archives.nypl.org -- Northern Student Movement records (original) (raw)

Launched in the fall of 1961 by Peter Countryman and a committee of the Student Christian Movement in New England, the Northern Student Movement (NSM) grew from a loose group of campus organizations raising funds for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its student-led civil rights initiatives in the South, to student-run tutorial programs in the inner-cities of Philadelphia, New York and Hartford, to a federation of community action projects in eight cities in the Northeast and Michigan. By the fall of 1963, NSM had a staff of fifty fulltime activists and more than 2,500 student volunteers. William Strickland succeeded Countryman as executive director in September 1963. The organization flourished until the mid-1960s when white members were ostracized and funding dried up.

NSM's initial operations involved three areas of activity: the campus, the community and the South; each area having its own coordinating committee, and representatives from each area making up the Executive Committee. Campus groups were to fight discrimination and token integration at their schools, and to develop a close relationship with community leaders in the inner-cities. Once a relationship of trust was established, a city project encompassing a tutorial program and community mobilization and empowerment projects would be launched with the help of student volunteers. The Southern component of the group's activities included raising funds for SNCC and organizing groups of students from colleges in the North to participate as volunteers in Southern civil rights campaigns. Beginning in 1964, the group's evolving structure consisted of a central office, city projects and campus affiliates. The Central Office recruited and trained new staff for the entire organization, coordinated the campus-based projects, maintained communication among the city projects, and was in charge of financial support. The group's overall orientation was set by the NSM Congress composed of delegates from the city projects, the central office and delegates at large, including Countryman and the president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Paul Potter.

In its early stages, NSM ran tutorial programs in debilitated areas accessible to college campuses in Philadelphia, New York City and Prince Edward County in Virginia. In North Philadelphia, Countryman and a fulltime staff of 25 operated the Philadelphia Tutorial Project in the summer of 1962, matching 175 tutors with some 350 children. Plans began that fall for year-round programs in eight Northern cities. In Hartford, Connecticut, 100 tutors from Trinity and other colleges held evening sessions with 300 tutees in the North End district. The tutorials, emphasizing one-on-one instruction, were held in boys clubs, church buildings, local high schools and the YMCA. Other large-scale tutorial projects included the Harlem Education Project in New York City, the Roxbury-South End project in Boston, and the Detroit Education Project. By the fall of 1964, NSM had some 4,000 tutors instructing over 5,000 elementary and high school students. The following year, concerned that the tutorials only addressed one symptom of ghetto life, the organization opted to phase them out. By the summer of 1965, all of the tutorials, including the Philadelphia Tutorial Project, were functioning as separate entities.

The national organization was often overshadowed by the tutorial projects and the community groups it either fostered or joined, especially in Boston and Hartford. Launched in 1962 as an independent community organization mobilizing for political and economic equality, the Boston Action Group (BAG) led selective patronage boycotts against department stores and companies like Wonder Bread that discriminated against Blacks, and organized parent councils to remodel part of the city's public schools. BAG became an NSM project in 1964, directed by Sarah-Ann Shaw. Meanwhile, Boston NSM organized a large-scale tutorial project in the Roxbury-South End area for pre-school, elementary and high school students, and was also involved in adult literacy, voter registration, a Black history workshop, and a Freedom Library of books by and about African-Americans.

Hartford NSM began its first tutorial in June 1963 with a staff of 25 and more than 200 tutors. Launched the same summer by Peter Morrill and other NSM activists, the North End Community Action Project (NECAP) brought the civil rights movement north to Hartford with a kneel-in campaign at several local restaurants and other businesses that would not hire Blacks in "visible places". Hartford NSM organized Black history, art and music classes, held civil rights forums and published a newspaper, the North End Voice, while NECAP mobilized local residents around issues of housing, jobs, voter registration and police brutality. Charles (Chuck) Turner who replaced Morrill in 1964 as NECAP coordinator was arrested in August 1965 and charged with inciting to riot after leading a rally in solidarity with the famous Watts upheavals in Los Angeles.

