In The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC, Cleveland Sellers and Robert Terrell trace both Seller’s own life and the struggles of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Key to an understanding of SNCC’s fate is the Hamburger Theory, articulated by Ella Baker in her thesis, “More Than a Hamburger,” in which she argued that civil rights workers needed to focus on more than having a burger at a lunch counter and "ought to be interested in a whole range of social problems" (pg. 36). Baker, and those who heard her words, wanted civil rights workers to use the lunch counter protests as a stepping-stone to a larger movement and desegregate all aspects of society. Further, Baker argued that people would co-opt the students' movement and undercut its power. Unfortunately, Sellers concludes that the Hamburger theory "proved an insufficient focus" for civil rights workers by 1962 (pg. 54). Even with the desegregation of public facilities, the balance of power in the South remained firmly entrenched in the hands of white supremacists. While members of SNCC continued to work to register African Americans to vote, they also realized the two-party system would not make it possible to solve the problems of poor blacks and “there was a need for alternative or parallel political structures” (pg. 115).
According to Sellers, the push to develop black consciousness eventually gave way to Stokely Carmichael’s black power movement (pg. 167). This effectively rallied those frustrated with more traditional methods of protest, but also signaled the eventual split of SNCC into those who wanted to continue using established techniques and the more radical members. Sellers argues, “Black Power thrust SNCC to the forefront of the struggle for black liberation. Although SCLC, CORE, the NAACP and the Urban League continued to have prestige, SNCC was the premiere organization” (pg. 183). Simultaneously, SNCC members “considered themselves part of an emerging Third World coalition of revolutionaries who were anticapitalist, antiimperialist and antiracist” (pg. 188). Even while developing this consciousness, a protest in Orangeburg, SC in which the police fired on unarmed demonstrators lead to Sellers’ own arrest and, eventually, the end of SNCC through continued factionalism. Sellers gradually became aware that he, and others involved in various civil rights organizations, were under observation and subject to disinformation campaigns from the federal government as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation (pg. 257). Even with all of these difficulties, Sellers concluded in his afterword, “I am encouraged by a revival of interest among SNCC members in writing the SNCC story. The accomplishments during that period were great and there is still much to be told” (pg. 277). ( )