Ricks, Willie: Ricks joined SNCC as a Chattanooga high school student in the early 1960s. He was part of SNCC's advance group organized to mobilize black support in small communities. A self-described black nationalist known within SNCC as "The Reverend," he shortened the slogan "Black power for Black people" to the popular "Black power." He was later expelled from SNCC for refusing to distance himself from the Black Panther Party.
- Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC edited by Cheryl Lynn Greenburg 1998, Glossary of Names and Terms p. 244
Student-Led Direct Action in Chattanooga
Freedom fighters in the United States had been organizing non-violent direct actions to challenge white supremacy and American Apartheid since "Jim Crow" laws were first enacted at the end of Reconstruction, when power was being gradually returned to the Southern white establishment by the occupying armies of the North. But it was the 1 February 1960 sit-in by four students from the North Carolina Agricultural & Technological State University at the lunch counters of a Woolworth's department store in Greensboro, North Carolina that catalyzed a national call to action. What started as four courageous Black students sitting at a "whites only" counter grew to 20 people the next day. Then 60. And then 300. The students received national media attention and the moment continued to grow as other students followed their example and began performing direct actions through out North Carolina and then Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee.
Mukasa Ricks (at the time known as Willie Ricks) became a freedom fighter early in life when, at the age of seventeen, he began working with other students from Howard High School to organize student-led non-violent direct actions. In January of 1960, students organized a sit-in at the segregated Woolworth diner on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga.
 |
| Students occupying the segregated lunch counter of Woolworth department store located on Market Street in downtown Chattanooga |
By February, over 200 Black students, most from Howard High School, were taking part in the demonstrations. The sit-ins were now spread out over four stores which were all located on Market Street: McClellan Stores Co, 713 Market Street; Woolworth, 729 Market Street; W.T. Grant, 715 Market Street; and S.H. Kress, 822 Market Street. All of the stores began closing down their lunch counter service, and often their doors, in response to the organized student actions.
 |
| Hundreds of Howard High School students were demonstrating by late February |
Reactionary white high school students started organizing counter demonstrations. These young white conservatives began routinely attacking the peaceful Black student demonstrators.
 |
| Conservative white students in Chattanooga reacted by demonstrating in support of American apartheid |
Tensions mounted quickly. Soon, the department stores became frantic scenes of violent outbreaks as mobs of conservative whites tried to keep Black students from entering the stores and sitting at the lunch counters. These struggles would spill out into the street where brickbats were hurled and knives flourished. Thousands of people began packing the downtown streets to see what was going on and what would happen next. Three years before Bull Connor ordered the Birmingham police to unleash their city's fire hoses on peaceful students, the Chattanooga police viciously attacked peaceful Black protesters with fire hoses on Market and Cherry Street.
 |
| In February 1960, Chattanooga Police unleashed high-pressure water jets on peaceful student demonstrators in downtown Chattanooga |
 |
| The forceful blast from water hoses violently cleared the streets and sidewalks of student demonstrators - and anyone else who happened to be there |
In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", Dr. Martin Luther King said that "nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue." This is precisely what the student-led direct actions at department stores in downtown Chattanooga successfully did. In August of 1960, after months of organized action, Black students had successfully desegregated seven department stores in downtown Chattanooga. Similar "stand-ins" were performed in movie theaters and within a short period many of Chattanooga's theaters, motels and hotels, about 70 restaurants as well as city buses and trains were all desegregated.
During the sit-ins, Mukasa Ricks had developed a reputation for himself as a student leader and a powerful organizer. The Chattanooga Police department had arrested, beaten, and turned high-pressured hoses on hundreds of non-violent students, all in the service of Chattanooga's racist white political and business establishment. With the leadership of student organizers like Ricks, and through the methods of principled direct action, Chattanooga's young people of color successfully challenged some of our city's white supremacist apartheid laws.
Due to his notoriety in the community, Ricks was contacted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to register voters in Chattanooga in 1961. The next year Ricks joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and participated in their first Direct Action Program in Albany, Georgia.
Due to his notoriety in the community, Ricks was contacted by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to register voters in Chattanooga in 1961. The next year Ricks joined the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and participated in their first Direct Action Program in Albany, Georgia.
From Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to Black Panthers
 |
| Front window of a SNCC field office in the South, picture taken from "The Story of Snick: From 'Freedom High' to 'Black Power'" by Gene Roberts, New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1966 |
Like the 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park and the massive mobilization of protesters in Wisconsin, the moment created by the Greensboro sit-ins became a national call to action. Freedom fighters who had been involved in organized struggles against white supremacy prior to the Greensboro sit-ins recognized the opportunity created in this new space and the need to go beyond uncoordinated solidarity actions, successful as they were, like those in Chattanooga.
