2024-2025 Activist in Residence
SNCC Legacy Project

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) Legacy Project (SLP) was begun to preserve and extend SNCC’s legacy.

SNCC was founded in 1960 by southern student protesters engaged in sit-in demonstrations against lunch-counter segregation. Within a year, it evolved from a coordinating agency to a hands-on organization, helping local leadership in rural and small-town communities across the South participate in a variety of protests, as well as in political and economic organizing campaigns. This set SNCC apart from the civil rights mainstream of the 1960s. Its members, its youth, and its organizational independence enabled SNCC to remain close to grassroots currents that rapidly escalated the southern movement from sit-ins to freedom rides, and then from voter drives to political organizing.

In the broadest sense, SNCC’s legacy is the legacy of grassroots organizing. Within this frame, SNCC and the field organizers of CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP are really an interconnected force that in just one intense decade successfully challenged and changed America for the better. But there are specific aspects—youth-led movement, MS Freedom Summer Project, articulation of “Black Power,” interrogation of gender roles, and continued work of its veterans—that belong to SNCC and perhaps use the SNCC experience in continuing efforts to fashion “a more perfect union” here in the United States.

Although SNCC, the organization, no longer exists, we believe that its legacy continues and needs to be brought forward in ways that continue the struggle for freedom, justice, and liberty. To that end, the SLP is undertaking a significant effort to archive SNCC documents digitally to make them easily available for use; encourage and assist in the development of books and other media by SNCC veterans with the idea of having the stories and interpretation of SNCC’s work told by its veterans; and develop with colleges and universities a program of SNCC visiting professors and scholars who would in formal and informal ways interact with young people on campuses and take advantage of campus resources to begin telling the story as it should be told. Built into our efforts is the determination to see that our legacy, the legacy of the freedom struggle, is passed from our generation to future generations.