[In the following review, O'Brien maintains that Zinn overestimates SNCC's potential to effect major changes in America unrelated to racial issues.]

From February 1, 1960 when the first sit-ins occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, to Spring, 1964, young members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee moved across the South, organizing sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives. Their efforts put them on intimate terms with cattle prods, jail cells, and a cast of law enforcement officials whose style of rule would warm the heart of—maybe Ivan the Terrible.

This book is built on the personal accounts of these young men and women. It is journalism; it is “human interest”; and it is valuable. We remember that behind “strategy” and “power structure” and “backlash” are people; that there are parts of our nation where people who work for equal rights—and not “strategies” or “power structures”—are defeated and sometimes killed.

Howard Zinn records the SNCC workers' early realization that the terrorized Negroes of the South would never cooperate unless the workers proved themselves willing to make a long-term commitment; problems were sure to multiply for the local Negro community the minute civil rights activities began. SNCC did make that commitment and has since shared the lot of the Southern Negro: poverty, discouragement, police and civilian harassment, shotgun blasts, beatings, church-burnings, and murder. SNCC has also shared in the joy of creating a community spirit, based on non-violence and education, which has changed the Southern Negro, and which hopes to change his white brother.

SNCC's commitment, Zinn makes clear, has not been matched by the federal government; consistently the Justice Department has refused to prosecute Negro civil rights cases because, it maintains, no white Southern jury would give the case fair consideration. One can only marvel then not at the blindness of Justice but of her stalwarts, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., when they decided to prosecute nine civil rights workers in Albany, Georgia before an all-white Southern jury, having removed all possible Negro jurors in the interest of fairness.

The civil rights workers in that case were accused of picketing a white grocer, not because he refused to hire Negroes, but because he had served on a federal jury which dismissed a civil suit brought by a Negro against the sheriff of Baker County. (The Negro accused the sheriff of shooting him while in custody; the sheriff was acquitted and the Negro was later sentenced to five years for assault.) The students were convicted of harassing a federal juror.

When one SNCC worker, Joni Rabinowitz, claimed she had not been one of the pickets, the Justice Department prosecuted her for perjury. She produced thirteen witnesses who supported her including a white girl who looked like her and had been picketing. The defense moved for dismissal on the ground of mistaken identity. The Justice Department refused and Miss Rabinowitz was convicted. Over thirty F.B.I. agents were used on this case, in which, incidentally, a civil rights worker was convicted whose pregnant wife had lost her baby after being kicked and assaulted by local police officials—in that case the federal government could do nothing!

Zinn details the laws (some on the books for decades) with which the federal government could protect the Southern Negro and his champions if the decision to enforce were made. Is it any wonder the SNCC workers might occasionally have suspected that the Attorney General was not Robert Kennedy but Franz Kafka? Their frustration in this regard was summed up by SNCC chairman, John Lewis, whose speech to the March on Washington originally included the question, “I want to know: which side is the Federal Government on?” Lewis never asked that question, however; it was objected to by another speaker, Archbishop O'Boyle of Washington, who has since requested from the Vatican Council another declaration on racial justice.

SNCC: The New Abolitionists is a combination of good journalism, hagiography and prophetics, with the latter two weakening the impact of the former. Zinn tends to lay on SNCC the robe of the Messiah, a robe which makes it look ridiculous. Rhetoric overpowers reporting; he describes one SNCC field worker: “the football player turned SNCC organizer, the Christian turned Jew, the Blackman turned Everyman.”

In the last chapter “Revolution Beyond Race” he enumerates the major political, judicial, educational, and economic problems we face today and adds: “in the end, whether SNCC will continue as a vital force in American life will depend on whether it thrusts and points beyond race, probing the entire fabric of society to point to injustice of all kinds, constituting itself as a permanent, restless prod to the conscience of the nation.” It would be nice, but SNCC is not going to save the world. By suggesting it could, Zinn places SNCC's true greatness in a possible (but very doubtful) future; and he needn't have.