The 1964 Mississippi Summer Project brought a thousand volunteers into the state SNCC had bled for; the Klan answered by murdering James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner during the project's first days, and over a thousand movement workers were arrested that summer amid dozens of bombings. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge at Atlantic City — and its betrayal — pushed SNCC toward independent Black politics.
As the organization declared against the Vietnam War in January 1966 — the first civil-rights group to do so — its members faced the draft as a weapon: communications director Julian Bond was expelled from the Georgia legislature for endorsing the antiwar statement (reseated by the Supreme Court in Bond v. Floyd), and Atlanta Project organizers who picketed the induction center were prosecuted, with several serving federal and state time.