Courtland cox biography
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He left Mississippi after the challenge, and joined Stokely Carmichael in Lowndes County, Alabama, known then as “Bloody Lowndes” for its anti-Black violence. Ella Baker and Howard Zinn led questioning to help the mostly young leaders work toward their vision for activism.
Institute for Policy Studies
In 1993 Cox was listed among "former fellows, project co-ordinators and staff" of the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington DC.[1]
SNCC
In December 1963 Gloria Richardson attended a national meeting of SNCC leaders in Atlanta, where they discussed the future direction of the organization.
ISBN 9780807862704.]
SNCC makes contact in Lowndes County
March 1965
Many SNCC activists were skeptical when, following the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson in Marion, Alabama, SCLC proposed a protest march to the state capitol in Montgomery. In Alabama, local parties were required to have a visual symbol because of the state’s high illiteracy rate.
Just days before Bloody Sunday and the first attempted march, 39 local people caused a stir when they tried to register to vote. Stokely Carmichael predicted “a bunch of media hoopla and confusion.” He was also concerned for the safety of the marchers, who would be traversing “the most backward and violent county in Alabama”–Lowndes County.
The violence of “Bloody Lowndes” was largely responsible for the fact that, despite being 80 percent Black, only one Black person was registered to vote there.
Cox met classmates like Stokely Carmichael, Ed Brown, Michael Thelwell, Jean Wheeler and others as NAG became involved in sit-ins along Route 40, Freedom Rides, and demonstrations on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
In its early days, SNCC operated as a loose association of student groups, and Cox was one of NAG’s representative on SNCC’s coordinating council.
SNCC had come out against the Vietnam War in January 1966, because after years of organizing, they now questioned why young Black men should fight and die in Vietnam when they were denied first class citizenship and faced white supremacist violence at home.
Cox remained committed to idea of economic empowerment.
In Atlanta they discussed and planned for an extended voting rights program to be conducted in the South the next year, an election year.[2]
References
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- ↑Institute for Policy Studies 30th Anniversary brochure
- ↑[Ransby, Barbara (2003). As well, from its very beginnings, SNCC drew parallels between its efforts in the Deep South and the goals of African liberation movements and connected with other anti-colonial struggles unfolding across the globe.
Courtland Cox
January 27, 1941 –
Raised in New York City, New York
“What would it profit a man to have the vote and not be able to control it?” asked Courtland Cox, who constantly searched for new ways to empower Black people to make decisions and take control of their lives.
Cox spent his childhood between New York City and Trinidad.
“It’s not about protest it’s about power,” explained Cox. Why protest about police brutality by the sheriff when Black people could elect a sheriff that reflected their interests?
SNCC researcher Jack Minnis found an obscure Alabama law that allowed for the creation of county-level political parties. University of North Carolina Press. “My father met with them, and I think he kind of liked those fellows or he was about like me, half crazy.” Either way, the Jackson family allowed the young organizers to use the house as their headquarters.
During their first weeks in Lowndes, SNCC activists deepened their ties to the community.
It gave Cox and the SNCC organizers ammunition they needed to organize the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP), an independent, Black political party. Black communities, he noted, whether in the Deep South or northern cities, lacked “any kind of economic infrastructure that could make a difference,” and Atlantic City had helped him realize that “you could not keep asking people … who were in fact benefitting from the status quo to change the status quo.”
He saw possibility in building alliances across the Black Diaspora, and in 1974, he helped organize a Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania that brought together Black leaders from around the world to discuss the “rekindling of political understanding and cooperation among African people.”
Sources
Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003).
Charles E.
Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 162-163, 233-234.
Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, ed., A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007).
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
Our Voices: Emergence of Black Power, featuring selections from the SNCC Critical Oral Histories Conference, July 2016, Duke University.
Our Voices: The Black Panther, featuring Courtland Cox and Jennifer Lawson, SNCC Digital Gateway.
Our Voices: Internationalism, featuring Geri Augusto, Courtland Cox, and Jennifer Lawson, SNCC Digital Gateway.
Interview with Courtland Cox by Joseph Mosnier, July 8, 2011, Civil Rights History Project, Library of Congress.
Courtland Cox
Courtland Cox ...
SNCC’s Martha Prescod Norman remembered, “I don’t think anybody who spent more than a second in Lowndes didn’t know the Jackson family and respect them for their courage and their tremendous determination.” Gloria House added, it was “really quite phenomenal that those of us in our twenties … could go and work on a daily basis with sharecroppers – communicate, build these bonds, share and love, trust each other.”
Sources
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V.
Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
Stokely Carmichael with Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (New York: Scribner, 2003).
Charles E. Cobb, Jr., On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2008).
Cheryl Greenberg, ed., A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
Henry Hampton, et al., eds., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s(New York: Bantam Books, 1990).
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
Paniel E.
Joseph, Stokely: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas, 2014).
Inside SNCC
…Or How the Organizers Organized
SNCC Poster, 1963, Photography by Danny Lyon, crmvet.org
After its founding in 1960, SNCC grew from a coordinating committee made up of campus affiliates to an organization of organizers with “field secretaries” working full-time for change in communities across the Deep South.
Cox began exploring strategies and tactics beyond protest. When Cox started working in Lowndes, Blacks made up 80% of the county’s population, but only four black people were registered to vote. After the Voting Rights Act passed, SNCC helped register 2,800 voters, and for the first time, there were more registered Black voters than white voters in the county.
Bob Dylan, Courtland Cox, Pete Seeger, and James Forman sitting outside SNCC office in Greenwood, Mississippi, July 1963, Danny Lyon, Bleakbeauty.com
But Cox and the other SNCC organizers thought it was not enough for Black people to vote for a less racist white sheriff; they wanted local people to elect county officials who shared their concerns.
He remembered that after school that day, “I went home and I talked to my father about it.” He asked his father if the SNCC workers could stay at an empty house the family owned.