Preserve the Legacy - Ensure the Future!

The Chicago SNCC History Project needs your support to help preserve the history of civil rights activism and organizing for the future survival of our communities, young people and city!

The Chicago SNCC History Project is an educational non-profit based in Chicago that preserves and tells the stories of the Chicago Area Friends of SNCC (CAFSNCC). This is a significant ongoing project of solidarity emphasizing Chicago's relationship to SNCC (Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee), the struggle for Black voting rights in the South, and CAFSCNCC’s pivotal role in the fight for Black equality in Chicago between 1960-1965. This local movement inspired by the Southern movement involved organizing the 1963 school boycott, when 250,000 students, their parents and teachers stayed out of school as part of the struggle to remove the racist superintendent of schools, Ben Willis. The segregated and substandard trailer classrooms known as "Willis Wagons" were the target of this effort to improve the quality of education for students in schools on the South and the West sides of the city.

In order to carry out our mission:
• we need to develop new educational programming with new technologies and platforms within the digital humanities.we need to develop monthly archival opportunities to engage students and the public at the Woodson Library.
• we need to increase the number of CPS schools impacted by our distinct and local approach to civil rights history.
• we need new electronic equipment to carry out the oral history recording, production and dissemination of educational/archival materials.
• we need to urgently collect the narratives and acquisition of personal archives of elder movement veterans.

To further this mission we have already: 
• organized five intergenerational conferences that brought movement veterans into dialogue with today’s young fighters for justice,
• conducted workshops in the Chicago Public Schools to involve students in the recording of oral histories of movement veterans and today’s activists,
• provided educational programming in churches and community centers

The Chicago SNCC History Project is inspired by the SNCC model of intergenerational work, grass-roots organizing, participatory democracy and the belief in the self-worth and ability of every human being to empower themselves to change their lives. Realizing that many of those more iconic figures like Ella Baker, Kwame Touré, James Forman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Lawrence Landry and countless, often unnamed "footsoldiers" who made this history possible had transitioned, a major goal of the project became not simply preserving that history solely for the sake of legacy or preservation but rather with the explicit mission to substantively pass knowledge of youth organizing for the young people, of today, who are continuing the fight for freedom, justice, equality and peace. This is a significant inheritance of intergenerational organizing from SNCC. 

In 2005, we began collecting the documents, memorabilia and oral histories from those involved with SNCC/CAFSNCC and archiving them in the Vivian C. Harsh Collection of African American History at Carter G. Woodson Regional Library in Chicago's Southside. These archives include stories of well-known, and ordinary people who stamped envelopes, made and carried picket signs, demonstrated and sometimes gave of their lives to create a mass movement that changed Chicago and the nations’ history.

If you know that the struggle against resegregation, white supremacy and inferior education is still ongoing and you believe in the SNCC History Project's oral history, educational and archival work is important for the future survival of our communities, please help us to continue this important work by donating whatever you can to this GoFundMe fundraiser.

For more information about our oral history project, past conferences and archival work please visit our website: https://snccchicago.org/