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Annals of the American Association of Geographers

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“The Care and Feeding of Power Structures”:Reconceptualizing Geospatial Intelligence throughthe Countermapping Efforts of the StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee

Joshua F. J. Inwood & Derek H. Alderman

To cite this article: Joshua F. J. Inwood & Derek H. Alderman (2019): “The Care and Feedingof Power Structures”: Reconceptualizing Geospatial Intelligence through the CountermappingEfforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Annals of the American Association ofGeographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1631747

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1631747

Published online: 26 Aug 2019.

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“The Care and Feeding of Power Structures”:Reconceptualizing Geospatial Intelligence through

the Countermapping Efforts of the StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee

Joshua F. J. Inwood!

and Derek H. Alderman†

!Department of Geography, The Rock Ethics Institute, The Pennsylvania State University

†Department of Geography, University of Tennessee

This article advances three interrelated arguments. First, by focusing on the Student NonviolentCoordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Research Department, an undertheorized chapter in the civil rightsmovement, we advance an expressly spatialized understanding of the African American freedom struggle.Second, by focusing on an SNCC-produced pamphlet titled The Care and Feeding of Power Structures, weadvance a larger historical geography of geospatial agency and countermapping of racial capital within blackcivil rights struggles. SNCC’s research praxis, which we argue constitutes a radical geospatial intelligenceproject, recognizes that geographical methods, information, and analytical insights are not just the purviewof experts but are a set of political tools and processes deployed by a wide range of groups. Our articledevelops a deeper understanding of the rich spatial practices underlying black geographies and the role ofgeospatial intelligence in a democratic society outside the military–industrial–academic complex. Key Words:black geographies, civil rights, countermapping, geospatial intelligence, SNCC.

本文推进三大相关主张。首先，通过聚焦学生非暴力协作委员会（SNCC）的研究部门——一个公民权运动中未经授权的支会——我们推进对非裔美国人自由斗争的显着空间化理解。再者，通过聚焦 SNCC 所生产的标题为“权力结构的关照与喂养”之小册子，我们推进地理空间施为的广泛历史地理学，以及黑人公民权斗争中对种族资本的反抗製图。我们主张，SNCC 的研究实践，构成了一个激进的地理空间智能计画，认识到地理学方法、信息与分析洞见，并非仅是专家的权限，而是由广泛的团体所部署的一组政治工具与过程。我们的文章，对支撑黑色地理学的丰富空间实践，以及地理空间智能在军工学术复合体之外的民主社会中所扮演的角色，建立更为深刻的理解。关键词：黑色地理学，公民权，反抗製图，地理空间智能，SNCC。

Este art!ıculo adelanta tres argumentos interrelacionados. Primero, orientando nuestro inter!es hacia elDepartamento de Investigaciones del Comit!e Coordinador del Estudiante No Violento (SNCC), un cap!ıtulopoco teorizado del movimiento de los derechos civiles, promovemos un entendimiento expresamenteespacializado de la lucha por la libertad afroamericana. Segundo, enfoc!andonos en un panfleto producido porel SNCC titulado “El cuidado social y las estructuras del poder en el programa de alimentos”, impulsamos unageograf!ıa hist!orica m!as amplia de la agencia geoespacial y del contramapeo del capital social dentro de lalucha por los derechos civiles negros. La praxis investigativa del SNCC, que a nuestro modo de ver constituyeun radical proyecto de inteligencia geoespacial, reconoce que la metodolog!ıa, informaci!on y perspicaciasanal!ıticas geogr!aficas no caen solamente dentro del !ambito de expertos, sino que son un conjunto deherramientas y procesos pol!ıticos desplegados por una amplia gama de grupos. Nuestro art!ıculo desarrolla unentendimiento m!as profundo de las ricas pr!acticas espaciales que subrayan las geograf!ıas negras, y del papel dela inteligencia geoespacial en una sociedad democr!atica por fuera del complejo militar–industrial–acad!emico.Palabras clave: contramapeo, derechos civiles, geograf!ıas negras, inteligencia geoespacial, SNCC.

The purpose of this article is threefold. First, byfocusing on the Student NonviolentCoordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Research

Department, an undertheorized chapter in the civilrights movement, we advance an expressly

spatialized understanding of the African Americanfreedom struggle. Neglected within the still nascentgeographic literature on the civil rights movement(e.g., Wilson 2000; Tyner 2006a, 2006b; Dwyer andAlderman 2008; Heynen 2009; Inwood 2009;

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0) 2019, pp. 1–19 # 2019 by American Association of GeographersInitial submission, June 2018; revised submissions, December 2018 and May 2019; final acceptance, May 2019

Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.

McCutcheon 2013) is a focus on the SNCC and inparticular its activism as geospatial work. Becausethese grassroots campaigns do not have as prominenta place in a U.S. national popular memory domi-nated by images of charismatic civil rights leadersand top-down organizations, we run the risk of over-simplifying the sophisticated intellectual work andstrategic planning of everyday activism. We suggestthat a critical rereading of SNCC activism can shedlight on the fundamental role geography played inthe civil rights movement, explode the narrow rangeof activities and practices that traditionally count forgeographic knowledge (Inwood 2017), and supportongoing efforts to decolonize the discipline and howwe understand geography as a social practice (Bryanand Wood 2015; Radcliffe 2017).

Our second purpose is to focus specifically on theproduction of a pamphlet entitled The Care andFeeding of Power Structures (Minnis 1965b) as part ofa larger historical geography of geospatial agency andactivism within black civil rights struggles. Whatappears on the surface as a modest, ten-page pamph-let instead is a virtual instruction guide for trainingand inspiring activists to expose, track, and visualizethe ownership stake that powerful institutions, corpo-rations, and individuals had in upholding whitesupremacy. SNCC hoped to map the broader geogra-phies of racial capital at work in the communitiesthey were organizing, identifying connections thatpowerful actors had with each other and withbroader social networks at varying spatial scales. Byrendering a countermapping of the power structurein the U.S. Deep South, SNCC sought to make vis-ible the flows of profit and webs of interdependencethat supported racial discrimination. SNCC encour-aged its field secretaries to leverage this knowledge toidentify “pressure points” that could be exploited byactivists to confront and challenge white supremacy.

SNCC’s geographic praxis recognizes that geo-graphical methods, information, and analyticalinsights are not just the purview of experts but are aset of political tools and processes deployed by awide range of groups. Importantly, we argue thatSNCC’s research praxis constituted what we call aradical geospatial intelligence project that, amongmany other things, encouraged activists to gatherand transform data and map the relations of capital-ism and community power for the strategic andinsurgent purposes of challenging racial inequality.These resistant intelligence efforts existed at the

very same moment that hostile local, state, and fed-eral governments were surveilling and tracking majorgroups, leaders, and campaigns of the civil rightsmovement. The countermapping of communitypower that The Care and Feeding prescribed was justone part of a broader subaltern and sometimes covertgeospatial intelligence (GI) effort on the part of theSNCC to mine, appropriate, and use publicly avail-able social and spatial data and collect and createtheir own data, oral testimony, and photographicevidence to carry out what SNCC advisor Ella Bakercalled the “spade work” of organizing mostly ruralblack communities.

In addition to pamphlets such as The Care andFeeding of Power Structures, this radical GI resulted ina host of state reports, freedom curriculum, politicalmobilization cartoons, newsletters, and detailed docu-mentation of racialized discrimination and violence.Importantly, we interpret these instances of SNCCresearch explicitly as “intelligence” to capture thegravity of the often life-and-death battle the civilrights organization waged against white supremacyand the strategic and actionable value that geographicknowledge had to that struggle. Through interviewswith SNCC veterans, one of the imperatives thatdrove the intelligence effort was the very real beliefthat many of the organizers would be killed and thereneeded to be a written record to drive the organizationforward should something happen to its leadership orits field organizers. All opposition research was createdand deployed with the hopes, sometimes realized butsometimes not, of expanding the political conscious-ness and sense of empowerment, education and train-ing, communication capabilities, and decision-makingprocesses and social mobilization of oppressed com-munities in the Deep South.

