Finding a Name for Freedom: On the Onomastics of SNCC and Teaching Beyond the Canon of Popular Civil Rights Memory

Keywords: antiracism, civil rights movement, education, freedom, naming, SNCC
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Place (re)naming is increasingly deployed in campaigns to do greater justice to the rights, histories, and identities of historically marginalized groups, particularly the African American experience. Important to these current struggles in recognizing that they are not at all brand new. There is an important but often under-analyzed tradition of Black social actors and groups claiming, controlling, and contesting the names of places, institutions, and people as part of the fight against racism. We revisit SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) to explore the ways in which the civil rights movement used the symbolic and material practice of (re)naming. First, we examine how SNCC field activists used coded place names as a tool of communication during social mobilization. Second, we discuss the efforts of SNCC workers to change the name of the 1960s organization as they debated its ideological mission and political identity. Third, we theorize renaming as place-remaking and highlight how SNCC transformed seemingly ordinary sites of life and work into bases of liberation such as Freedom houses, Freedom schools, and Freedom cities. Conducting an onomastic study of SNCC—the ways civil rights workers valued, controlled and contested names—is not just important to understanding the current naming turn. The historical role of naming in civil rights activism provides a lens through which to teach beyond the well-worn canon of ideas that comprise popular civil rights memory and help instructors and students more fully appreciate the intellectual labor and geographical knowledge production that made the Movement possible.