SNCC

This book is not, the author would have us know, a history of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee "in any formal sense. it leaves out too much for that." Perhaps it does, but what has certainly not been left out is a sense of the historical value of what a mere 150 fully committed young men and women, Negro and white, with a few thousand part-time supporters, are accomplishing today in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. We all owe them a debt for "releasing he idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tested the drama of a social upheaval." And we — they, also — owe Mr. Zinn a debt f or writing such a vivid, moving account which captures the spirit of its subject so well that one ceases to remember that one is only reading about these people and their cause — one is there; and if not beside them in the marches, the sit-ins, the courts, and the jails, t hen at least forced to look on from a few yards away while they are kicked or tortured with cattle prods. What may be lacking in "objectivity" here is more than compensated for by faith and urgent honesty. Too little of this story was known to the general public until the recent tragic disappearance of three civil rights workers brought it headlines — for a while. Here is much, if by no means all, of the inside story, the people actually involved and the nature of the involvement.