The idea of the civil rights movement creating,deploying, and depending on radical geographicalintelligence opens up a much-needed conversationabout the role of GI in a democratic society outsidethe context of the military–industrial–academic com-plex and how we as a discipline come to understandthe progressive potential of geographical knowledgewithin public arenas and struggles. Such a conversa-tion is not intended to equate SNCC’s researchpraxis to the well-funded, officially sanctioned GIprojects of today. Rather than a formal tradecraft ora set of technologies and techniques, the geographicintelligence process of SNCC was a nonprofessional-ized, creative resistance process. The intelligence

2 Inwood and Alderman

products of SNCC do not necessarily conform totraditional geographic conventions about what con-stitutes maps, spatial data, and analysis, but they ren-der legible geographic knowledge about the powerstructures operating in communities in the southeast-ern United States.

By more centrally acknowledging SNCC’s radicalgeospatial activism, our third major purpose in thisarticle is to develop a deeper understanding of therich, spatial practices underlying black geographies, anintellectual and political movement that is gainingcritical traction within and outside the discipline ofgeography. One of the foundations of black geogra-phies is recognition of the resistant agency of AfricanAmericans in creating and using geographic knowl-edge production within and against white supremacyand articulating alternative visions of how societymight be organized more justly (Bledsoe, Eaves, andWilliams 2017; Eaves 2017; Allen, Lawhon, andPierce 2018; Brand 2018). Black geographies is pre-cisely about giving recognition and legitimacy to theseneglected knowledge-creating practices, to understandhow the “unknown reconfigure knowledge, suggestingthat places, experiences, histories, and people that noone know do exist, within our present geographicorder” (McKittrick and Woods 2007, 4, italics in ori-ginal). Revisiting and spatially rereading SNCC’swork in the Deep South offers us rich opportunities tounderstand the ways in which black people sought tomake antiracist space and meaning in the face ofracial capitalism and white supremacy. The organicintellectualism behind SNCC’s conceptualization andknowledge of community, economic geographies ofcapital and power, and relational mapping in the1960s was far ahead of academic geographic scholar-ship at the time.

Of importance to the wider geographical commu-nity, the SNCC research office and its projects chal-lenge normative assumptions about GI, how wedefine mapping and GI work as embodied politicalpractices, and the role of black agency in the makingof knowledge systems that constitute and structureour present and taken-for-granted lived geographies.These present systems of knowing are undergirded bydeeply exploitative structures that continue toexpose minorities to “the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differenti-ated vulnerability to premature death” (Gilmore2007, 28). SNCC’s research praxis and other activ-ism were important interventions in their own right,

but they are just one step in a broader movementthat seeks to expose not only how the making ofspace is wrapped up in and through white supremacybut how black geographies are also “central andnecessary element[s] in the construction of newinstitutions and new regional realities” that canopen up new ways of knowing and remaking theworld (Woods 1998, 290).

To make the arguments just outlined, we engage agrowing literature that pays close attention to therole of countermapping, subaltern cartographic prac-tice, and participatory geographic information sys-tems (GIS) as avenues for marginalized groups toproduce alternative knowledges and subjectivities,claim authority over place and the power to definepolitical agendas, and make interventions in strug-gles over social and environmental justice (Peluso1995; Elwood 2006; Dando 2010; Radcliffe 2011;Radil and Anderson 2018). Despite the growing vol-ume of this scholarship, there has been a neglect ofthe place of countermapping and in particular rad-ical GI work within the historical geography of theAfrican American freedom struggle (but see Hanna2012; Dando 2018)—a lacuna that our art-icle addresses.

We then offer a brief historical background intoSNCC and situate the organization’s radical GIwithin its political vision and goals. We suggest thatSNCC’s conversion of social and spatial data intoactionable intelligence was not a mere informationalexercise but core to their own ideas about knowingand acting on, in a highly place-sensitive way, theconditions and needs of African American commun-ities and penetrating what Sherrod (n.d.) called the“black box” of racial inequality within thoseoppressed communities. Detail is provided about theSNCC Research Department, how and why it wasformed, and the type of data resources and innova-tions it sought to leverage for activists.

Our final major section before concluding returnsto The Care and Feeding and other examples ofSNCC radical geographical intelligence, delvingdeeper into those efforts as attempts to expose, map,and resist racial capitalism. A number of evocativeexamples illustrate that SNCC’s gathering and map-ping of intelligence represented an effort to raiseconsciousness and educate and to assist in exploitingthe vulnerabilities and contradictions of racial capital-ism and race connected practices that enveloped andthreatened people of color in these communities.

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 3

Toward a Radical GeographicalIntelligence

Critical Cartography from Below

To understand how SNCC developed anddeployed resistant practices of GI gathering requiresa broader exploration of the power-laden nature ofgeographic knowledge production. Our researchdraws on scholarship in “critical cartography”(Crampton and Krygier 2006), which offers arethinking of what the map is, how and for whom itfunctions politically, and who ultimately counts as amapmaker. For Wood (1992, 2010), maps are funda-mentally about “work.” Maps are “engines that con-vert social energy to social work,” and the map playsa crucial intermediary role in the work of creatingsocial orders, spaces, and knowledges (Wood 2010,1). The ideological and political work done by mapsis accomplished because they have the often-unques-tioned authority of being “statements that affirm ordeny the existence of something” (Wood 2010, 41),and these propositions take “the form of linkagesamong conditions, states, processes, and behaviorsconjoined in the territory that the map brings intobeing” (Wood 2010, 52).

More recently, there has been a growing recogni-tion that it is necessary to incorporate a more expan-sive definition of what cartography means and whoputs it into service and for what political purposes(Crampton 2009). Building on the growth of criticalcartography and critiques of GIS, Crampton andKrygier (2006) noted how the politics of mappingand imaginative practices have worked to“undiscipline cartography” and cause mapmakingpraxis to slip from the “control of powerful elitesthat have exercised dominion over it for severalhundred years” (12). Sletto (2009) noted that mapsare not only implicated in place making but are“tools of power” (445). Geographic knowledge notonly underwrites “hegemonic, symbolic and materialpractices” but there is a long history of marginalizedgroups drawing “on the rhetorical power of maps topresent alternative worldviews and futures” (Sletto2009, 445). These challenges broadly conceptualizehow the making of geography is not only a politicalact but illustrates how geographic knowledge servesthe interests of those in power and the way margi-nalized groups actively seize the power of mapmakingto stake claims to space and place (Wainwright andBryan 2009).

Scholars often depict critical cartography as arelatively recent development, and to some largedegree it is because of the latest expansion of public,nonexpert access to spatial data and open source col-laborative tools. Yet, SNCC’s geospatial work, whichemerged over three decades before the formal rise ofcritical cartographic studies within geography,prompts a broader consideration of how radical map-ping practices—despite being seemingly “discovered”by university scholars—were informed by longer andmore sustained activist traditions. To realize fullySNCC as an early chapter in critical cartographyrequires that we undiscipline and expand the defini-tions of the map itself. Reiz, O’Lear, and Tuininga(2018) suggested that if you take the definition ofcartography—to write the earth—literally and fully,there are a range of ways to understand how mapsand other geographic representations are made, used,and understood. They argued that central to criticalcartography is the effort to map networks of powerand sets of relationships that exist and reveal domi-nant relationships.

