Youth played a pivotal role in the civil rights and black power movements

Posted by the ghetto intellectual 2/11/2010

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African-American History Month: The Role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

It was on February 1, 1960, some five decades ago, that the student movement was initiated. On this date four youth were arrested for demanding service at a segregated white-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.

When the Southwide Student Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation was held in April of that same year, at least 56 colleges in the region had participants linked to the so-called “sit-in movement.” These activists were spread out over 12 states and had links with students from 19 northern colleges and universities.

This gathering was sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) headed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and under the executive director Ella Baker. The over 300 students who were delegates and observers to the conference walked away having witnessed the formation of a continuing Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) which would constitute itself later as a more structured organization with a headquarters as well as field workers.

With the intensification of the campaigns to abolish legalized segregation and to win universal suffrage for African-Americans in many areas of the southern United States, SNCC began to play an even more critical role in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1961, the “Freedom Rides” were launched by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) resulting in the bombing of an integrated busload of freedom riders in Anniston, Alabama and the severe beating of persons by white racists in a Greyhound bus depot in Birmingham.

As a result of these actions carried out against the freedom riders, CORE called off the campaign aimed at outlawing segregated inter-state transportation facilities in the South. However, it was the student activists from SNCC based in the Nashville area, who pledged to continue the freedom rides until the segregation laws governing inter-state transportation in the South were overturned.

Read entire post @ Pan-African News Wire


tags: black history month, civil rights, racism, southern United States, black power