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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been restricted from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population.
Ella Josephine Baker was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, and Bob Moses, as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.
Mary Elizabeth King is a professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the United Nations affiliated University for Peace, a political scientist, and author of several publications. She is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University and has a doctorate in international politics from Aberystwyth University. She is also a Fellow of the Rothermere American Institute and a distinguished Scholar at the American University Center for Global Peace in Washington D.C.
Annie Bell Robinson Devine (1912–2000) was an American activist in the Civil Rights Movement.
Victoria Jackson Gray Adams was an American civil rights activist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She was one of the founding members of the influential Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was a coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi. COFO was formed in 1961 to coordinate and unite voter registration and other civil rights activities in the state and oversee the distribution of funds from the Voter Education Project. It was instrumental in forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. COFO member organizations included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from its earliest days in 1960 until her death in October 1967. She served the organization as an activist in the field and as an administrator in the Atlanta central office. She eventually succeeded James Forman as SNCC's executive secretary and was the only woman ever to serve in this capacity. She was well respected by her SNCC colleagues and others within the movement for her work ethic and dedication to those around her. SNCC Freedom Singer Matthew Jones recalled, "You could feel her power in SNCC on a daily basis". Jack Minnis, director of SNCC's opposition research unit, insisted that people could not fool her. Over the course of her life, she served 100 days in prison for the movement.
Unita Zelma Blackwell was an American civil rights activist who was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Blackwell was a project director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and helped organize voter drives for African Americans across Mississippi. She was also a founder of the US–China Peoples Friendship Association, a group dedicated to promoting cultural exchange between the United States and China. Barefootin', Blackwell's autobiography, published in 2006, charts her activism.
Hollis Watkins is an activist who was part of the Civil Rights Movement activities in the state of Mississippi during the 1960s. He became a member and organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1961, was a county organizer for 1964's "Freedom Summer", and assisted the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the regular Mississippi delegation from their chairs at the 1964 Democratic Party national convention in Atlantic City. He founded Southern Echo, a group that gives support to other grass-roots organizations in Mississippi. He also is a founder of the Mississippi Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement.
Carpenters for Christmas was conceived to counteract a series of church bombings and arson attacks in Mississippi during and following the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. During the summer of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) organized a nationally supported campaign that challenged the racial segregation of the Mississippi Democratic Party and the state's systematic exclusion of black citizens from voting. Churches played a central role in this campaign, often housing Freedom Schools, serving as freedom election polling places, and serving as the venue for mass meetings. To counter this central role, segregationist forces began a campaign of terror against civil rights workers and the churches that gave them support.
Over the course of Freedom Summer, there were at least three murders, approximately 70 bombings or burnings, over 80 beatings, and over 1,000 arrests of civil rights activists. The COFO incident report, a single-spaced document that offered brief daily summaries, was over ten pages long.
Judy Richardson is an American documentary filmmaker and civil rights activist. She was Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of Africana Studies at Brown University.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist.
David J. Dennis is a civil rights activist active in the movement since the 1960s. He grew up in the segregated area of Omega, Louisiana, and worked as co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), as director of Mississippi's Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and as one of the organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Dave Dennis worked closely with both Bob Moses and Medgar Evers as well as members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Dennis' first involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was at a Woolworth sit-in organized by CORE and he went on to become a Freedom Rider in 1961. More recently Dennis has put his activism toward a new project, the Algebra Project, which is a nonprofit organization run by Bob Moses that aims to improve the mathematics education for minority children. Dennis also speaks about his experiences in the movement through an organization called Dave Dennis Connections.
Ralph Edwin King Jr., better known as Ed King, is a United Methodist minister, civil rights activist, and retired educator. He was a key figure in historic civil rights events taking place in Mississippi, including the Jackson Woolworth’s sit-in of 1963 and the Freedom Summer project in 1964. Rev. King held the position of Chaplain and Dean of Students, 1963–1967, at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. At this critical juncture of the civil rights movement, historian John Dittmer described King as “the most visible white activist in the Mississippi movement.”
Dorie Ann Ladner is an American civil rights activist.
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, formerly Gwendolyn Robinson, is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Florida, where she researches Islamic feminism and the impact of Sharia law on Muslim women. She was a civil rights activist, serving as a member of both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Nation of Islam (NOI). Simmons has received a number of prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, USAID Fellowships, and an American Center of Oriental Research Fellowship.
Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden, was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early recruit to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi Hayden was a strategist and organizer for the 1964 Freedom Summer. In the internal discussion that followed its uncertain outcome, she clashed with the SNCC national executive. Hayden's vision was of a "radically democratic" movement driven by organizers in the field. In defending grassroots organization she believed she was also advocating for the voice of women. In "Sex and Caste", a reworking of an internal memo they had drafted with other SNCC women, Hayden and Mary King drew "parallels" with the experience of African-Americans to suggest that women are "caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power." Since regarded as a bridge connecting civil rights to women's liberation, Hayden describes its publication as her "last action as a movement activist." In the decades since, she has continued to acknowledge the civil-rights struggle of the era as the forerunner for women, and for all those, who have taken up "the idea of organising for themselves."
Jean Smith Young is an American psychiatrist, writer, and civil rights activist. She was an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the 1964 Freedom Summer.
References
- 1 2 Tillinghast, Muriel; McFadden, Patricia (1991-01-01). "WOMEN AND NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS". Yale Journal of Law and Liberation. 2 (1).
- 1 2 Collins, Ed (July 2012). "Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, and Dorothy M. Zellner, eds., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC., Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2010. Pp. 616. Cloth $34.95. Paper $26.95". The Journal of African American History. 97 (3): 354–358. doi:10.5323/jafriamerhist.97.3.0354. ISSN 1548-1867.
- 1 2 3 "Muriel Tillinghast". SNCC Digital Gateway. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
- ↑ Duran, Jane (2015). "Women of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Feminism and Social Progress". Philosophia Africana. 17 (2): 65–73. doi:10.5325/philafri.17.2.0065. ISSN 1539-8250.