Two such freedom fighters were Ella Baker and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who called together a conference at Shaw University to talk with university students from all over the country about what could be done to build on the momentum created by the Greensboro sit-ins. On Easter morning 1960, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was formed with the explicit objective of bringing people together, developing local leadership and organizing locally controlled organizations to combat oppression on the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the deep South.
At a time when registering people of color to vote was incredibly dangerous, SNCC leaders declared that "voting is direct action". SNCC members would put their lives on the line by becoming "Freedom Riders" in 1961. Freedom Riders were integrated groups of activists riding in buses through the south, registering voters in towns where they stopped. In the lead-up to voter registration drives, SNCC organizers provided indigenous leadership development and grassroots community organizing trainings to folks living in the local community.
 |
| Klansman firebombed the Freedom Rider's Greyhound bus on 14 May 1961 |
SNCC was different from other civil rights organizations in that it did not have a hierarchical decision making structure, but instead utilized consensus decision making practices to ensure that those who were most directly affected, and in many cases literally laying their lives on the line, could meaningfully participate in all decisions. Also unlike most other civil rights organizations, which simply supported civil rights activists and mass mobilizations, SNCC organizers traveled throughout the southern United States working alongside the rural poor to form their own community organizations. SNCC organizers found that most rural communities already had in place some recognizable indigenous leadership and some degree of organization that had been actively working to protect and advance the interests of the local Black community, sometimes for many years. These leaders and organizations had existed as a matter of survival for rural communities of color living in the Black Belt.
These were the most dangerous areas of the country for civil rights work. SNCC organizers would often spend years traveling among the same communities. When Ricks joined SNCC as a community organizer in 1962, the organization was integrationist, non-violent and inter-racial. He immediately began working in Georgia, Mississippi and then eventually in Alabama alongside Stokely Carmichael. It was from their experiences on the frontlines of the battle for civil rights that organizers like Mukasa Ricks and Stokely Carmichael became more deeply aware of the depth to which violence and oppression were built into the white supremacist political system - and how inadequate their approaches were in seriously challenging and changing the deeper root problems.
"It took us through a lot of different kinds of changes to see the extreme savage brutality and racist behavior of not just the police, but the judge and the entire system that was oppressing and holding our people down."
- Mukasa Ricks, quoted in Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights by Winston A. Grady-Willis, 2006 Duke University Press p. 61
Due to their experiences organizing in the rural South, Ricks and Carmichael began undergoing a deep change of consciousness. They began to see themselves not as second-class citizens of the United States seeking integration and assimilation, but as a separate nation living under the colonial rule of the white supremacist capitalistic United States government. The struggle for Black folks in the South to organize their own communities into a larger movement for liberation became inherently linked to the international struggles of Black Nations against European imperialists. Their growing Black Nationalist consciousness was heavily influenced by Malcolm X and Franz Fannon, but the largest contribution came from the underlying values of self-reliance and self-determination taught to SNCC organizers by the folks living and struggling in the very rural Black communities they were organizing within.
We had been struggling throughout the south, in this country for freedom and liberation. We had to go through the backdoor and say, “yes sir” to white people. We were being lynched, shot down and murdered, like they did Cheney, Schwerner and Goodman. Like they did Medgar Evers. They dynamited our churches, burned down our churches and just killed our people just for wanting to be free. Then in Alabama they had bombed and killed many of our workers, the governor and government were fighting a movement. In Tuskegee, Alabama, a man named Sammy Young went into a bathroom that said “whites only”, and when he came out the owner of the gas station, a white man shot him in the head with a shotgun. SNCC had begun to become somewhat militant. I remember one night, the Ku Klux Klan came and shot in our house, the next night we went and shot in their house. We began to say long ago that the non-violent part didn’t make sense and that we did it for tactical reasons. In 1965, in Lowndes County, Alabama we formed the Lowndes County Black Panther Party. We said we were going to defend ourselves against these killers. We often preached and talked about if we had power, we would have power to defend ourselves, power to feed our people, power to stop them from shooting us down in the streets, power to have decent schools etc.
With this change in consciousness came a change in political focus, from non-violent actions that attempted to appeal to the conscious of whites to Black solidarity and self-reliance, the creation of alternative Black institutions, and complete political control of their own communities. No longer would they demand equality with whites, but self-determination for their communities. This change in focus necessitated a change in their organizing program, which found its expression in the organization of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO).
