SNCC Legacy Project

09/29/2026

History leaves clues and also people that demonstrate the commitment needed to create a just society.

Ms. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons is an example of servant leadership commitment that Ms. Ella Baker.

She is a retired Assistant Professor of Religion and affiliated faculty in the Women Studies Department at the University of Florida.

Raised in Memphis, Simmons received her BA from Antioch University in Human Services and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion with a specific focus on Islam from Temple University as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies.

Simmons’ primary academic focus in Islam is on the Shari’ah (Islamic Law) and its impact on Muslim women, contemporarily. She won’t say it BUT she is an expert in this study and the pedagogy of freedom teaching.

Simmons has a long history in the area of civil rights, human rights and peace work. During her early adult years as a college student and thereafter, she was active with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and spent seven years working full time on Voter Registration and desegregation activities in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s.

She was on the staff of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker peace, justice, human rights and international development organization headquartered in Philadelphia, PA for twenty-three years.

Zoharah serves as a member of the SNCC Legacy Project Board and continues to advising organizations and young people around the country, while remaining an active organizer herself. She is a testament of commitment and belief that WE WILL WIN!

📸: taken by Nick Moreland at the 2026 SLP Movement History Summit. For information on movement veterans, downloadable curriculum, interviews and primary source documents visit www.sncclegacyproject.org

09/24/2026

Movement Now‼️

We have been working with professors from around the country to deepen their knowledge of movement, while integrating it into their classrooms. This community ranges from educators to organizers to archivists to students.

Dr. LaTasha Levy is an associate professor of Africana Studies at Howard University. Her passion is to expand opportunities for Black Studies and Political Education past the classrooms.

📸 taken by: Nick Moreland at the Movement History Summit 2026

09/09/2026

We recognize Mr. Lonnie Bunch for his tireless effort to curate and communicate American History as the fourteenth secretary of The Smithsonian.

The SNCC Legacy Project (SLP) wishes to express its profound gratitude to Lonnie Bunch for his consistent determination to tell the stories of all Americans during his tenure at the Smithsonian. As SNCC veterans who continue to work to make America a more democratic society, we salute his insistence on inclusive storytelling. Lonnie Bunch oversaw and, with his dedicated staff, brought into existence the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).  This is of singular importance. The NMAAHC brings to the fore the magnificent, historically-grounded stories of African Americans, beginning with their roots in African kingdoms to their enslavement, to the Movement for Black Lives. 

At a time when there is a concerted effort to ban books and the teaching of the full history of this country,  a visitor to the Museum can learn about the Reconstruction Period, the period of democratic promise that followed the Civil War; the 1960s Freedom Movement that has grounded all of us in the SNCC Legacy Project; the brilliance of W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells; the music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Miles Davis; and the literary works of Sterling Brown, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes.  Visitors can see the grassroots voting rights campaigns that led to the election of numerous Black elected officials throughout this country, as well as the election of over 60 African American Congresspeople... and Barack Obama. 

Even before the NMAAHC was constructed, Lonnie Bunch created the Treasurer’s Project. The Project travelled across America, showing various communities – including some in which we had organized — how to collect and curate their archival materials.  These materials have helped correct the historical record and have unearthed often untold stories that continue to strengthen those communities. Most importantly, those materials remain in the communities which collected them. 

{Cont’d in comments}

09/09/2026

LONNIE BUNCH

The SNCC Legacy Project (SLP) wishes to express its profound gratitude to Lonnie Bunch for his consistent determination to tell the stories of all Americans during his tenure at the Smithsonian. As SNCC veterans who continue to work to make America a more democratic society, we salute his insistence on inclusive storytelling. Lonnie Bunch oversaw and, with his dedicated staff, brought into existence the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). This is of singular importance. The NMAAHC brings to the fore the magnificent, historically-grounded stories of African Americans, beginning with their roots in African kingdoms to their enslavement, to the Movement for Black Lives.

At a time when there is a concerted effort to ban books and the teaching of the full history of this country, a visitor to the Museum can learn about the Reconstruction Period, the period of democratic promise that followed the Civil War; the 1960s Freedom Movement that has grounded all of us in the SNCC Legacy Project; the brilliance of W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells; the music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Miles Davis; and the literary works of Sterling Brown, Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Langston Hughes. Visitors can see the grassroots voting rights campaigns that led to the election of numerous Black elected officials throughout this country, as well as the election of over 60 African American Congresspeople... and Barack Obama.

Even before the NMAAHC was constructed, Lonnie Bunch created the Treasure Project. The Project travelled across America, showing various communities – including some in which we had organized -- how to collect and curate their archival materials. These materials have helped correct the historical record and have unearthed often untold stories that continue to strengthen those communities. Most importantly, those materials remain in the communities which collected them.

We civil rights organizers, now in our 80’s and grounded in the 1960’s civil rights movement, are particularly grateful to Lonnie Bunch. From the beginning, he understood the importance of telling the bottom-up history and stories of regular people in that Movement, the narratives that would lift the human spirit as well as tell the real story. In addition to community archiving and other local programs, he also hosted a 2-day event for Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, the anthology of 51 SNCC women’s writings. The event was organized by SNCC’s Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who, with Dr. Bunche’s strong support, had directed the Smithsonian’s Black American Culture Program and was later its Curator Emerita of African American Songs of Protest.

