BLACK POWER
41
expansion of slavery would be allowed, but the institution would be
left alone where it already existed. The principle of nonextension first
came into prominence in the late eighteen-forties when fear devel–
oped in the North that territory acquired from our war with Mexico
would be made into new slave states. Later the doctrine formed the
basis of the Republican party which in 1860 elected Lincoln to the
Presidency. The Abolitionists, in other words, with their demand for
immediate (and uncompensated) emancipation, never became the
major channel of Northern antislavery sentiment. They always re–
mained a small sect, vilified by slavery'S defenders and distrusted even
by allies within the antislavery movement.
The parallels between the Abolitionists and the current defenders
of Black Power seem to me numerous and striking. It is worth noting,
first of all, that neither group started off with so-called "extremist"
positions (the appropriateness of that word being, in any case, dubi–
OUS).7
The SNCC of 1967 is not the SNCC formed in 1960; both
its personnel and its programs have shifted markedly. SNCC origin–
ally grew out of the sit-ins spontaneously begun in Greensboro, North
Carolina, by four freshmen at the all-Negro North Carolina Agricul–
tural and Technical College. The sit-in technique spread rapidly
through the South, and within a few months the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formally inaugurated to chan–
nel and encourage further activities. At its inception SNCC's staff
was interracial, religious in orientation, committed to the "American
Dream," chiefly concerned with winning the right to share more
equitably in that Dream and optimistic about the possibility of being
allowed to do so. SNCC placed its hopes on an appeal to the national
conscience and this it expected to arouse by the examples of nonvio–
lence and redemptive love, and by the dramatic devices of sit-ins,
freedom rides and protest marches.
8
The Abolitionist movement, at the time of its inception, was
similarly benign and sanguine.
It,
too, placed emphasis on "moral
7. For a discussion of "extremism" and the confused uses to which the
word can be and has been put, see Howard Zinn, " Abolitionists, Freedom–
Riders, and the Tactics of Agitation,"
Th e A ntislavery Vanguard ,
Martin
Duberman, ed., (Princeton,
1965),
especially pp.
421-426.
8. For the shifting nature of SNCC see Howard Zinn,
SNCC: The New
Abolitionists
(Boston,
1964),
and Gene Roberts, " From 'Freedom High'
to 'Black Power,'"
Tht! New York Times,
September
25, 1966.
