By spring, sit-ins are breaking out all over the upper & mid-south, and even a few in deep South towns. News coverage and community mass meetings are thrusting young Black students into leadership positions and media spotlights for which they are often unprepared.
Seeing the need for sharing experiences, leadership training, and improving communication between the independent sit-in groups, SCLC's Executive Secretary Ella Baker convinces Dr. King to drain SCLC's meager funds by providing $800 to finance a conference of student sit-in leaders. By letter, Baker invites them, "To share experience gained in recent protest demonstrations and to help chart goals for effective action." Understanding the students' desire for independence, the call to conference states that although "Adult freedom fighters" would be present for "counsel and guidance," the conference would be "youth centered." (King — the most prominent "adult" — is at this time just 31 years old.)
King co-signs Baker's letter, and the conference is held at Shaw University in Raleigh NC over the Easter Weekend (April 15- 17) — just six weeks after the first Greensboro sit-in. 126 student delegates from 58 sit-in centers in 12 states attend, along with delegates from 19 northern colleges, SCLC, CORE, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), National Student Association (NSA), and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). A dozen white students are among the more than 200 participants.
Ella Baker — 55 years old at the time — addresses the assembled students and "adult freedom fighters," telling them that: "The younger generation is challenging you and me, they are asking us to forget our laziness and doubt and fear, and follow our dedication to the truth to the bitter end."
Bob Moses, one of the architects of Freedom Summer, went to Mississippi in 1961, a young man, drawn by the sit-ins, “they looked how I felt”, Moses and others, in the great tradition of Ella Baker, away from headlines and TV cameras, helped to organize sharecroppers to make a historic demand for political access.
Links
http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/index.html