The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Founded in 1960 in North Carolina, by black college students from across the south, SNCC was largely responsible for spreading the use of "sit-ins" (and other forms of direct nonviolent action) as a major tactic against racial discrimination in public spaces. SNCC was a key collaborator with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the Freedom Rides of 1961 where interracial groups of nonviolent activists rode interstate buses into the deep South to challenge segregationist practices in public interstate transportation facilities and on the buses themselves. They suffered horrific beatings, arrests and jailings but their courage helped move the country toward a firm legal stand against discrimination in interstate travel. Their collaborations with CORE, the NAACP and other movement organizations created "Freedom Summer" in 1964, in which hundreds of students from northern white colleges joined black organizers and grassroots community members in a major onslaught against legal apartheid in Mississippi. As a part of "Freedom Summer", SNCC was essential to the development of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP was an interracial alternative to the all-white regular Democratic Party and sent delegates to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, challenging the nation to recognize the illegitimacy of the "regular" party. In the communities where they worked, SNCC often partnered with other grassroots organizations in the creation of alternative educational and cultural institutions such as libraries, community centers, Freedom Schools, the Free Southern Theater, and the SNCC Freedom Singers. In all of this work SNCC was developing an organic model for community organizing that was indigenous to the experience of African Americans in the rural south, a model based in the life of the black community and its institutions.