SNCC’s visualization of social and spatial datawas decidedly about tracing the effects and relationaldimensions of white power and racial capital. Theorganization believed that this racialized controlcould be challenged through a resistant use of infor-mation, communication, and education, as well aspolitical mobilization. SNCC workers would seldom(if ever) refer to themselves as mapmakers or cartog-raphers, but they recognized that building and mobi-lizing a geographic knowledge of communities asstructures of power was part of an organic intellec-tualism of rewriting a vision of the Earth in whichAfrican Americans were full and equal citizens.

Importantly, geographers as well as the generalpublic have traditionally relied on essentialized ideasof what constitutes a map, but it is necessary todestabilize these fixed ideas and recognize that map-ping, as a political practice, is not confined to con-ventional cartographic definitions. Although SNCCfield activists created and used conventional maps,such as in mapping income disparities as part of doc-umenting the effects of racism within the states ofMississippi and Alabama, they moved beyond stan-dard maps to identify other creative ways of render-ing where and with whom power came to beconcentrated, interconnected, and interdependent.This highlights a significant if heretofore under-studied role of geography in the civil rights struggle

4 Inwood and Alderman

and points to how expansive definitions of cartog-raphy and mapmaking can explode staid understand-ings of what the map is. To briefly move away fromthe The Care and Feeding pamphlet, take, forexample, the schematic that SNCC researchers cre-ated to document the economic and political con-nections between Liberty Life Insurance Companyand the Alabama State Police, both institutions thatexercised a vested interest in supporting whitesupremacy, racial capitalism, and black subordination(see Figure 1).

The schematic might not look like a map, but itnevertheless does the work of a map by allowingcivil rights activists to represent, realize, and resistthe patterns of interaction and interdependence thatmade up a racist political economy. We argue that itis necessary to understand SNCC’s research workwithin the broader role of cartographic knowledgeproduction that is deployed in a range of everydaypractices and methods for understanding the broaderworkings of power within a U.S. context (Crampton2009). As we suggest, reconceptualizing SNCC’s

resistant geospatial work offers an opportunity toradicalize the concept of GI in ways that expand theterrain of what we think about when it comes tocritical cartographic praxis.

Radicalizing Geospatial Intelligence

Nothing illustrates the capacity of maps and othergeographic data representations to do social workand the politicized labor of geospatial work than thegrowth and use of GI. Closely identified with theuse of geographic information and technologies byelite state and corporate actors for purposes ofdefense, national security, and commercial interests(Rivest et al. 2005; Sullivan 2005; Bacastow andBellafiore 2009; Bryan and Wood 2015), GI is a sig-nificant tool of war making and representative of thecritical but often unaddressed ethical and violentimplications that accompany the strategic use of geo-spatial technologies, data, and analysis (N. Smith1992; Pickles 1997; Schuurman 2000; Crampton andKrygier 2006; Bryan and Wood 2015). The political

Figure 1. Map of the economic and political connections between Liberty Life Insurance Company and the Alabama State Police. Thisis an example of the “Power Structure” work that the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Research Department undertook.

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 5

implications of GI have heightened with the ever-expanding collection and exploitation of socialmedia information and locational data by corpora-tions and governments (Stefanidis, Crooks, andRadzikowski 2013), as well as the growth of dronesand the use of uncrewed aerial vehicles for surveil-lance and targeted killings (Birtchnell 2017).

GI is so closely identified with defense, nationalsecurity, and capitalist agendas that it has becomedifficult for geographers and other scholars—many ofwhom are knowingly or unknowingly complicit insupporting these structures of power—to conceive ofGI in an alternative, counterhegemonic way. In anearly and important call to intervene in the ethics ofthe geospatial field, Kwan (2007) emphasized “theneed for researchers, developers, and users … tocontest the dominant meanings and uses of GT [geo-spatial technologies], and to participate in strugglesagainst the oppressive or violent effects of thesetechnologies” (23). Kwan asserted that we shouldpay attention to the qualities of geospatial practicesand resist the prevailing tendency to see these tech-niques and technologies as the disembodied, objec-tive science behind manipulating lines and dots onmaps rather than the lives and deaths enactedthrough that mapping. Such a conceptualization rec-ognizes how geographical knowledge productionaffects people’s bodies as well as the crucial idea thatbehind the development and use of GI is the bodilywork of practitioners and their feelings, values, andethics—all of which shape their “decisions to adoptparticular research agendas and engage with particu-lar issues” and ignore others (Kwan 2007, 24).Similarly, we suggest that a more critical reconceptu-alization of GI is one that is sensitive to the affec-tive, embodied, and politically laden dimensions ofstrategic mapping and geographical knowledge andthe potential to “destabilize the fixed meanings of… [geospatial practices] that have precluded theiruse in novel and creative [and resistant] ways”(Kwan 2007, 28).

To focus solely on how GI is put into service of cor-porate or state-centered goals misses the capacity ofgeographic knowledge that is created and used byindividuals and groups whose interests diverge fromthe state. Missing from much of the research thus faron GI is a critical exploration of GI as a subaltern proj-ect that uses geographic information gathering andanalysis to expose and resist injustice. Importantly, incharacterizing specific geographic information

collection, analysis, and visualization practices as GIor not, we emphasize geospatial work that has strategicand actionable value to the self-expression, decision-making processes, and social mobilization of marginal-ized groups. Although the value of this geospatialwork—as reflected in SNCC’s research pamphlets andother projects—certainly lies in guiding the internalplanning and educating of movements, it is also vitalin telling stories that counter dominant accounts thatexclude and minimize the experiences of theoppressed. There is a publicness to some subaltern GImissing from military and corporate applications fix-ated on maintaining security, secrecy, and lim-ited access.

We argue that the moment is ripe to carry out abroader conversation that reinterprets and radicalizesGI. We say radicalize in a general sense to advocatefor a watershed move beyond just industry, govern-ment, and academic understandings of GI and a rec-ognition of the broad range of people who create,use, and embody geographic information and practi-ces in strategic and actionable ways. We also use theword radicalize more pointedly to call for scholarshipthat explores GI as an activist tool, raising consider-ation not only of the role of geography in antiracismstruggles—among others—but how we as a disciplinecome to understand a more progressive and radicalpotential of geographic knowledge within pub-lic arenas.

The The Care and Feeding pamphlet produced bythe SNCC Research Department represented aneffort to train activists to create a graphic depictionof the political economy of white supremacy, thuscreating a social mapping that was essential to thestrategic enactment of a radical GI program. Thisties into work by Dalton and Stallmann (2018), whonoted that critical cartography contributes to broaderefforts in critical data science that not only problem-atize conventional data science but uses data in waysthat can help realize new social relations.Recognizing the value that critical cartography pla-ces on using maps and data to enact social change,we argue that SNCC’s antiracist mapping of powerrelations and structures represented a crucialmoment in trying to understand and make an inter-vention in what Sherrod (n.d.) described as the“black box” of communities. We discuss the idea ofthe black box of communities more fully later in thearticle. To appreciate the significance of whatSNCC sought to do, it is necessary to contextualize

6 Inwood and Alderman

their intelligence gathering and analysis withinbroader understandings of countermapping and therole of geospatial work in the African Americanfreedom struggle and the rise of black geographies—which the next two sections address, respectively.

