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This chapter discusses the importance of dress for student activists in the first half of the black student movement in the early 1960s. It explores how and why women activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) abandoned their “Sunday best” attire for denim overalls and jeans. Interviews with SNCC field secretaries reveal that in the early 1960s, they stopped wearing dresses in large part because such attire was not practical on the front lines. But by 1964, they were also doing it to forge political ties with the sharecroppers they were helping to organize and as a way to reject middle-class notions of feminine propriety. Their clothing choices helped spark protests against conservative campus dress codes, ushering in the popularity of “street fashion” on campus.

This chapter examines the cultural politics of civil rights movement photography by analysing the work of Danny Lyon who worked as a photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1962 and 1964. It explores how documentarians such as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and James Agee inspired Lyon’s documentary work and how the political culture of the New Left influenced his work’s reception. The chapter first focuses on Lyon’s photographs of black SNCC activists in the South, particularly Robert Moses. Lyon’s photographs of Moses helped spread a romantic mythology around Moses and SNCC that was useful in recruiting white liberal support up North. Lyon also photographed the rural South’s landscapes and people extensively. Many in the New Left romanticized rural black southerners as true outsiders, the authentic opposites of their industrialized and commercialized societies back home. Consequently, Lyon’s photographs had the capacity to aestheticize the same conditions that SNCC recognized as the source of black subjugation. The chapter also highlights how these images and themes appeared and circulated in a civil rights movement photography book, The Movement, which Lyon contributed to and helped produce.

Chapter 3 focuses on the simultaneity of the Johnson administration's escalation of the war in Vietnam and passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act, marking the end of de jure segregation. While the African American public and the mainstream civil rights movement were delighted with the end of segregation, the war in Vietnam gripped SNCC and other militants from the beginning. They were struck by the administration's hypocrisy: it was willing to send troops to faraway Vietnam but reluctant to send federal marshals to protect civil rights workers in the Deep South. For a brief moment in early 1965, the civil rights and antiwar movements overlapped at the SDS march on Washington. By the end of the year, the passions unleashed by the Vietnam War were displacing civil rights as the nation's most pressing problem. As Johnson militarized the war, the riots in Watts erupted, antiwar dissent grew, and SNCC debated whether to formally take a stand against the war. The war in Vietnam diverted attention from the civil rights movement, and dissent and debate over the war aggravated preexisting generational and ideological schisms in the movement. It was a harbinger of future strife.

Chapter 4 describes the deepening divisions in the civil rights movement in 1966 and the concomitant rise of Black Power. On January 3, the murder of Sammy Younge Jr., a navy veteran and SNCC activist, motivated SNCC to come out against the war. SNCC's antiwar stance created a national uproar, as its members were accused of treason and the moderate wing of the civil rights movement distanced itself from the group. Later in the year, SNCC would embrace racial separatism. The ramifications of opposing the war are highlighted by the controversy surrounding Julian Bond. Though elected to the Georgia legislature, Bond was denied his seat when he failed to repudiate SNCC's antiwar statement. Meanwhile, Black Power became a public sensation in the summer of 1966 and further destabilized the civil rights coalition. Increasingly consumed by the war, Johnson's commitment to the Great Society and civil rights legislation dimmed. The Democrats’ defeat in the midterm elections in November seemed to validate concerns about a white backlash. As African American casualties mounted in Vietnam, the civil rights movement seemed to be at a crossroads.

This chapter covers the pilot project summer of the Student Interracial Ministry and the seven students (three white males, one white female, and three black males) who worked in the south during the summer of 1960. Of particular note is Jane Stembridge’s work with Ella Baker to start up the first office for SNCC in Atlanta, Georgia. This chapter also covers the creation of the founding charter for the organization and the establishment of SIM as an official civil rights group during the academic year 1960-1961, supported by the National Council of Churches and the Interseminary Movement and endorsed by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Council.

By the mid-1950s, the worst aspects of McCarthyism and the Red scare had abated, yet the Cold War culture continued to dominate American life and foreign policy. The civil rights movement's fortunes improved with Brown v. Board of Education and the emergence of young Martin Luther King Jr. As cracks in the Cold War hegemony appeared and small spaces for dissent occurred, the frayed ties between the peace and freedom movements started to re-form. The most significant phenomenon was the creation of SNCC in 1960s because it accelerated the pace of change and brought nonviolent direct action to the fore. As part of the New Left, with its post–Cold War mind-set, SNCC and later SDS challenged the liberal consensus. Although the nonviolent protests catapulted civil rights to the top of the nation's agenda, the young activists were often disillusioned by the constraints of the Democratic Party and liberalism. This chapter explores the genesis of SNCC and why the most radical elements of the civil rights movements were some of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam War.

This chapter explores how the VEP empowered 129 separate African American voter campaigns during this period, spending over a million dollars, and registering 688,000 black southerners. This chapter argues that this surge of black voting power paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Wiley Branton led the VEP during this period, and their support, with philanthropic backing, energized thousands of black civil rights activists across the American South. This chapter chronicles how VEP money and support empowered grassroots movements across the South, and how the civil rights movement relied on the VEP.

During the 1960s, activists catalyzed Washington, D.C., into a new phase of civil rights activism, one that allowed them to give expression to the frustrations of poor black residents while fighting for political and economic control of the city. Chapter 1 shows how the Washington Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter led by Julius Hobson, the Free D.C. campaign run by Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader Marion Barry, welfare rights activism by Etta Horn and other low-income black women, and the Black United Front marked a strategic shift in the local movement toward self-determination. After almost a decade fighting for civil rights, black activists no longer wanted to live in a city whose terms were dictated by white stakeholders, federal officials, and unelected representatives. As this chapter demonstrates, due in part to the attention that radical campaigns brought to the issue of home rule, and also in part to Lyndon Johnson’s own political calculus, the president issued a partial home rule measure. But while African Americans ascended to local political office, powerful white stakeholders, along with members of the Johnson administration and Congress, retained control over the city.

When it became clear that the civil rights movement had not quite managed to drag segregation behind the barn and shoot it to death, others stepped in and picked up the fight. SONG created some room to move in the vital crawl spaces across the South in the 1990s, modeling intersectional organizing that would come to full bloom in the 2010s. The Ella Baker Center in Oakland has spent the better part of three decades figuring out how to grow successive generations of youth organizers to redirect public monies toward education, not prison. Youth immigrant organizers have taught the nation to value family emancipation and reunification as an essential right. The Movement for Black Lives and youth water protectors at Standing Rock have shined a brilliant spotlight on the mounting reality of government and corporate authoritarianism—surveillance, beating, shooting, warrantless taps, repeat arrests, mass incarceration. All of these organizations have advanced visions for a just and open society, doing so where adult society has dismally failed. In each case, it has been young people, not corporations or established parties or law enforcement, who pushed the nation a step further toward its self-proclaimed ideal of “liberty and justice for all.”