A Lecture by Hasan Kwame Jeffries

"We gonna show Alabama just how bad we are!" SNCC and the Southern Roots of Black Power

A Lecture by Hasan Kwame Jeffries
Associate Professor of History, Ohio State University

In April 1960, student activists, fresh from participating in the wave of civil rights sit-ins that had swept across the country earlier that year, gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina and established the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Throughout the ensuing decade, SNCC activists could be found on the frontlines of nearly every major conflict in the African American freedom struggle. Today we remember SNCC mostly for its civil rights activities, ignoring the fact that SNCC was responsible for introducing the nation to Black Power and developing the political program behind the radical slogan. This talk explores the central role that SNCC's 1965-1966 organizing project in Lowndes County, Alabama played in the evolution of Black Power. Hasan Jeffries is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt (NY Press 2009).

Monday, March 1, 2010
4:30 P.M.
Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

Sponsored by Black Studies, the Department of History, and the Dean's Office for Multicultural Affairs