The struggle to secure voting rights, as well as recent efforts to resist voting rights protections, carve a grave reminder through our current political haze: citizens are not simply born, but made. This was certainly one of the wider lessons of the Student Nonviolent Committee (SNCC)’s Freedom Schools during Mississippi Summer Project, “Freedom Summer,” 1964. Yet many of the programs, organizations, and ideas linked to SNCC’s activism went further than full recognition of citizenship: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Child Development Group of Mississippi; in Alabama, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization; the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education and New Communities, Inc; Black Power. In this regard, SNCC has not only a legacy of voting rights and direct action, but also anti-poverty work, political organization, economic development, cultural pride. What principle, if any, can help to encapsulate this many-layered legacy?

The papers and commentary of this panel together propose that, understood as the practice of freedom (as Paulo Freire might say), education encapsulates the layered legacy of SNCC’s activism. In turn, SNCC helps us think through the broader relationship between education and political struggle. This panel focuses on education only partially because SNCC’s varied projects, from the Freedom Schools to the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, involved educational work (broadly defined) with local leaders. In truth, organizers were themselves learners who leaned on and even transformed the example of a litany of organizations and leaders such as the NAACP, Highlander Folk School, Ella Baker, Amzie Moore, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Septima Clark leading the SCLC’s citizenship schools. Moreover, by lending their reflections on their past and current work, SNCC veterans today invite us to learn as they learned. By examining how education and political struggle help encapsulate SNCC’s legacy, this panel also touches on broader questions relevant to the historical study of social movements in American life: the tension between local, regional, and national politics, competing models and ideas of organizing, the importance of popular culture, and intergenerational debate, dialogue, and coalition-building.