THE MOVEMENT

“… For six years during that era, a small-circulation newspaper, THE MOVEMENT, was published each month in San Francisco and distributed nationwide. At its peak, it produced a 25,000 copy press run with 2,500 paid subscriptions. Of the many “underground newspapers” that flourished during this period, it is appropriate that THE MOVEMENT should now be posted on the web (Farmworker Movement Documentation Project), reproduced in facsimile (Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project), and the originals archived at San Francisco State’s Labor Archives and Research Center). There can be no sustained rebellion or resistance without organizers. No militancy can be effective without that core of people who compile lists, knock on doors, call meetings, argue, convince, fail to convince, return, call other meetings, hand out leaflets, write, talk, and take risks. Some become visible as public leaders. Most remain unknown. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was remarkable in that it was essentially an organization of organizers. The vast majority of the staff worked in the South, where, beginning in 1960, they led the sit-in movement, spearheaded voter registration projects, and organized Black communities at the grassroots level. Some SNCC field secretaries established offices in the North and West to raise funds and generate publicity and political support. Many of these offices became centers of community organization and political activity. In 1964, SNCC Field Secretary Mike Miller established the San Francisco Friends of SNCC office. He asked Terry Cannon, a twenty four-year-old writer who had helped him launch a community-organizing project in the Fillmore District, to set up a newsletter that would keep West Coast SNCC supporters in touch with activities in the South.  … The sources for most of these stories were the organizers themselves. This established THE MOVEMENT’s signature approach: its heart lay in organizing, its strength in reports from the field. Early staff members spent as much time trying to block shipments of boycotted grapes as they did covering stories; over the next several years, however, the paper built a network of organizer/correspondents who reported and debated throughout its pages. They generated information available almost nowhere else. This approach led Radical America to write, in 1968: ‘Over the last four years THE MOVEMENT, published monthly in California, has been the best single source of information and commentary from the New Left.’ …”
[PDF] Introduction to THE MOVEMENT
The Freedom Archives