Civil Rights Leaders' Infighting Threatened Movement

The Movement That Almost Destroyed Itself

In the summer of 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) elected Stokely Carmichael as its chairman. Carmichael had been a field organizer in the South, beaten and jailed for his work. He was tired of waiting. He was tired of the slow pace of change. He was tired of the strategy of nonviolence that had been the movement's guiding principle. At a rally in Greenwood, Mississippi, he told the crowd: "We've been saying 'Freedom Now' for six years. We've been saying 'We Shall Overcome' for six years. We're not going to overcome until we get some power." Then he said something that changed the movement: "We want black power."

The phrase was not new. It had been used before. But when Carmichael said it, in the context of the movement's frustrations, it became a dividing line. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had built the movement on the philosophy of nonviolence, of integration, of appealing to the conscience of white America. The new leaders of SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were questioning that philosophy. They were questioning whether white America had a conscience to appeal to. They were questioning whether integration was the goal. The movement that had been unified in the early 1960s was fracturing.

What Everyone Knows

The Civil Rights Movement is remembered as a unified struggle, with Martin Luther King Jr. as its moral leader, with marchers and protesters who faced fire hoses and police dogs with dignity and courage. The story is taught in schools, celebrated in films, and invoked in political speeches. It is a story of unity, of progress, of a nation that eventually did the right thing.

What is less often emphasized is that the movement was never unified. It was a coalition of organizations with different strategies, different constituencies, different goals. The coalition held together in the early years, when the targets were clear and the victories were hard-won. By the mid-1960s, the coalition was fracturing. The fractures were not just about strategy. They were about power, about race, about who would lead and who would follow.

What History Actually Shows

The divisions in the movement were evident from the beginning. The NAACP, founded in 1909, was a legal and lobbying organization. It worked through the courts and Congress. The SCLC, founded in 1957, was a church-based organization that used nonviolent protest to challenge segregation. SNCC, founded in 1960, was a student organization that believed in grassroots organizing and direct action. The three organizations worked together in campaigns like Birmingham and Selma, but they did not always agree on tactics or goals.

The divisions deepened after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The legal victories were real, but they did not change the conditions of Black life in the North. The problems of poverty, housing discrimination, police brutality—these were not solved by the legislation that had ended Jim Crow in the South. The younger activists in SNCC and CORE began to question the strategy of nonviolence, the goal of integration, the leadership of King.

The FBI's COINTELPRO program exploited these divisions. The program, which was authorized by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, was designed to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of Black activists. The FBI infiltrated the movement, planted false information, and encouraged rivalries. Agents sent anonymous letters to King, suggesting that he should commit suicide. They spread rumors that Carmichael was an FBI informant. They tried to turn the movement against itself.

The Part That Got Buried

The divisions in the movement were real. They were not created by the FBI. The FBI exploited them. The tensions between King and Malcolm X were not manufactured. The tensions between SNCC and SCLC were not manufactured. The debate over nonviolence, over integration, over the role of white allies—these were real debates. The movement was not a monolith. It was a collection of organizations and individuals who did not always agree.

By 1967, the movement was in disarray. King was focused on the Poor People's Campaign, a multiracial effort to address economic inequality. SNCC had expelled its white members and was moving toward a Black nationalist position. CORE had done the same. The coalition that had won the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had fragmented. The fragmentation was not a sign of failure. It was a sign of success. The movement had achieved its immediate goals. The next phase—addressing the structural inequalities that the legislation had not touched—required different strategies, different organizations, different leaders.

The Ripple Effect

The fragmentation of the movement did not end the struggle for civil rights. It changed it. The Black Power movement, which emerged from the fragmentation, focused on Black self-determination, on economic development, on political representation. The movement for Black studies in universities, for Black elected officials, for community control of schools and police—these were the legacies of the fragmentation.

The infighting that the FBI exploited also left scars. The suspicion that had been sown among activists—that their comrades were informants, that their leaders were compromised—persisted. The movement that had been built on trust and solidarity was damaged. The damage was not fatal. But it was real.

The Line That Says It All

The Civil Rights Movement was never the unified, harmonious movement that the history books remember; it was a coalition of organizations that disagreed on strategy, on goals, and on who should lead—and the disagreements that threatened to destroy the movement were not signs of weakness, but signs that the movement had achieved enough that its leaders could afford to disagree about what to do next.