often cannot vote or contribute to the campaigns of our politicians. Unless true equality of opportunity for ALL is constitutionalized, the soul of America’s democracy cannot and will not be redeemed. Nuevo SNCC seeks nothing less than to facilitate a sustained nonviolent resistance movement to recognize, respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to a free, quality public education for all.
Click here to learn more about the original SNCC.
WATCH BOOK TRAILER FROM NUEVO SNCC'S FOUNDER:
“I was sitting in the federal district courthouse, I was in the witness stand, and if you remember, this was in the spring of 1963. And at that time, President Kennedy was still alive, Bobby Kennedy was attorney general, Burke Marshall was the assistant attorney general for civil rights, and John Doar was my lawyer. He was the chief litigator in the field. And the judge, Judge Clayton, was a federal district judge. We had taken hundreds of sharecroppers in Greenwood [Mississippi] to register, and then, subsequently, the SNCC field secretaries had been arrested. And Burke had our cases removed to the federal courts. So, Judge Clayton looks over, and he wants to know why we are taking illiterates down to register to vote. And so, in a nutshell, our answer is, "Well, the country can't have its cake and eat it, too. It can't have denied a whole people access to literacy through its political arrangements and then turn around and say, 'Well, you can't access politics because you're illiterate.'" And, we won that struggle. We won it in the courts. And it was Judge Wisdom's decision in the case of U.S. v. Louisiana, where he said, well, we can't allow the state of Louisiana to have authority over the actual qualifications of voting. That has to be moved to the federal system. So the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave the federal government the responsibility of saying who could qualify for the right to vote. But we didn't win the issue of illiteracy, and I think that's the issue that in this evolution of who are the constitutional people -- the children of our country do not have a constitutional right to a public school education. And you have to look at the Rodriguez case, 1971, Mexican Americans who sued in Texas for equity. Their case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court said, you can't come here into the federal system for relief, because there's no substantive federal right -- a constitutional right -- to a public school education in this country. And I don't think most people understand that. But following Rodriguez, litigation shifted to the states. So right now in our country, there are 45 cases in 45 different states looking at the question of equity and the funding of our public school system.”
Nuevo SNCC seeks to revive SNCC’s legacy of nonviolent resistance, to create the modern equivalent of SNCC, and to reveal the hidden parts of America to the world with yet another nonviolent movement with, by and for our young people who often cannot vote or contribute to the campaigns of our politicians. Unless true equality of opportunity for ALL is constitutionalized, the soul of America’s democracy cannot and will not be redeemed. Nuevo SNCC seeks nothing less than to facilitate a sustained nonviolent resistance movement to recognize, respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to a free, quality public education for all.
Click here to learn more about the original SNCC.
WATCH BOOK TRAILER FROM NUEVO SNCC'S FOUNDER: