Blackwell Reference Online

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The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was an organization founded on April 17, 1960 for the purpose of bringing together college students from all over the South who had participated in lunch counter sit-ins so that they could engage fully in the leadership of the civil rights movement . Although SNCC was formed initially as the result of actions taken by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to organize the students, SNCC remained independent of all other civil rights organizations, working in concert with them during the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer . Eventually, members of SNCC became disillusioned with compromises made by older members of the civil rights movement and broke with their original philosophy of nonviolence and racial integration in favor of a Black Power approach that favored black exclusivity and self-defense in the face of violence. Many scholars saw the formation of SNCC as marking a generational shift in the civil rights movement and the embrace by SNCC members of a Black Power ideology as the end of the movement. The impetus for such an organization began with the sit-in demonstration undertaken on Monday, February 1, 1960 by four freshmen students at North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro, North Carolina, who, inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott and other civil rights activities, decided to try to eat ... log in or subscribe to read full text