SNCC & Grassroots Organizing Discussion Series
The SNCC and Grassroots Organizing: Building a More Perfect Union discussion series focuses on SNCC’s grassroots community organizing and its relevance to ongoing efforts to build a more just, inclusive, and sustainable society. At its core, SNCC helped community members feel empowered to make choices and act on the issues that most impacted their lives and their communities.
Join us at an in-person or virtual event to learn more about SNCC’s organizing work from SNCC veterans and humanities scholars and to explore connections to your life and community.
The series is focused on six themes that are at the heart of SNCC’s history of grassroots organizing: the organizing tradition, voting rights, Black Power, women and gender, freedom teaching, and art and culture in movement building.
Movement History Initiative
Telling the Civil Rights story from the ground up and the inside out
The Movement History Initiative (MHI) is a collaboration among veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC Legacy Project), today’s activists and grassroots organizations (e.g., New Georgia Project and BYP100), the John Hope Franklin Research Center, Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and noted scholars and archivists at Duke University and other institutions.
The group first met in 2013 to conceive a project that would present a different narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, telling that story from the ground up and the inside out. MHI partners focus on preserving the legacy of the grassroots organizing tradition and its influence on the black freedom struggle of the 1960’s and on identifying how that tradition is carried on through contemporary movements.
Over the years, the MHI has developed two websites (One Person, One Vote and the SNCC Digital Gateway); two expansive Critical Oral History programs, featuring both inter and intra-generational conversations; two K-12 Teacher Institutes; several workshops; a voting rights conference; and video documentation for three national conferences.
Through this work, the partners have built relationships across generations and have documented an intergenerational transfer of movement experience in real time.