In 1965, Mukasa Ricks and Stokley Carmichael began organizing political workshops in Lowndes County, Alabama. The vast majority of folks living in Lowndes County were people of color, but not a single Black person was registered to vote. During the workshops, community members debated whether their vote would truly matter, since the interests and needs of rural poor and working class people of color diverged significantly from those of the white folks in control of the Democratic Party on the national, state and local level. So they arrived at a consensus: they would work together to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, an independent third-party organized solely by Black people to solely represent the interests of Black people.
 |
| 1965 Montgomery, Alabama Police Department File Photo |
With the creation of the county-wide LCFO, the Black community could mobilize support for a third-party and end the subordination of their own interests to the white supremacists that controlled the Democratic Party. The State of Alabama required that all political parties register an emblem to represent them. The Democratic Party literally had a "white supremacy" white rooster as their logo. So the folks in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization chose the Black Panther.
 |
| From a pamphlet handed out by the LCFO at the time |
The first organizational meeting of the LCFO was a massive success. Over 50% of the potential Black voters from Lowndes County turned out to elect party officers and candidates. Shortly thereafter, on 8 May 1966, SNCC held an organizational meeting in Kingston, Tennessee to adopt an organizational plan of action. What came out of that meeting were three main policies that would completely change the organization of SNCC as well as the organizing work they were doing:
- The organization would focus on organizing all-Black independent political parties based off the Lowdnes County model.
- The organization would incorporate the promotion of Black consciousness and postive Black cultural representations into all of their education and messaging work in an attempt to combat white supremacist constructions of Black people.
- White allies would no longer work for SNCC as organizers in rural Black communities - this choice was made to better align SNCC's organizational composition with their renewed allegiance to self-reliance and self-determination as the core guiding principles of their organizing work.
Taken all together, this new orientation came to be encapsulated by two words: Black Power.
Black Power
On 6 June 1966, James Meredith, the first Black graduate from the University of Mississippi, started a solitary journey from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to encourage Black folks to register and vote in the face of the violence that was awaiting them at their county registrar's office and polling locations. At this point in time in Mississippi, killing civil rights workers was a popular past time. From 1963 to 1966, over forty Black and white civil rights workers were lynched or murdered, but not a single person was convicted of any crime. From 1964 to 1966 over fifty Black churches had been burned or bombed. While the passing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was proclaimed as ushering in opportunities for Black folks to participate meaningfully in government, the realities of white supremacist terrorism in the South ensured that no such promise was actualized. Earnest attempts of enforcing the Voting Rights Act would have required that the Federal government mobilize its resources, as of 1966 not a single Federal law officer had been assigned to the South to ensure implementation of the law. It was in this gulf between existing legislation and the daily realities of Black folks living in the South that James Meredith began his trek.
Meredith's "March Against Fear" was quickly cut short when the very next day after starting his march he was blasted by a shotgun on the side of the road. After meeting with Meredith in his hospital room, Dr. Martin Luther King with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Floyd McKissick with the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and Stokely Carmichael and Cleveland Sellars with SNCC all agreed that their organizations would work together to organize the continuation of the march.
 |
| Dr. King, Stokely Carmichael & Mukasa Ricks during the "March Against Fear" |
"As we approached Greenwood large crowds turned out to welcome us to the city. At the huge mass meeting that night which was held in a city park, Stokely mounted the platform and proclaimed in stentorian terms, "What we need is black power." After expounding his black power theme, Willie Ricks, the fiery orator of SNICK leaped to the platform and shouted, "What do you want?" The crowd roared Black Power. Again and again Ricks cried What do you want? and the Black Power response grew louder and louder. This refrain was continued until the crowd reached a fever pitched point. For people who had been crushed so long by white power and who had been taught that black was degrading, this slogan had a ready appeal. So Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement. The phrase had been used long before by Richard Wright and others, but never before had it been used as a slogan in the civil rights movement."
- From the original transcript of the chapter on Black Power from Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community" by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. provided by The King Library and Archives [LINK]
During one of the many rallies that accompanied the civil rights march through Mississippi in June, Willie Ricks, a 23-year-old member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, stood on the back of a flat-bed truck and harangued a crowd of nearly a thousand Negroes. Ricks is known within the Committee as "The Reverend" for his ability to thunder in the manner of a fundamentalist preacher, and that night, at the fairground in Yazoo City, he talked of "white blood flowing," yelled "black power" several times and otherwise warmed up to the subject of how he, as a Negro, was tired of white society.
- "The Story of Snick: From 'Freedom High' to 'Black Power'" by Gene Roberts, New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1966
Mainstream civil rights organizations and white liberals became increasingly uncomfortable with the deepening and increasingly explicit radicalism of SNCC. Since self-determination had become a central principle of SNCC's organizing program they had decided to no longer allow white allies to work with them in organizing communities of color. This choice to have only Black organizers preaching Black self-determination shocked the white liberal establishment. Many liberal white newspapers, supportive of the civil rights movement over all, called SNCC racist, sometimes going so far as to compare them to very white southerners who had tried to lynch, firebomb, and shoot civil rights workers. Many moderate civil rights leaders denounced SNCC and their Black Power philosophy, saying it alienated white allies and the philanthropic donors that supported the movement. At the time, Dr. King described Black Power as "disappointment wrapped in despair."