Countermapping for and by the Marginalized

The explosion of public participatory GIS andcritical mapping collectives—as one example—underscores the creative and subversive use of geo-graphic information and mapmaking (Dalton andMason-Deese 2012; Caquard 2014). Closely relatedto these subversive geospatial practices is the widerconcept of countermapping, which would be justone component of a radical GI concerned with notonly visualizing power structures but also surveillingor tracking them and identifying their vulnerabilitiesor what SNCC called their “pressure points.”Hodgson and Schroeder (2002) defined countermap-ping as “mapping against dominant power structures”(79). Countermapping recognizes the importance ofdemocratizing knowledge production and decisionmaking, and these initiatives emphasize how localcommunities and political movements, especiallythose led by indigenous and other oppressed groups,use conventional and unconventional mapping tech-niques and, in some instances, new geospatial tech-nologies (Rundstrom 2009). Countermapping is aninherently “political act” of creating and employingmaps as community activism and building tools tocontest dominant knowledge framings and exclusion-ary statist mapmaking and to give visibility andlegitimacy to previously ignored or misrepresentedidentities, histories, and claims to place as part ofexercising self-sovereignty and challenging exploit-ative government and private interests (Maharawaland McElroy 2018).

Many academic treatments of countermapping areset in the contemporary period, in a public participa-tory or collaborative model that emphasizes local com-munities and activist organizations partnering withprofessional cartographers, academicians, scholar-artists, or government agencies to develop geospatialdata and skills that will assist in their empowerment(e.g., Mitchell and Elwood 2016; D. A. Smith, Ib!a~nez,and Herrera 2017). Louis, Johnson, and Pramono(2012) noted, however, that tensions arise when thegeographic knowledge systems of indigenous and otherhistorically marginalized groups are forced to fit

established cartographic standards and practices.Moreover, Radil and Anderson (2018) noted the fre-quent failure of public participatory GIS to enhancethe political engagement of oppressed people becauseit involves them “by working within establishedframeworks of institutionalized governance in particu-lar places” and hence reproduces rather than chal-lenges the “very conditions of socio-economicinequality it strives to ameliorate” (195). Accordingto Radil and Anderson (2018), for counterhegemonicmapping and other geospatial practices to contributesignificantly to progressive movements, there must begreater emphasis placed on disrupting, rather thanparticipating with, the political-economic order.

To realize the emancipatory potential of counter-mapping—and by extension GI—requires a deepunderstanding of the historical geography of radicalgeospatial praxis and centering it within the embod-ied experiences of disenfranchised people rather thanjust experts or officials. Largely absent from the lit-erature is a discussion of the geographic knowledgeproduction within the historical geography of every-day activism and resistance, long before most aca-demic geographers and professional cartographershad defined or sought to facilitate countermapping.A noted exception is Dando (2018), who exploredhow women created and used maps and geographicinformation as part of their political activism andstruggle to expand legal rights during the U.S.Progressive Era (1890–1920). Dando (2018) high-lighted the subaltern public cartographies createdand employed by women during the suffrage move-ment and the push for antilynching legislation. Shesaw this oppositional geospatial work as a challengeto the masculine, imperialist history of much state-based mapping as well as a reminder that “[g]eog-raphy and mapping are not confined to governmentand academia; all people have their own practice ofgeography and cartography,” even if those mapslook, feel, and function differently from what hasbecome professional convention (10).

Because of the situated nature of grassroots, bot-tom-up political struggles and needs, Dalton andStallmann (2018) noted difficulty in narrowingcountermapping down to a single, comprehensivedefinition or standard—which supports our conten-tion that SNCC’s resistant cartographic praxis andradical GI does not easily fit in conventional aca-demic conceptions of cartography. The significanceof countermapping lies not just in the creation of a

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 7

subaltern cartographic product but in the perform-ance of data collection, mapping, and analysis practi-ces that can serve to open up strategic conversationsabout the formation of social oppression and gener-ate alternatives to the status quo (Dalton andStallmann 2018). Dando (2018) added that weshould consider the processes and artifacts of map-ping and “the affinity networks and locations” whereactivists “practiced and shared their information” asthey encouraged others to create geographic know-ledge and effect social change. Recognition of thewider assemblage of actors, places, and networks ofpractices that constitute radical geospatial work reso-nates in the case of SNCC, which saw participatorydemocracy and community building as the backboneof its politics of resistance. The power of SNCC’sradical GI came not only from the production ofoppositional pamphlets, maps, and statistical reportsbut also from how these creations and the ideas andpractices behind them circulated and gained socialcurrency within communities. Essential to any effortto conceptualize radical geospatial work is to movebeyond the binary of production versus consumption.As Del Casino and Hanna (2006) argued, the use ofmaps is not a passive process but a moment in whichpeople creatively rework the meaning and efficacy ofgeographical knowledge.

Black Geographies and Geospatial Work ofCivil Rights

SNCC’s engagement with radical GI and itscountermapping of (and against) the relationalunderpinnings of a white supremacist political econ-omy were not the first and only time that AfricanAmericans engaged in a nuanced and highly com-plex production and use of geographic knowledge tocombat discrimination and advocate for civil rightsand self-determination. The “black sense of place”that McKittrick (2011) discussed has always beenabout carrying out strategic and creative geospatialwork, such as “reading, navigating, and exploitingracialized landscapes, developing subaltern way-find-ing and transport [and migration] systems, creatingcounter public spaces that offered social refuge andeconomic freedom, and mapping the social effectsand spatial networks [and boundaries] that under-girded white supremacy” (Alderman and Inwood2016, 184).

Critical cartographic approaches are central to thefreedom aspirations of African Americans, and thefull weight of SNCC’s radical GI is grounded in ahistory of resistant geographic knowledge productionand use. Escaping slaves relied on subaltern forms ofspatial wayfinding and environmental cognition,eluding capture by taking advantage of a “system ofpaths, places, and rhythms” created by the slavecommunity “as an alternative, often as a refuge, tothe landscape systems of planters and other Whites”(Ginsburg 2007, 37). Informing the greater AfricanAmerican struggle for geographic mobility andopportunity—from the Great Migration out of theSouth to driving on hostile Jim Crow highways—was the compilation and dissemination of an alterna-tive spatial knowledge about the location of opportu-nities, navigational resources, and safe spaces centralto survival within the broader sociospatial context ofwhite supremacy (Inwood 2014; Alderman andInwood 2016).

Although much of the countermapping and GIgenerated by African Americans took unconven-tional if not sometimes hidden forms, there weremoments when traditional cartographic practiceswere transformed into a tool of resistance. The pub-lic has recently rediscovered the mapping efforts ofblack sociologist and civil rights leader W. E. B.DuBois, who worked with Booker T. Washingtonand a team of students to produce series of“infographics” for display at the 1900 ParisExposition. Conventional maps were an importantpart of this exhibit, which sought to use data visual-ization to expose international audiences to thecontext of African Americans since slavery. AsDando (2018) reported, later in the early twentiethcentury, the Tuskegee Institute and the NAACPregularly produced and published maps showing thepervasiveness of white mob violence againstAfrican Americans as part the campaign for federalantilynching legislation. In both instances, carto-graphic praxis and the collection and analysis ofdata were not simply about expanding publicknowledge about black life but expressly for thepurposes of leveraging that geographic knowledge toeffect social change.

Through a close look at SNCC’s radical geospa-tial activism we not only have an opportunity tocome to a deeper understanding of the way the civilrights movement engaged with and used geographyin its struggle for liberation from oppression. These

8 Inwood and Alderman

visions and spaces of black liberation, according toBledsoe and Wright (2018), do not conform to asingle, monolithic black spatial and political imagin-ary but are characterized by different movements,different distinctions within movements, and pluralmeans of resistance. Importantly, the varied natureof black spatial politics includes not only well-known practices of protest such as sit-ins, marches,and boycotts but also a wider range of spectacularand everyday tactics—including, we would argue,radical GI.

