The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded in 1960.
SNCC emerged from a meeting of student activists held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960. Ella Baker helped encourage the students to create an independent organization rather than simply operate as a youth branch of an established civil-rights group.
The organization grew out of the sit-in movement that began at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter on February 1, 1960. SNCC supported voter-registration drives, Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and other campaigns that relied on local organizing and nonviolent direct action.
SNCC’s leaders included Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Lawson, Bob Moses, and Stokely Carmichael. The group later debated nonviolence, political participation, and Black Power. Although it declined after the late 1960s, SNCC’s emphasis on grassroots leadership transformed the movement’s organizing methods and brought many young activists into national civil-rights work.