SNCC 60th Anniversary Conference
Small Group Discussion Transcripts
October 2021

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Introduction

2020 was the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The commemoration and conference planned for that year had to be postponed due to the Covid pandemic. It was converted from an in-person event to a virtual remote-event and held in October 2021.

As part of that conference, eight groups of Freedom Movement veterans from SNCC and other organizations gathered in eight online small discussion groups to look back with the perspective of decades and frankly assess with each other how we now understood what we did & experienced, how our lives were shaped by that struggle, how we assessed what we accomplished, where we failed, and what it meant for today.

The discussions were loosely organized around the following questions:

First session: How did our participation affect us?
Why did we participate?
What did it mean for us?
How did it change us?
Second session: Evaluation of the Freedom Movement
What was achieved?
What did we fail to achieve?
What lessons did we learn?
What did it all mean?

All discussion participants were veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement, men and women whose boots were on the ground in the southern states. Most had been active with SNCC, others with CORE, SCLC, NAACP, and Delta Ministry during the years 1951-1968.

 

Discussion Video Recordings

The video-recordings were transcribed, edited for continuity and clarity, and then reviewed and revised by the participants for accuracy. The raw video recordings from the SNCC 60th Conference are posted on the CRMA Vimeo channel.

Transcript & Video Links:

Group A:Transcription — Video
Bruce Hartford, Jennifer Lawson, Peter de Lissovoy, Claire O'Connor Rick Tuttle.

Group B:Transcription —  Video
Chude Pam Parker Allen, Heather Tobis Booth, Daphne Muse, Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, Larry Spears, Pat Vail.

Group C:Transcription [TBD] —  Video
Ron Cole Bridgeforth, Theresa El-Amin, Martha Livingston, Penny Patch, Dorothy Zellner.

Group D:Transcription —  Video
Phyllis Cunningham, Fatima Cortez, Laura Foner, Karen Haberman (Trusty), Peter Orris, John McAuliff.

Group E:Transcription —  Video
Arlene Dunn, Ira Grupper, Constancia Dinky Romilly, Karen Spellman, Nancy Stearns, Eugene Turitz.

Group FTranscription —  Video
Josh Gould, Janet Heinritz-Canterbury, Ed Nakawatase, Frances O'Brien, Muriel Tillinghast

Group G:Transcription —  Video
Angeline Butler, Marion Kwan, Linda Wetmore Halpern, Johnny E. Parham, Jr., Bill Perlman, Jane Silver.

Group H:Transcription —  Video
Miriam Cohen Glickman, Carol Rogoff Hallstrom, Faith Holsaert, Timothy Jenkins.

 


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