Interestingly, although those studying blackgeographies have found great value in studyingnontraditional geographic sources and expressionsof the black experience—largely music, fiction, art,and film (Allen, Lawhon, and Pierce 2018)—therehas been little investigation of the resistant carto-graphic cultures and geospatial practices as theyfocus on black life and agency. Yet, recent theoriz-ing of black geographies by Allen, Lawhon, andPierce (2018) allows room for our examination of theopposition research carried out by SNCC. Allen andhis colleagues (2018) argued for “relational place-making” as a viable theoretical lens, one that recog-nizes the need for a plurality of methodologies anddata sources for analyzing and making sense of theexperiences and sociopolitical goals of people ofcolor. Even more important, a relational placemak-ing prompts us to consider how these experiencesare set within and shaped by networks of power rela-tions and how symbolic and material elements—including objects—become bundled together to pro-ject and hopefully materialize alternative blackvisions of place. In this respect, The Care andFeeding is more than simply a pamphlet representa-tive of and produced through black freedom strug-gles. It is an important nonhuman actant or agentin the making and potential remaking of an antira-cist place because it seeks to instruct civil rightsworkers in how the networks underpinning racialcapitalism operate within their communities. TheSNCC pamphlet, in addition to expanding ourappreciation for the use of countermapping and theproduction of a radical GI within the AfricanAmerican freedom struggle, provides an importantmoment to advance the larger intellectual and polit-ical project of uncovering the complex placeassemblages, spatial political imaginaries, and geo-graphic knowledge productions that have longdefined black geographies.

Toward a Geography of SNCCResearch Praxis

Centrality of Place in SNCC Organizing

One of the central aims of this article is to advancea greater understanding and appreciation for SNCCamong geographers and, in particular, to retheorizethe importance that their understudied ResearchDepartment played in the production of geographicknowledge to challenge white supremacy. It is impos-sible to adequately capture the history of SNCC in asingle article, and our discussion is a selective narra-tion of a civil rights organization that had an amaz-ingly varied trajectory from its creation in 1960 to itsfalling off in 1967. SNCC was on the front lines ofthe most significant civil rights protests of that era—beginning with its involvement in the student sit-insand freedom rides, maturing into a large, interracialorganization that helped lead the March onWashington (1963), the Selma Campaigns (1965),Freedom Summer, and other nonviolent campaignsfor voting rights, desegregation, and economic justiceand finally evolving into a more militant, all-blackLowndes County Freedom Organization, later knownas the Black Panther Party. In addition to SNCCundergoing significant organizational and politicaltransformations in its relatively short history, theorganization had a varied geographic footprint, as itcarried a style of grassroots, direct action organizingthat was especially sensitive to the place-specific con-ditions, needs, and power structures of communitiesrather than simply carrying out a top-down mono-lithic model of protest.

Founded in 1960, SNCC formed between studentorganizers and Ella Baker, a longtime civil rightsactivist. The everyday labor and activism of womenand youth played a key role in sustaining the strug-gle against racial oppression (Payne 2007; Dwyerand Alderman 2008), even though much of thiswork is forgotten in many contemporary celebrationsof the civil rights movement. Baker herself wasfamiliar with this tension, having worked for a shorttime in the offices of the Southern ChristianLeadership Conference (SCLC), the organizationfounded by Martin Luther King, Jr., to fight racialoppression. It was her connection with SCLC thatgave her access to the initial funds to sponsor a con-ference that brought student activists to ShawUniversity that led to the birth of the SNCC(Payne 2007). She became disillusioned with SCLC,

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 9

however, and frustrated over the patriarchy and sex-ism that marginalized women in favor of a hierarch-ical structure more closely aligned with the blackchurch and male pastors. It was partially these expe-riences that drove her to work with students whowere organizing themselves to fight segregation.These realities also created opportunities for womenwithin SNCC to assume prominent leadership roles.Indeed, in the early stages of SNCC’s development,it proved to be not only the most racially integratedcivil rights organization but arguably the mostdiverse in terms of gender and the central roleplayed by women in the black freedom struggle.

Early in the development of SNCC there was akeen realization that activists would be working insome of the most dangerous and inhospitable placesin the United States, and violence was an ever-pre-sent reality. As a result, SNCC activists made a stra-tegic decision to create a less hierarchical and morediffuse leadership style suited to the local, social-and geographic-specific conditions confronting civilrights struggles in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.In addition, SNCC created its Research Departmentand kept a meticulous informational footprint partlybecause James Forman, a prominent SNCC leader,felt that if anything should happen to the leadershipteam, there needed to be records so that a new cadreof leadership could step in and continue the organi-zation’s work. Because SNCC was willing to engagein rural communities that had endemic corruption,racist power structures, and a high likelihood for vio-lence, this also presented opportunities to organizein spaces and places that had mostly been left out ofcivil rights and political organizing at that time. Itwas this profound and long-standing commitment tothose places that gave SNCC its distinctive organiz-ing character. Bob Mosses, SNCC leader and activ-ist, explained in an interview:

While we were doing voter registration, we had so tospeak the field to ourself because people could not justcome in and organize politically. … We had spacethen to create some kind of political organizationwhich we felt would be responsible to the people thatwe were working for. … We had actual access to thepeople that other people were not willing to do thegame because of the risks involved. (WashingtonUniversity St. Louis 1986)

SNCC was focused on empowering locals and con-cerned about educating student activists to navigateand interact with the harsh and hostile Deep South.

In this sense, SNCC was forcing mostly white volun-teers from the North to confront their positionalityand the limits of their political development beforebeing able to go into the field to organize. Toachieve this, SNCC developed a range of materi-als—including course syllabi, instructional pam-phlets, and other teaching aids—to educate studentvolunteers about underlying racist power structuresin the United States. Rather than seeing the civilrights movement as series of campaigns planned byjust a few national leaders, a notion that has cometo dominate U.S. white popular memory, the historyof SNCC speaks to the labor of everyday men andwomen and the work that went into creating thepolitical conditions necessary to take on whitesupremacy. As alluded to in the Introduction, thiswork was hard and was often referred to as “spadework” by Baker and SNCC activists.

“Spade Work” and Unpacking the “Black Boxof Community”

Through her decades of organizing work, Bakercultivated an approach within SNCC focused oncommunity empowerment and the cultivation ofeveryday forms of resistance. Baker had a fundamen-tal commitment to participatory democracy and abelief in local movements tailored to the social andspatial conditions within communities. She wascommitted to taking the lived experiences of theoppressed and using those experiences to empower amovement that would smash white supremacy. Bakerreferred to this kind of labor as spade work, high-lighting how it was hard, dirty, and went on farbelow the more spectacular, publicized direct actionsof the civil rights movement (Payne 2007). Thespade work done by African Americans to interro-gate and challenge the geography of white socialpower and, in particular, the geographic knowledgedeveloped and produced through that work, have fortoo long gone unnoticed or underanalyzed by geogra-phers. This neglect not only contributes to the eras-ure of black geographies but obscures the ways inwhich these practices have reconfigured our presentknowledges and understandings of how geographiesof place and power are understood within thebroader geographic tradition.

Given the nature of the kind of difficult workthat SNCC was attempting and the kind of on-the-ground organizing being carried out, it was

10 Inwood and Alderman

imperative for its activists to know the lay of theland of white supremacy with specific locations inthe Deep South along with the spatial and socialdimensions and interconnections of segregation andracism running through those places. Such anapproach to organizing required the development ofcomplex and multifaceted understandings of howlocal geographies connect to broader social and geo-graphic structures of white supremacy and inequality.In other words, important to the spade work of help-ing communities mobilize to take on their oppressionis getting to know and engage with people as theyare in the specific social and geographic context oftheir lives.

