SNCC Revival

In August of 1960, Ella Baker, a former executive directory of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organized a conference for student leaders on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The idea was to organize students as a parallel organization to support Dr. King's work.

Dr. King got more than he asked for. The students pushed for a radical approach. They recognized the connection between American people of color and colonialism around the world. The students read Mao, Marx and other revolutionary thinkers. They called their organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

One of the SNCC leaders was a young Chicago native named James Foreman. He served as Executive Secretary from 1961-1966. He was aware of the personal suffering that African-Americans experienced because of their participation in voter registration and other civil rights activities. Foreman contacted his friend, Sylvia Fischer, in Chicago. She and Lawrence Landry were the founders and first co-chairs of Chicago Area Friends of SNCC in the Civil Rights Movement (CAFSNCC). CAFSNCC's first project was to raise money and food for the Black farmers evicted from their lands for trying to vote in Fayette County, Tennessee.

By 1968, SNCC was only a shadow of its former self as financial troubles, dwindling staff, internal conflicts, and police repression weakened the organization’s support and impact. With the passage of the voter rights and other civil rights legislation, SNCC became inactive and the student leaders moved on. CAFSNCC also became dormant until 2004 when several of the people who had been involved in the 1960s woke it up. Part of the stimulation was the death of James Foreman in 2004 and Kwame Ture's (Stokely Carmichael) death.

As the website for CAFSNCC explains, "the Chicago SNCC History Project formed to create a three-part program inspired by SNCC’s commitment to grass-roots organizing and participatory democracy based on the belief in the self-worth of people and their ability to empower themselves to change their lives. It began by hosting a national conference, “Tell the Story: The Chicago SNCC History Project, 1960 – 1965”, on October 21-22, 2005 at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The second part of the project was collecting the oral histories of those involved with SNCC/CAFSNCC, not just leaders but ordinary people who stamped envelopes, made and carried picket signs, demonstrated and gave of their time to create a mass movement that changed Chicago’s history. The third and final part was creating an archive of the stories and memorabilia of the period. The archive is housed in the Vivian C. Harsh Collection of African American History at Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in Chicago."

Organizers of the revitalized CAFSNIC include Sylvia Fisher, one of the founders of CAFSNCC in the 1960s, and Fannie Rushing, another 1960s activist. As well as the history project CAFSNCC conducts educational programs and hosts conferences. An international conference aimed at engaging young people is scheduled for April 4-8, 2019 in Chicago, Illinois. The title of the conference is "The Global Sixties: Social Movements for Civil Rights, Decolonization, Human Rights." The purpose of the conference is to raise awareness of the global consciousness of the student movement in the 1960s and to inspire youth and others to adopt a global perspective.

There are many ways to become involved:

-endorsing the conference 

-helping to plan the conference

-attending a workshop

-attending the conference 

-helping spread the word about the conference 

-sending people to the conference 

-sponsoring the conference