Power Is Knowledge, Powerful Knowledge: Research Activism in the Civil Rights Struggle

The SNCC Research Department (founded in 1963) was headed by Jack Minnis, whom veteran organizer Judy Richardson recalls as “crusty older white guy who smoked like a fiend, looked generally unkempt, and could get research from a turnip.” Many episodes of the department’s service to SNCC field organizers (e.g. finding the legal loophole that allowed the Lowndes County Freedom Organization) has the prevailing pattern of responding to needs and inquiries of organizers “on the front lines.” The research team was headed by Minnis, but it was led by the movement; it did not “arm” organizers with knowledge so much as work with them through research that did work for them.

To that end, this paper begins with, but is not solely about, SNCC’s research arm or its intrepid investigator. Rather, this paper examines the recurring problem of civil rights activists responding to, devising, applying, and educating with research as part of their organizing practice. The idea that research serves social movement strategy is intuitive for the litigation work of the NAACP, but surprising for grassroots projects like Septima Clark’s Citizenship Schools on the South Carolina Sea Islands. Considering the SNCC Research Department in relationship to this recurring problem, this paper reflects on how, as part of the struggle for political power, movements create a local or nationally networked learning community that turns activists into inquirers and researchers into activists, experimenting with a radical configuration of knowledge and power in society.