By Marian Wright Edelman
This month marked a Civil Rights Movement anniversary: the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. People often forget that children and young people were major frontline soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement. Six-year-old Ruby Bridges in New Orleans, the Little Rock Nine at Central High School in Arkansas, and other Black students desegregated schools across the South, often standing up to howling mobs. Many, including Bridges (who later became a Children’s Defense Fund colleague), continue to write books and speak at schools and college campuses across the country sharing their experiences with young people, helping students today understand that none of this is ancient history in our country’s story. After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was jailed in Birmingham in April 1963, young people responded with the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in May. More than 1,000 students walked out from local schools to march, withstanding fire hoses and police dogs to challenge Bull Connor’s brutal rule and topple segregation in that city. College-aged young people coordinated voter registration drives, participated in Freedom Rides testing segregation laws on interstate buses, conducted voter education and Freedom Schools during 1964’s Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and more. They faced pervasive risks of arrest, injury, or death. My generation was blessed beyond measure to be in the right places at the right times to experience and help bring transforming change to the South and to America, and SNCC was one conduit.
The path to its founding began two months earlier, in February 1960, when four Black freshmen at North Carolina A&T State University—Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—sat in at the Whites-only lunch counter in the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store. That was just the spark I and many other Black youths were waiting for that galvanized us to stand up against the segregation that daily assaulted our dignity and lives with similar actions. At first there was no mechanism in place to connect us all. But the visionary Ella Baker, who was working with Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organized an April meeting at her alma mater, Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., to bring student activists together. I was a senior at Spelman College in Atlanta at the time, and took my first ever plane ride that Easter weekend on a plane chartered by SCLC to join with about 200 other college students for the April 15 convening where SNCC was founded.
From the beginning Ella Baker insisted that students find their own voice and form our own organization instead of becoming the youth arm of SCLC or an established civil rights group. She became a trusted SNCC advisor and mentor, and she and some of the other adults who became colleagues with young people in SNCC and nurtured us were some of the most extraordinary people in the Civil Rights Movement. At the same time, the student activism energized the larger movement. Many of the student leaders from that time continued to build on the passion and commitment unleashed as teenagers and twenty-year-olds and dedicated their entire adult lives to advocacy and service. While SNCC lasted only six years, SNCC alumni carried on, following up on the ideals we believed in and doing our part to make a better world for the next generations.
That legacy still matters today. All of the children and young people who were part of the Civil Rights Movement are a reminder, as Children’s Defense Fund Freedom Schools® scholars know, that you are never too young to make a difference in your nation and world.