SNCC Legacy Project Toolkits

As people look for strategies to challenge fascism today, we can learn a lot from the work of the youth-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s.

The SNCC Legacy Project has produced six toolkits that are free to download. Each one has primary documents, narrative history, photos, and discussion questions.

Topics include voting rights, women & gender, freedom teaching, art & culture, Black power, and the organizing tradition.

Classroom Stories

Coming into their junior year of high school, many of my U.S. history students know little about the Civil Rights Movement. They’ve typically heard of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., of course, but they couldn’t tell you more than their names.

Almost none of them have ever heard of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, at least until I introduce them to the SNCC Digital Gateway and the accompanying toolkits. These powerful teaching tools enlarge my students’ conception of the Civil Rights Movement. They introduce a new, dynamic cast of characters, who worked outside of the limelight in the fight for racial equality and justice. They illuminate the grassroots organizing tradition that propelled the movement forward long before and after the activism of the 1950s and 1960s.

My students become enamored with SNCC — its workers, its methodology, and its philosophy and ideals. They feel empowered learning that young people — not much older than themselves — profoundly impacted history. My students also become much more interested, not just in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but in history in general, knowing that there is always more than meets the eye.

These resources have become a staple in my curriculum and have reshaped how I teach the Civil Rights Movement.

—Todd Christensen, High School AP U.S. History and American History Teacher, Burlington, North Carolina

My students found the SNCC Legacy Project Toolkits easy to use. The graphics are beautiful, and the stories are easy to read and engaging.

—Melissa Rich, High School History Teacher, Rochester, New York

The SNCC Legacy Project resources provide teachers and students with nuanced, robust, and engaging information on the Civil Rights Movement and the people who participated in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality in the United States. These materials go beyond the standard, leader-focused narrative that we hear about civil rights, making it abundantly clear that women, young people, and individuals from all different backgrounds were essential to the movement and integral to its accomplishments.

The SNCC Legacy Project gives teachers and students exactly what they need and what too few resources provide — the means to understand and identify with historical actors and gain a greater sense of their own power and agency.

—Stacie Brensilver Berman, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Teaching and Learning Department at NYU Steinhardt, New York, New York