SNCC Shifts Emphasis to Outsting Miss. Congressmen

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee will not recruit volunteers for a Mississippi summer project unless Negro leaders of each locality specifically request them, officials revealed yesterday. Instead, SNCC plans to recruit 2000 students to work in Washington, aiding the Mississippi Democratic Party's attempt to unseat the state's five congressmen.

SNCC, which recruited nearly 1000 students for last summer's civil rights project in Mississippi, will have this year's volunteers conduct three weeks of intensive lobbying and "non-violent direct action" to support the MFDP's Challenge.

Plans for the Washington project were worked out last week in a seven-day conference SNCC in Atlanta, Ga. The decisions at Atlanta probably mean that many fewer students will work this summer in Mississippi for the council of Federated Organizations (COFO)-the coalition of SNCC, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SNCC had provided the bulk of the COFO volunteers.

At Atlanta, SNCC decided to hold "people's Conferences" in Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and Alabama. At these conferences local Negro leaders will attempt to shape their own programs.

"Some local areas will probably ask for student volunteers," according to Mrs. Robert N. Zeilner, head of SNCC's Boston office, who attended part of the Atlanta conference. She added, however, that the number of volunteers requested will probably be well below last year's figure.

The Boston Office will now recruit only for the Washington project and expects about 100 volunteers from the metropolitan area, she said. SNCC was "trying to re-evaluate its whole role" at the Atlanta conference. "The whole emphasis is being put on local people running their own projects," she explained.

"Students on a part-time basis cannot hold communities together. There has to be a transfer of control," Claude Weaver '65, a SNCC worker, said yesterday.

Mrs. Zeliner insisted that ousting the Mississippi congressmen was :not a wild dream." "We are fighting to win," she said.

The MFDP is charging that the election of the Mississippi congressmen last November is legal because large numbers of Negroes were denied the opportunity to register and vote. The House voted 276-149 to allow the five Mississippi representatives to take their seats while the congressional challenge is pending.

A series of legal steps-including public hearing in Mississippi and other parts of the country-will keep the dispute from Congress until late June or early July. Then the MFDP, withe the aid of the student lobbyists, hopes to out the congressmen and thereby compel new Mississippi elections.

The student volunteers will also lobby for a new voter registration bill. The Justice Department is currently preparing such legislation, but civil rights groups want to make sure the bill provides for very wide federal power for intervention in cases of alleged discrimination.

SNCC presently has bout 250 workers In Mississippi. Most of them remained after last summer's project and will continue to work under the auspices of COFO. Likewise, CORE, which has concentrated on the state's fourth congressional district, will maintain its activities, according to James Farmer, CORE's executive director.

Farmer also said that CORE will expand into Louisiana, Northern Florida, and South Carolina and begin recruiting local Southern white and Negro college students to staff the projects.

As its Atlanta meeting, SNCC also made a number of important organizational changes. It created a 22-member executive committee and a secretariat composed of John L. Lewis, chairman, James Forman, executive secretary, and Cleveland Cellers, program secretary, to ease day-to-day coordination problems.