We cannot overstate the enduring contribution Lonnie Bunch has made to the historically accurate telling of all our important histories. We must all work to ensure that his work continues to educate and sustain us.

08/21/2026

Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon taught us that all meetings in movement must have song. You start with song before getting down to the agenda. Not just any songs BUT powerful Freedom Songs. She mentioned that song is raising the possibilities and spirit and allows for participation where at any point someone can lead. The former founding member of the Freedom Singers and Sweet Honey in the Rock (We Who Believe in Freedom) mentioned that in the Black Organizing Tradition it sustained us. In this photo Judy Richardson is leading a freedom song (Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody…) with Courtland Cox and Dr. Geri Augusto holding up the rear.

Visit sncclegacyproject.org keywords: music of the movement or Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon for information on freedom song, song leaders and the history of freedom music.

“MUSIC IS A MOTIVATOR AND ORGANIZING TOOL.”- Chuck Neblett

08/19/2026

If you are in the Washington, DC area on Saturday, August 29th make some time to attend the Social Justice Curriculum Fair. As the new school year begins, this is an opportunity to learn strategies, acquire materials, and talk through pedagogy grounded in justice and your overall teaching experience. Teaching can be lonely and stressful BUT your network, practice, and support systems expand at the Social Justice Curriculum Fair. Visit our friends Teaching for Change for more information.

Also don’t miss the Women & Gender Toolkit Workshop facilitated by the amazing Judy Richardson and dynamic Jess Rucker. The organizing toolkits that are 6 in total span topics to include Women & Gender, Art & Culture, Organizing Tradition, Freedom Teaching, Voting Rights, and Black Power. The toolkits can be found at sncclegacyproject.org /sncc-grassroots-organizing

We Must Fight for Our Freedom❗️

07/31/2026

07/30/2026

Legacy leaves clues.

Explore our documentation of movement and the freedom struggle in the many forms (written, audio, visual, and personal documentation). Allow the work of the past and present to inform your work of the day, as legacy leave clues. It serves as map of where we’ve been and all the learnings along the way. Whether it be the building of leaders through Ella Baker, the resistance of the sit ins, the transforming the right to vote, or the riveting story of Lowndes County and the Lowndes County Freedom Party just to name a few, become curious through our primary sources.

www.sncclegacyproject.org

07/14/2026

The Civil Rights Movement Archive also know as CrmVet is an archive created by civil rights workers active in CORE, NAACP, SCLC, SNCC and similar connections to the Southern Freedom Movement.

Curated by Bruce Hartford

CrmVet publishes a monthly newsletter with expansive resources, photos, reports, art, speeches and historical items that contribute to the sustainability of movement history. It serves as one of the most consistent documentations of moment history.

It’s no less than amazing the collection of materials in the CrmVet repository. Download the monthly newsletter at www.sncclegacyproject.org and also explore each unique cover with time and purpose captions dedicated to also highlighting the beautiful imagery of the Black Freedom Struggle.

Follow, Like, Share and Comment here to continue to help us grow. CrmVet is a partner of the Movement History Initiative (MHI), a collective work group aimed at sharing resources and supporting legacy.

07/03/2026

Happy Birthday Medgar Evers. A movement continued because of your work and efforts❗️

As written on www.snccdigital.org

July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963
Raised in Decatur, Mississippi

Medgar Evers had misgivings about SNCC–too young, too radical, not knowledgeable about the state. But on the other hand, he was frustrated. He was the NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, the first in the state, and his national office was reluctant to move on Mississippi–too dangerous, too little gained for the money likely to be spent. But SNCC, Evers concluded, as did other local NAACP leaders, represented young energy he could use.

Evers laid much of the foundation on which the voting rights struggles of the 1960s were built. Before SNCC’s presence in Mississippi, he mentored young Mississippians who later became a crucial part of SNCC’s work. Students like Charles McLaurin, Dorie and Joyce Ladner, and Colia Liddell all looked to Evers for guidance before becoming field secretaries in SNCC.

A veteran of World War II, Medgar Evers was program director of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) organized in 1951 by Dr. T.R.M. Howard. In 1954, he became the NAACP’s Mississippi field secretary, a position that he would hold until his assassination in 1963. He spent much of the late 1950s traveling from one NAACP chapter to the next giving “pep talks,” often dressed as a sharecropper to avoid drawing attention to himself. Seeking to investigate and publicize racially-motivated homicides and lynchings in Mississippi, he became increasingly frustrated by how difficult change appeared to be in Mississippi. Watching the success of Montgomery bus boycott, Evers lamented to his wife Myrlie that “it was all happening somewhere else. Mississippi stood still.”

Evers’s relationship with SNCC was complicated at first. While he believed that the head-on confrontations that SNCC sometimes used in direct action protests might prompt violent responses against Black Mississippians, he also respected the militant actions they were taking to challenge inequality.

For primary source movement history visit www.snccdigital.org, www.sncclegacyproject.org or www.crmvet.org