The records displayed on this website are part of the T. Rasul Murray Papers Collection donated by the owner to to the Archives of the Charles Evans Inniss Memorial Library, Medgar Evers College, CUNY in 2017. 

In the early 1960s, young Black college students conducted sit-ins around America to protest the segregation of restaurants. Ella Baker, a Civil Rights activist and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) official, invited some of those young Black activists (including Diane Nash, Marion Barry, John Lewis, and James Bevel) to a meeting at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April of 1960. From that meeting, the group formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was made up mostly of Black college students, who practiced peaceful, direct action protests.

Young activists and organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC (pronounced “SNICK”), represented a radical, new unanticipated force whose work continues to have great relevance today. For the first time, young people decisively entered the ranks of civil rights movement leadership. They committed themselves to full-time organizing from the bottom-up, and with this approach empowered older efforts at change and facilitated the emergence of powerful new grassroots voices. Before SNCC, with only a few exceptions, notably the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC) during the 1930s and ’40s, civil rights leadership always meant grownups.

The Story of SNCC

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Inside SNCC

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Brief Outline of the History of SNCC