The Philadelphia's Tutorial Project (PTP), NSM's oldest venture was arguably its most successful. The tutorial grew over a two year period to include 800 tutors and over 1,100 children and high school students in 1964. It won praise from Pennsylvania's governor, William Scranton, the School District of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations. Non-tutorial activities organized by Philadelphia NSM included a leadership training program for high school students and dropouts called "Brothers at the Corner", and African-American history programs that emphasized black identity and black struggle. Thurman Harrison became PTP director in 1964. The NSM Freedom Library in Philadelphia was launched by John Churchville in August 1964 to project a more positive image of Blacks in American life. It operated a pre-school and after school program, a Freedom choir, and initiated the Feb. 1966 Black Unity Rally that spearheaded the next stage in the development of the organization. The Freedom Library also housed a Community Action Program that organized housing tenants and an Intra-City Community Cooperative that worked with Black youth in North Philadelphia.

In New York, NSM fostered two groups: the Harlem Education Project (HEP) and the Harlem Action Group (HAG). HEP grew out of a 1962 summer selective patronage campaign that targeted National Dairy, the maker of Sealtest milk and ice cream. Its three-prong program in 1963 involved a high school tutoring program led by Sarah Lawrence graduate Kathy Rogers, a Neighborhood Commons project organized by Carl Anthony, a student at Columbia University's school of architecture, and a community action group that coalesced the following year into HAG. The tutorials included field trips to cultural institutions and work places, and brought the students in contact with professionals who explained the kinds of preparation needed to enter their respective fields. The Neighborhood Commons enlisted local youth and architectural students to transform vacant lots into "pocket parks" and playgrounds. HEP also organized lecture series on Black history and published a newspaper, the Harlem Voice, edited and written by high school students. Led by Robert Knight, HAG's initial efforts included teaming up with Jesse Gray's Community Council on Housing to organize rent strikes against rat infestation and other "hazardous and dangerous conditions" in several Harlem tenements, and leading junior high school students in picketing against "poor schools and to demand better books and smaller classrooms". HAG also initiated a Youth Mayor of Harlem program and a leadership development camp for youth in upstate New York, as well as adult literacy and consumer education programs, but was discontinued by NSM in 1965 because of group apathy and internal squabble. A summer preschool program run by Dorothy Stoneman, arguably HAG's most successful effort, continued independently.

Organized in 1962, Detroit's NSM project ran a successful and well-funded tutorial program involving several hundred tutors and over 1,000 high school students, until it was discontinued in December 1964. Earlier that year, the Adult Community Movement for Equality (ACME) was launched on Detroit's East Side to organize against poor housing, unemployment and police brutality. It participated in voter registration, published a bi-weekly newsletter, We the People, and put forth a proposal in February 1965 to reshape Detroit's anti-poverty program to allow more community participation. After NSM's shift to all-black membership, Frank Joyce, former NSM director in Detroit, launched Friends of NSM in October 1965, as "a movement of whites and Negroes" in solidarity "with the ghetto-based movement". ACME was renamed the Afro-American Youth Movement in early 1966.

NSM's shift in 1965 to an all-Black organization came with a shift in orientation from civil rights to Black Nationalism. "Protest qua protest has failed to effect substantive change in the country", Strickland wrote in August 1964, adding that the civil rights movement had failed Black people and was only "playing at freedom". NSM would now become an arm of the "national movement of Black people to acquire power", and a national Afro-American Student Conference was held in Philadelphia in May 1966 to discuss the role of Black students in the movement. NSM's new goal was to build community organizations toward "a relevant movement in the ghettos of the North" and "to develop the political consciousness of the masses so that urban democracy can become a reality" (Strickland to Ella Baker, May 6, 1965). A Black People's Unity Movement was launched to attract Black professionals, businessmen and affluent Blacks to the movement, and thus make up for the loss of white funding, "with teas, socials, garden-parties and other sordid activities to which the Black bourgeoisie is prone" (Hilton Clark to John Churchville, July 11, 1966). A Black Unity rally in Philadelphia in February 1966 drew 2,000 participants. NSM was still active in 1967 in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Detroit. Its subsequent demise coincided with the decline of SDS and SNCC, and the student radicalism of the 1960s in general.