Remote patrol weekend

"Freedom Song," making its debut at 6 p.m. Sunday on TNT, tells the story of perhaps the least-understood flank in the civil rights movement, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Though it would later become identified with black separatism espoused by its leader, the late Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael), SNCC's early years were marked by aggressive organizing by its hardcore band of volunteers. They even waded into rural areas, like the Mississippi town depicted in "Freedom Song," where the Klan and local authorities worked hand in glove to create virtual apartheid states. "Freedom Song" opens inside a jail cell late one night in 1961. A black teen-ager is singing the opening bars of a movement hymn. Soon other young men join in, and it looks like one of those standard-issue, "Eyes on the Prize" uplifting scenes - until we realize they are waking up all the white citizens around town who have their windows open that hot summer night. As the whites curse the blacks from their porches, the young men congratulate themselves for striking this small, nonviolent blow. Danny Glover and Vicellous Reon Shannon ("The Hurricane") star in "Freedom Song," which a gives a good idea of just how terrifying it must have been to organize in the Deep South in the early 1960s. @ART CAPTION:Vicellous Reon Shannon (left), Loretta Devine and Danny Glover in a tense scene from "Freedom Song," airing Sunday. @ART:Photo @ART CREDIT:TNT >>>