SNCC anniversary marked by documenting early years of civil rights movement

Tottle House in Atlanta, GA, occupied during a SNCC sit-in in 1963. Source: Library of Congress.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first meetings on a college campus in Raleigh, North Carolina that led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, the grassroots organization that challenged racial inequality through non-violent action.

The gathering grew out of student sit-ins in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina that drew national attention and sparked protests against racial segregation throughout the south.

Civil rights leader Ella Baker was a co-founder of SNCC. She described the beginning of the organization in a 1977 interview archived at the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina's Wilson Library.

“The meeting was called for the Easter holiday in '60. I had suggested it was very obvious that the manner in which these things were springing up… There was no real coordination or even exchange taking place between the groups that were springing up. It was to a large extent, I called you and said, "How come your school sat in?" or something. I got a grant of about $800 SCLC was willing to put up, and I got in touch with the leadership of these different groups and got to writing them.”

H. Rap Brown at a SNCC news conference in 1967. Source: Library of Congress.

Baker says the participation exceeded her expectation.

“And I was hoping for not more than, say, a hundred and some of the "leadership" of the sit-ins as as we had culled it from the newspapers and so forth. And so it ended up about three hundred or more people.”

SNCC went on to organize voter registration drives and freedom rides, and members were jailed, beaten and operated under frequent threats of violence.

The SNCC 50th Anniversary conference started today in Raleigh North Carolina. Among those in attendance will be John Lewis, Julian Bond and Eleanor Holmes Norton. Organizers say the conference will launch the SNCC Legacy Program, a project that will record oral histories, original records, photographs and other documents from SNCC workers over the years.