Another key voice in the founding of SNCC,Charles Sherrod, articulated and defined perhapsmost clearly and powerfully the mandate facing activ-ists as they worked to understand and challengewhat he called the black box of communities.Sherrod was SNCC project director for southwestGeorgia and has worked for over a half-century inAlbany organizing and teaching for social justice.Sherrod pushed his colleagues in SNCC to under-stand the broader community conditions and powerrelations that drove the operation of racism and howknowing the community was essential to nonviolentmobilization. In a document contained in thearchives at the University of California at Berkeley,Sherrod argued that within every community thereexisted a “personal box” of racial inequality and toorganize effectively required SNCC workers tounderstand these communities. By understandinghow individuals were positioned within the commu-nity, SNCC workers would be able to cultivate theability to “break away from the box and let the[black] man [sic] see himself as he really is and thenas he can be” (Sherrod n.d., 2).

Fundamental for Sherrod was how the SNCCneeded to understand the broader social, psycho-logical, and geographic context of the oppressedcommunities in which they worked. According toSherrod, to mobilize oppressed communities requiredthat the “atmosphere [of racism] in the box must beknown.” For him it was central to develop a chart ora form of relational map of community leaders andto understand the interconnected way the economicsof communities operated across time and space. Thiswould provide SNCC with an understanding of thepower structure and racialized nature of economicdevelopment and poverty creation. For Sherrod,

SNCC workers needed to document and trace“economic and occupational groups such as land-lords, tenants, businessmen or various incomegroups” (Sherrod n.d., 3). For Sherrod and others inSNCC, there emerged a key realization of a broaderintellectual and political project that had to situateany meaningful empowerment of oppressed commun-ities with a production of social and geographicknowledge of that community.

SNCC saw research and the generation of socialand geographic knowledge about communities as notjust background material but part of the politicalspade work of mobilizing against and within theblack box of white supremacist power within com-munities. It was within this intellectual and politicalenvironment that the leaders of the civil rightsorganization realized the need for establishing aResearch Department and the value of producingoppositional research tools such as The Care andFeeding of Power Structures. The ResearchDepartment came to life in late 1962 or early 1963when James Forman—then SNCC executive secre-tary and later a leader in the Black Panther Partyand the League of Revolutionary Black Workers—commissioned Jack Minnis to help organize and di-rect the department for the purposes of providinginformation—often geographic in nature—to activ-ists in the field about the communities that SNCCwas seeking to organize. The research process wasnot that top down, though, based on DorothyZellner’s (personal communication 2019) experiencesworking with Minnis and Forman. In charge of col-lecting field reports over the phone, she rememberstwo-way flows of information and knowledge produc-tion and use between activists in the field and theresearch office (see also Seidman 2017).

Interviews with former SNCC members and lead-ership reveal a critical theme: Before entering any ofthe communities that SNCC sought to mobilize andhopefully transform, organizers would be armed witha plethora of public and private information, statis-tical data, and current news about the local econ-omy, the population, and the connections betweenthe local landscape and broader regional, national,and even global economies. Julian Bond, anotherfamed SNCC leader, praised the level of social andspatial data resources provided to activists by theResearch Department:

[SNCC] had the best research arm of any civil rightsorganization before or since. Field secretaries entered

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 11

the rural, small-town South armed with evidence ofwho controlled and owned what, and who, in turn,owned them. “Power structure” was no abstract phrasefor SNCC’s band of brothers and sisters, but a real listwith real people’s names and addresses and descriptionsof assets and interlocking directorships. Knowledge ofwho owned what was crucial to SNCC’s strategies.From it, we knew that Southern peonage was noaccident, but rather the deliberate result of economicpolicies determined thousands of miles away from thecotton field. (As cited in Seidman 2017)

As Bond’s comments on the power structure reveal,SNCC was wrestling to understand what Wilson(2002) described as “race connected practices.”Resulting from the negative attitudes that groups ofpeople hold about another race, race-connected prac-tices connect to and result from longer histories ofracial capital exploitation and, as a result, these prac-tices are grounded in a historical–geographical con-text (Wilson 2002). Within the deep southeasternUnited States, race-connected practices necessarilyconnected to what Woods (1998) described as the“plantation bloc.” The plantation bloc had a mo-nopoly on agricultural production, manufacturing,banking, and access to land and natural resources inthe region. This supremacy exerted unquestionedauthority over its majority African American popula-tion in conditions not far removed from those existingbefore the legal end of slavery in the 1860s. Thus, col-lecting social and spatial data for the purposes ofexposing, tracking, and charting the race-connectedpractices at work in the white supremacist legacies ofplantation control required a strategic response in theform of the SNCC Research Department.

SNCC Research Department

The Research Department was located in Atlanta,Georgia, staffed by Minnis and other researchers andclerks who worked closely with SNCC leadershipand field directors or secretaries by providing infor-mation to and holding workshops with those fieldoffices as well as receiving periodic reports and col-lected data from those offices. A white progressive,Minnis was well-schooled in civil rights organizing,having worked for the Southern Regional Council(SRC) for several years before formally joiningSNCC. The SRC was an organization formed afterWorld War I dedicated to civil rights and social jus-tice work in the U.S. South. Minnis becameacquainted with SNCC when SRC asked him to

review SNCC’s 1962 voter education project, whichSRC helped fund. At some point, Minnis becamedisillusioned with SRC and left the organization. Itwas at this time that Forman asked Minnis to joinSNCC and organize and direct a research depart-ment. The idea of the department was a directextension of Forman’s informational praxis, his beliefin the strategic political value of collecting, analyz-ing, and communicating information and data toassist in the struggle against racism.

Minnis became a trusted ally for activists, takingon the mantle of “foot soldier,” and was committedto serving “the young black women and men whowere in leadership” (B. Zellner, personal communica-tion 2019). Even as SNCC pursued a policy ofexcluding white liberals from its ranks, he continuedto work for the civil rights organization. At therequest of famed SNCC leader Stokley Carmichael(later Kwame Ture), Minnis and the SNCCResearch Department identified a provision withinthe Alabama Code of Laws that allowed for the for-mation of the Black Panther Party of LowndesCounty (Alabama) Freedom Organization(Richardson 2010). In a memo prepared in 1965 andtitled “At Last, The Paper You All Have BeenWaiting For: What Is the SNCC ResearchDepartment,” Minnis and his staff detailed the pro-grams that the Research Department was keen tosupport and the social and spatial data they used tocompile their reports.

The memo began by outlining the various datasources used and analyzed by SNCC researchers.This included subscriptions to all of the majornational newspapers as well as many smaller newspa-pers throughout the South. SNCC researchers alsoreceived the Congressional Record and CongressionalQuarterly and were on the mailing lists of severaldozen government agencies who produced quarterlyand annual reports about various economic, social,and political conditions throughout the UnitedStates. Perhaps most important, the memo details alist of economic and legal publications, includingpublications related to Wall Street and finance anda complete set of U.S. Census Bureau publicationsfor each of the Black Belt states. The memo thenoutlines four projects supported by the SNCCresearch office over the past year. This included sup-plying “needed facts and figures” to Freedom Schoolsin Mississippi to help develop their curricula onbasic economics in the Delta region.

12 Inwood and Alderman

The Research Department’s memo drew attention,in particular, to an example of an SNCC worker inMississippi needing information on the credit facili-ties available in his area for local farmers feeling thepain of poverty and inequality endemic to thatregion. The memo stated, “Regardless of the prac-tical application of such information [on creditfacilities], this worker probably learned somethingimportant about the workings of the banking system.At the very least, we were able to help him expandhis view of a narrow problem” (Minnis 1965a). It isthis last comment that is critical for understandingthe importance of what SNCC’s research arm wastrying to accomplish. It sought to situate the mostlocal and seeming practical realities within a broaderunderstanding of institutions and structures thatdetermine who is (or who is not) allowed, raciallyspeaking, to succeed and survive along with trans-forming what appeared as just facts and figures intoa cutting political arithmetic about capitalism andpossibly actionable knowledge and intelligence.

