The Struggle Continues: A Dialogue with SNCC Veterans

Date: Thursday, September 29, 2016

Location: The Forum for Scholars and Publics (Old Chem 011)

Time: 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Light lunch served beginning at 11:45

Please join us for a conversation with three veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as they discuss their work after SNCC and the southern freedom movement. Charles Cobb, journalist (founder of National Association of Black Journalists) and author (This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible), Judy Richardson, filmmaker (Eyes on the Prize) and author (Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC) and Maria Varela, photographer, community organizer and MacArthur “Genius Grant” Fellow, will reflect on how their experiences in SNCC impacted the choices they made with the rest of their lives. From opening the Drum and Spear bookstore and the Center for Black Education in Washington, D.C. to organizing with Latino and native resistance groups in the Southwest, the panel will look at how the worldview and approach they learned in SNCC infused itself into their later work and continues to do so today. The discussion will be moderated by John Gartrell of the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke’s Rubenstein Library.

This program is presented in partnership with the SNCC Digital Gateway Project. The SNCC Digital Gateway is a collaborative project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Legacy Project (SLP) and Duke University that tells the story of SNCC from the perspective of the activists, themselves. It is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and builds off of the pilot website of the SLP-Duke collaboration, One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights (http://onevotesncc.org). The forthcoming website, SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn From the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work (https://snccdigital.org) tells the story of how young SNCC activists united with local communities in the Deep South during the 1960s to take control of their political and economic lives. In it, SNCC veterans, historians of the Movement, archivists, and students weave together grassroots stories, digitized primary source materials held at repositories across the country, and new multi-media productions to bring this history to life for a new generation.