Often pronounced as “snick,” the SNCC was a major civil rights organization that played a large role in challenging the segregated institutions of the Jim Crow South. John Lewis, Julian Bond, and others created SNCC as a national organization to help various local chapters of activists share best practices and allocate resources. As the name indicates, it began with a firm commitment to nonviolence, which it retained under Lewis’s chairmanship from 1963 to 1966, but many members came to question this approach after activists suffered terrible violence, and efforts to ensconce activists within the Democratic Party fell short. Lewis’s successor Stokely Carmichael downplayed nonviolence as one tactic among many and came to reject an emphasis on achieving civil rights in favor of achieving “Black Power.” This approach alienated many of its white allies, and so the SNCC allied with the Black Panther Party. This merger so thoroughly divided the organization that it never recovered, and it formally dissolved in 1970.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, civil rights activists worked to register Black voters in districts where legal segregation had been most rigorously enforced and where barriers to voting persisted despite the new law.