For Ricks and Carmichael and other veteran freedom fighters in SNCC, Black Power was the direct philosophical and cultural development of the reflective community-directed grassroots organizing that SNCC had been doing in the rural south. It was from rural Black southerners that organizers like Carmichael and Ricks learned the incredible value of self-reliance and self-determination. As their consciousness evolved, SNCC organizers recognized the need to develop a program that would build the necessary institutional support through which these values could flourish. The organizing experiences in Lowndes County were the basis for this new vision. It was through the creation of all-Black political parties that existed outside the control of white supremacists, like the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, that independent power bases could be constructed.
Black Power, as an organization philosophy was much more than rhetoric, it was both radical & pragmatic.
Liberation is a Journey
For much of its early history, SNCC battled against the fear that had kept rural southern blacks from wholeheartedly organizing and acting on their own behalf. It strengthened or built aggressive, locally led movements in the communities where it worked. While organizing grassroots voter-registration drives, SNCC workers offered themselves as a protective barrier between private and state-sponsored terror and the local communities where SNCC staffers lived and worked.
By 1965, SNCC fielded the largest staff of any civil rights organization in the South. It had organized nonviolent direct action against segregated facilities, as well as voter-registration projects, in Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland, Missouri, Louisiana Virginia Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi; built two independent political parties and organized labor unions and agricultural cooperatives; and given the movement for women's liberation new energy. It inspired and trained the activists who began the "New Left." It helped expand the limits of political debate within black America, and broadened the focus of the civil rights movement. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing social order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.
- SNCC: What We Did by Julia Bond
From his early days as a Howard High School student organizing sit-ins in the department stores of downtown Chattanooga to his work on the frontlines of the civil rights struggle in rural counties of the deep South to the formation of the Black Panther Party in Lowndes County, Alabama - the story of Mukasa Ricks is the story of what is possible when everyday grassroots folks commit themselves to the struggle for freedom. The journey on the road to freedom changes us, changes who we are and what we come to understand as the destination we are seeking. SNCC's changing political orientation from a non-violent, integrationist and inter-racial organization to an organization dedicated to working within rural communities of color in the South to develop their capacity for direct control of their own material conditions through leadership development, institution building, raising Black consciousness and being open to a diversity of tactics mirrored the personal political maturation of both Mukasa Ricks and Stokely Carmichael.
Dr. King, towards the end of his life, also began moving in the direction of Ricks and Carmichael. In the notorious speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence", delivered at Riverside Church in New York, a year to the day before his assassination by the United States government in Memphis, Dr. King described the United States as the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world." Like the political program of Black Power, Dr. King's attacks on American imperialism and support of the self-determination of people of color, whether in the ghettos of the United States or the fields of Vietnam, was viciously attacked by the liberal white establishment. The New York Times described King's connecting the plights of poor people of color in the United States to those in Vietnam as "wasteful and self-defeating", while the Washington Post attacked King himself saying he had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."
Substantive differences exist between the approaches and philosophies of Dr. King and the SNCC organizers turned Black Panthers, but in the end they all agreed that piecemeal reform would never lead to full freedom, equality and justice for people of color. A fundamental restructuring of our society, economy and political system would be required if we, as a people, are to live up to our professed values. This change will not occur in a vacuum and will not occur of itself. To be liberated from the oppressive confines of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and capitalism we must individually commit ourselves to the fight for freedom and work to actively move others to join us in our struggles. We can look to the life of Mukasa Ricks, a Chattanooga native, for a guide as to the path that journey might take us.
Love your people more than you love yourselves. Make whatever sacrifices are necessary for your people. Get organized, every individual should belong to an organization, and within those organizations, get educated. Study liberation movements, not just African liberation movements but study movements in China, Guinea, Cuba. Study these movements to see that all liberation movements have one common enemy: imperialism. And that there is one solution: poor people all over must unite to whoop imperialism; we have to take their resources and use them to uplift people all over. Students have to serve working class people. Not just study history, but get out there and make history to make a strong contribution towards our liberation.
- Mukasa Ricks
 |
| Picture taken from Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights by Winston A. Grady-Willis, 2006 Duke University Press p. 60 |
This post is one in a series entitled "The People's History of Chattanooga". My hope is to begin providing a more complex and true history of the actual events and people who lived, worked, and struggled in Chattanooga. This is not the Chamber of Commerce's version of local history. I am trying to provide narratives that speak to the grassroots about the grassroots in a way that includes all of our failings, contradictions, victories and moments of inspiration.