Jennifer Jensen Wallach,
John A. Kirk, eds.c.
Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas.
Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2011. 225 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-55728-968-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-55728-966-7.
Reviewed by Amanda D. Higgins (University of Kentucky)
Published on H-1960s (January, 2012)
Commissioned by Ian Rocksborough-SmithJennifer Jensen Wallach and John A. Kirk’s Arsnick is a concise collection of scholarly essays, participant recollections, and documents from the Arkansas project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The anthology attempts to recover the specific importance of the Arkansas SNCC chapter to the larger civil rights movement. Arsnick fulfills its stated purpose, while leaving a number of departure points for further investigation by future historians. Like John Dittmer’s Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (1995) and William Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (1981), Wallach and Kirk’s anthology asserts the importance of local chapters and state projects in understanding the full history of the modern civil rights movement.
Divided into three sections, Arsnick begins with five scholarly essays about the movement. The essays draw on a number of the primary sources provided in the volume, showcasing the interconnected nature of the anthology. The essays are “all the secondary literature written today on SNCC in Arkansas,” suggesting that much more work is needed on the project’s history and contributions (p. xii). Each individual essay, taken separately, is a strong contribution to the history of local and national organizations. Kirk’s piece discusses the connections between the desegregation campaigns in 1960 Little Rock and the larger, later movement throughout the state. Kirk astutely connects the inaction of local, state, and federal courts on civil rights arrests and prosecutions and the development of SNCC as a national organization. Brent Riffel uses project director Bill Hansen as a lens to understand SNCC in Arkansas, arguing that Hansen “played an important, if overlooked, role in the history of the American civil rights movement and the history of Arkansas” (p. 34). Holly McGee moves out of Little Rock and discusses SNCC’s second office in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Pine Bluff students at Arkansas AM&N successfully desegregated the city lunch counters, at great personal risk. Many students were expelled from the college, as the AM&N’s president felt he had to protect the school’s reputation in the state legislature in the midst of a funding crisis. McGee’s essay highlights the ideological split between middle-class, older African Americans in Pine Bluff (and Arkansas in general) and the younger, student movement. In the same vein, Randy Finley’s work highlights the racial tensions present in small Arkansas towns (Helena, Forrest City, and Gould), particularly between white and black SNCC workers and the locals they were trying to organize. Finally, Wallach’s essay examines the response of white SNCC workers in Arkansas to the emergence of Black Power within SNCC. Wallach constructs an alternative narrative to the SNCC Mississippi project, arguing that whites remained active within Arkansas SNCC well after the 1966 turn toward Black Power, and some white workers even organized around the principles of Black Power.
The book’s strongest contributions to the scholarly record are recollections of SNCC members and their historical documents. The inclusion of this material sets it apart from other anthologies of local movements. The incorporation of participants’ understanding of their work in Arkansas SNCC sheds light on the implantation, development, and ultimate ending of the project and its significance to individual participants. The oral histories and written recollections of the members highlight the varying reasons individuals joined and remained active in the movement. Collected over forty years, the recollections also provide a lesson in the transient nature of historical memory, as some participants’ recollections and oral histories provide a contradictory picture of the organization’s development. Each entry has been edited for space, with some repetition removed; however, the scope and language of individual contributions remains intact.
Similarly, the documents of the Arkansas SNCC illuminate the changing nature of the organization, from a small project in 1962, to a major component of SNCC’s southern campaign by 1966. The documents capture the uncertainty and the dedication of the organizers. They also express the disjointed nature of a grassroots organization, when communication is slow and decisions have to be made quickly. The voices of local organizers and participants in SNCC’s projects throughout the state are showcased in the document section. One particularly powerful example of this is a poem by eleven-year-old Geraldine Smith, a student in the SNCC Freedom School in Forrest City, which explained what “We Shall Overcome” meant to her.
The strength of the primary sources included in the volume complement the scholarly essays. Still, while the essays are informative, are clearly argued, and build on each other chronologically and thematically, they often repeat information and do not fully acknowledge each other. Each essay spends a great deal of time discussing the contributions of Hansen, the Arkansas project’s white director. Thus, the voices of local activists and rank-and-file workers are less prominent. There is also a heavy emphasis of understanding Arkansas SNCC in the wake of Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 exhortation of “Black Power” during the Meredith March against Fear. The anthology could have been improved with the addition of a general overview of the project in the introduction and the removal of repetitive information throughout. A map would also have allowed the reader to see the proximity of the towns to each other and the movement of SNCC resources throughout the state.
Wallach and Kirk’s volume is an excellent starting point for understanding SNCC’s statewide campaigns, and would complement Clayborne Carson’s seminal In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1995), by providing depth and context to the larger movement. Moreover, the volume’s exploratory nature also highlights the many remaining areas for scholars to investigate. More work is needed on local projects and people involved with SNCC and the larger movement, as well as interactions between SNCC’s Atlanta headquarters and its state projects. Further, the anthology provides some of the preliminary work for scholars, pointing researchers toward important archival collections and highlighting some of the key documents that exist. Overall, while Arsnick has a few structural issues to do with its essays, the volume is an excellent departure point for exploring the varying nature of SNCC’s grassroots projects in Arkansas.
Citation: Amanda D. Higgins. Review of Wallach, Jennifer Jensen; Kirk, John A., eds.c, Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas. H-1960s, H-Net Reviews. January, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34350