The Work of Tracking, Mapping, andResisting Racial Capital

SNCC workers involved themselves within theblack box of community and worked to cultivatelocal leadership and institutions that could take onentrenched white supremacy. SNCC’s communityempowerment approach and the legacies of this civilrights activism have attracted significant attentionfrom historians and other scholars (e.g., Carson1981; Moses et al. 1989; Perlstein 1990; Frost 2001)while also informing more contemporary movements.Important, if at times unexamined, are the efforts ofSNCC activists and researchers to understand racialcapital and the broader race connected practicesthat exerted influence on the lives and fortunes ofblack people in the Deep South. Moreover, research-ers have paid little attention (if any) to the organi-zation’s geospatial work to identify, visualize, andtrack this discriminatory political economy.

Building on Pulido’s (2016) definition of racial cap-italism, we see “racism as a constituent logic of capi-talism” that is predicated on “differential human valueand is embedded in the global landscape” (7). Perhapsmost central to our arguments and the way in whichwe conceptualize SNCC’s activism is how “[r]acial dif-ference, similar to gender inequality, creates a varie-gated landscape that cultures and capital can exploit

to create enhanced power and profits” (Pulido 2016,7). SNCC researchers and field activists were engagedin a struggle to understand this landscape and, as wedemonstrate, the organization sought to use the con-tradictions inherent in racial capitalism to exploitweaknesses in the system to push forward their civilrights agenda.

Because racial capitalism creates a landscape of dif-ferentiated human value in which certain groups andpeople are not only exploitable but disposable, it wasincumbent on SNCC organizers to understand thenature of community that animated what Sherrodreferred to as the black box. Because the power struc-ture created by racial capitalism is able to work inand through the concept of race, gender, and a rangeof other socially constructed positionalities, thesepositions and identities are important to the exploit-ation that creates and enhances profit (Woods 2007)and thus constitute what Wilson (2002) called race-connected practices. Judy Richardson noted in arecounting of women in SNCC:

With Jack’s [Minnis] research, SNCC folks went intonew communities armed with U.S. Census data andother information indicating the number of blackregistered voters, poverty, the discrepancy betweenfederal funding of African Americans. (As cited inSeidman 2017)

The comments by Richardson point to the ways inwhich race connected practices took place. AsMelamed (2015) observed, the “antinomies of accu-mulation require loss, disposability, and the unequaldifferentiation of human value and racism enshrinesthe inequalities that capitalism requires” (77). Yet,the dominance of accumulation is never complete,and it creates opportunities to expose and exploitthe differentiated ways in which race comes to begeographically grounded. Just as racial capitalism cre-ates an uneven terrain of race-connected practicesthat take place and control place in different geo-graphic contexts and at a multiplicity of scales, thatsame terrain means that there are gaps and holes inracial segregation and white supremacy as well. Byexposing and mapping how power structures in com-munities were organized and operated through race-connected practices, SNCC hoped to craft politicalstrategies that could take advantage of weaknesses,contradictions, and gaps in how white supremacyand racial capital worked.

SNCC’s Research Department was instrumentalin gathering and analyzing strategic data for training

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 13

leadership and workers to recognize exploitablecracks in a community’s political economy. Thattraining happened at SNCC conferences attended byhundreds of activists, when the ResearchDepartment held workshops out in the field or in itsAtlanta offices, and in the very pages of the StudentVoice, a newspaper produced by SNCC and distrib-uted to SNCC members and interested communitymembers. In an article from the June 1965 editiontitled “Who Runs Southwest, Georgia?” SNCCresearch is deployed to outline the ownership stakesthat several powerful men in Americus had inupholding racism. The article noted that“Businessmen [sic] themselves occupy many of themost critical positions in state and local government,from presidency to mayor,” and it is important forlocal people to understand the power structure thatexisted within the community.

The Student Voice article in question drew attentionto Americus entrepreneur Charles Wheatley. As the art-icle details, Wheatley was one of the most powerful menin southwest Georgia, noting that he owned four of thefive grocery stores in town, owned the land on whichthe hospital was built, and had ownership stakes in thetown’s largest factory. Wheatley also owned more thantwo dozen run-down houses that he rented to the town’sAfrican American community. Moreover, he also ran aconstruction company in town while also serving as thecity engineer who “decides which company will get cityconstruction contracts!” (“Who Runs Southwest,Georgia?” 1965, 2). The piece went on to documentseveral other prominent businessmen in southwestGeorgia and their vested interest in a racialized politicaleconomy. The article concludes by arguing, “If you wantto change things, you have to look at who owns what,for businessmen are the ones who really swing the billyclubs” (“Who Runs Southwest, Georgia?” 1965, 4).

This theme of exposing, tracking, and challengingracial capital is evident in a number of Student Voicearticles published in 1965, no doubt paralleling ifnot responding to the SNCC Research Department’semphasis on gathering intelligence about place-spe-cific power structures within mobilizing commu-nities. The Care and Feeding of Power Structures is apowerful expression of that radical GI, and it is pos-sible that it might have directly guided studies andcritiques such as this one about Americus, Georgia.Not coincidentally, The Mississippi Power Structure(Minnis n.d.), an essay and lesson included in theantiracist curriculum developed for African American

children attending SNCC’s Freedom Schools, bears astrong resemblance to the countermapping method-ology detailed in The Care and Feeding. Yet, the ana-lytical value of the pamphlet, curriculum, and newsarticles is not just that they are products of a subal-tern cartography or intelligence; rather, they are win-dows into SNCC’s broader efforts to fashion a newway of knowing and hence resisting the social andspatial relations underlying racial capital. The embod-ied practice of questioning, researching, and mappingwhere and with whom these unjust relations origi-nated and spread constitutes radical GI.

In the pages of The Care and Feeding, Minnis nar-rated specific cases in which activists had converteddata on the where and who of community powerinto a resistant intelligence used to exploit the vul-nerabilities of racial capital for the sake of advancingcivil rights. The pamphlet summarized the logic ofSNCC activists’ identifying and mapping regionaland national economic geographies: “The basicassumption of the piece [the pamphlet] was thatthose who control the economy of the nation arethe only ones who have the power to change thingsfor the benefit of black people” (Minnis 1965b, 1,emphasis in original). The geographical work pre-scribed in The Care and Feeding of Power Structurescalled on activists to uncover and chart out theintricate connections of power running within andbeyond the borders of oppressed communities and toleverage this social and spatial knowledge to bringpressure on a range of economic actors whose tiesextended from the Delta throughout the UnitedStates and internationally. To illustrate, the pamph-let begins with the story of how a nineteen-year-oldAfrican American volunteer from Savannah,Georgia, led a protest against one of the largestbanks in New York City, a bank owned by DavidRockefeller. The story begins with this student dis-covering through public records that ChaseManhattan Bank was financing municipal bonds inSavannah and that those bonds were used in part tocreate separate and unequal segregated facilities inthe city. Traveling to New York City, he was able toconfront one of the bank’s vice presidents about theissue, indicating that SNCC was preparing to lead aprotest movement within twenty-four hours if thebank did not outline a policy about the use of bankfunds to finance segregation in multiple U.S. cities.Within twenty-four hours, SNCC began protestingthe bank.

14 Inwood and Alderman

In outlining why the African American studenttargeted Chase Manhattan, Minnis describedSNCC’s research process. He noted that the studentbegan by looking at Moody’s Manual of MunicipalBonds to find out what banks were working to floatthe bond issue in Savannah. The student discoveredthat three important banks from New York Citywere involved, but SNCC only had the resources togo after one of the banks. As Minnis(1965a) explained:

So he [the student] selected the one which wasstrategically vulnerable because of its connection witha politician [Nelson Rockefeller] who avows distaste forracial discrimination. He documented this connectionby checking the Chain Banking Study published in 1962by the Select Committee on Small Business of theU.S. House of Representatives. (3)

Central to the strategy just outlined is the SNCCactivist engaging in what we would characterize as acountermapping of the social and spatial structure ofcommunities with the express intent of challengingthe power relations that made racial inequal-ity possible.

