Gender conflict and anti-Communist infighting destroyed SNCC’s LA chapter in 1968

Evidence

In SNCC Los Angeles, the gender conflict—and then the Communist hunts—got so bad in 1968 that the chapter closed its doors by summer’s end. Angela Davis then started seriously considering joining the Communist Party, a party she felt had not paid “sufficient attention to the national and racial dimensions of the oppression of Black people.” But the CPUSA’s new Che-Lumumba Club did. And this collective of Communists of color became Davis’s entryway into the Communist Party in 1968, and her leap into campaign work for the first Black woman to run for the US presidency, CPUSA candidate Charlene Mitchell. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1028

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the broader history of COINTELPRO harassment and the Communist Party’s Che-Lumumba Club — connects to reading on black radical left politics in the 60s.