SNCC was a grassroots organization focused onempowering community activism; a critical piece ofthe organizing strategy was to create a cadre of localpeoples who could engage in the kind of work thatthe civil rights organization was working to under-take. Bob Zellner (personal communication 2019),who worked closely with Minnis in the ResearchDepartment and who also served as field secretary,explained during our interview:

In order to take on the long-term community basedorganizing we had to train and leave some educatedleadership in place. [Our goal] in SNCC [was] always[to] work ourselves out of a job. [R]esearch was veryimportant for training the local people to run theirown organization, to do the research themselves, to dopress outreach, all of the things an organization needsto do, a lot of that had to be built from the ground upin our grassroots organizing.

Zellner’s comments help to place The Care andFeeding into a broader context of political organizingand education. Part of what the pamphlet does is toleave behind a guide to assist local people with col-lecting and using publicly available data to engagein the kind of research and activism that SNCC wastrying to accomplish in the Deep South. Thepamphlet is a primer in how to engage in activist

research praxis and its power, beyond what specificprotest strategies it might have informed andinspired, laid in how it sought to institutionalize rad-ical intelligence practices and skills within the lead-ership fabric of oppressed communities.

Zellner also shed important light on how TheCare and Feeding and other forms of SNCC intelli-gence work were directly situated within knowledgeproduction meant to expose and understand the var-iegated landscape of race connected practices andinequalities. As Wilson (2002) explained, race-con-nected practices “are not only historically specific,but geographically or place specific” as well (37). Asa result, understanding regional differences and con-nections between places is central to “understandingcritically race-connected practices” (Wilson 2002,37). As noted earlier, at the heart of SNCC’s activ-ist epistemology and research praxis was a theorythat racism inherently had its own geographic differ-entiation and that radical GI work was aboutactively developing the ability to understand andpolitically act on a set of interrelated geographicconditions that underpinned racial oppression. BobZellner explained,

One of the early requirements of every project,whenever we went into a new area, was to do a powerstructure analysis of that area: who owned what, whichcompanies were there, what was the history of theplace from the frequency of lynching and castration,[and was] … it a really tough place to register to vote.All of those things were part of the power structureanalysis and what Minnis was so good at wasinterlocking directories. He’d say, “Look at thecompanies in that region and look at the office holdersand see what relationship they have with thosecompanies.” He was always doing corporate researchand how it related to politics on the ground level.

It is the ability to take local and on-the-ground con-ditions, the deep history of a place, and then to beable to place that information into a broader struc-tural analysis that suggests that the political efficacyof this radical GI came from how it allowed activiststo understand how racial capital operated with andcut across multiple scales as it maintained whitesupremacy. Such a perspective engages with proc-esses that geographers have long identified as“jumping” or “bridging” scales (Merk 2009). Theterm jumping scales traditionally refer to “social strug-gles that take place at different scales, ranging fromspaces of production (encompassing workplaces,

The Care and Feeding of Power Structures 15

industrial zones, and nations) to spaces of consump-tion, where sweatshop practices of global brands andretailers are contested” (Merk 2009, 600).

SNCC researchers similarly recognized, well out-side the context of academic geography, the broadercapital relationships that existed between local plan-tations, manufacturing sectors, and economic rela-tionships found in communities in the Deep Southand the national and global centers of finance cap-ital. In explaining the importance of the SNCCResearch Department, Stokely Carmichael pointedto its work in “uncover[ing] the complex network ofownership of the plantations of the Deep South.One was owned by the corporation supplying electri-city to Boston Massachusetts. The majority stock-holder of another was Her Majesty, the Queen ofEngland” (Student Non-Violent CoordinatingCommittee Digital Archive 2018).

To return to the case described in The Care andFeeding, protesting conditions only within Savannah,Georgia, had limited social purchase. Threateningand targeting an international bank and drawingattention to the connections that Chase Manhattanhad with segregation jeopardized the political for-tunes and reputation of Nelson Rockefeller and thusSNCC could take their protest to a geographic spaceand scale with more potential to enact socialchange. SNCC’s geospatial work of collecting andexploiting data in this context is indicative of howit engaged in a radical GI project that used informa-tion as an activist tool. In other words, by focusingon the black box of community within Savannah—how segregation was institutionalized and financed—SNCC was able to understand a broad array of eco-nomic relationships that existed within and outsidethe community and was then able to leverage thatinformation in a strategic way to bring pressure onthe city to change its segregated policies.

Significance

For at least the last decade, interest in counter-mapping, public participatory GIS, and other formsof alternative cartographic praxis has driven interestin what Cidell (2008) described as the importantways everyday people engage in their own “criticalcartographies” (1203). An important but under-studied piece of alternative cartographic praxis is therole of mapping and geographic knowledge produc-tion in the African American freedom struggle,

including the nonspectacular spade work of challeng-ing white supremacy. SNCC created and engaged ina tradition of gathering social and spatial data onpower structures and countermapping their sphere ofinfluence and control, inventorying the politicaleconomy of regions and communities, and formulat-ing radical geographic pedagogy that predated muchof the “critical” turn in human geography. This factin turn prompts a consideration of the organic intel-lectualism and grounded and resistant knowledgepractices of public groups often missing within theacademic or industrial debates (Wright 2018).

The SNCC’s historical and geographic experience,although clearly important to students of the move-ment and black geographies, is also an importantreminder of the need to expand and in fact radical-ize our conception of the who, when, where, and sowhat of GI. By asserting that SNCC’s ResearchDepartment relied on, created, and operationalized aradical GI to carry out strategic decisions and polit-ical actions important to the efficacy of civil rightsorganizing, we point toward the ways in which wemight expand our understanding of GI beyondnational security, the expansion of corporate capital-ism, and the expert-driven “tradecraft” relationshipscharacterizing the military–academic–industrial com-plex. A more critical, if not radical, understandingof GI recognizes it less as a profession or industryand more as a broad set of embodied, affective, andpolitically laden practices in which people create,use, and employ sophisticated geographic under-standings and knowledge to make complex deci-sions—whether those support dominant social andpolitical interests or not. Such a reading of GInecessarily draws attention to the ways in whichgeography is not only complicit with the military–in-dustrial–academic complex and the violent implica-tions of those relationships, but it also opens spacefor a broader exploration of the ways in which geog-raphy can be put into service to undermine, destabil-ize, and challenge the hetero–patriarchal–racistfoundations of modern capitalism.

Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the anonymous reviewers whoimproved previous versions of the article and to NikHeynen for his helpful commentary. We also thankAnna Brand and Lorraine Dowler, who read over

16 Inwood and Alderman

previous drafts of this research. Omissions areour own.

Funding

This research was made possible by a grant fromthe National Science Foundation.

ORCID

Joshua F. J. Inwood http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8291-5970Derek H. Alderman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5192-8103

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JOSHUA F. J. INWOOD is Associate Professor inthe Department of Geography and the Rock EthicsInstitute at The Pennsylvania State University,University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected] research interests include civil rights geogra-phies, memorialization and truth work in the UnitedStates, and broader interests in urban and cul-tural geography.

DEREK H. ALDERMAN is Professor in the Departmentof Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,TN 37966. E-mail: [email protected]. His research onrace relations, public memory, popular culture, and heri-tage tourism in the U.S. South focuses on the rights ofAfrican Americans to claim the power to commemoratethe past and shape cultural landscapes as part of a broadergoal of social and spatial justice.

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