Black Freedom Movements
- 1960 SNCC (The Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee): Founded in April 1960 shortly after students at North Carolina A&T began the lunch counter sit-in campaign that reignited the southern civil rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was arguably the most dynamic and influential of the 1960s new left and civil rights era organizations. Not only did SNCC lead many of the campaigns that challenged segregation in the early 1960s, it also inspired some of the new radical formations of the mid and late 1960s, including Black Power and the student movements that swept across college campuses.
- CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) Founded in 1942 by an interracial group of University of Chicago students, CORE pioneered key tactics of the modern civil rights movement, using sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience to challenge segregation. Winning victories in northern cities in the 1940s and 1950s, CORE became active in the South with the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. The following year CORE organized "Freedom Rides," sending black and white students south to disrupt segregated interstate bus service.
- BLACK PANTHER PARTY The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was founded in October 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale who had met at Merritt College in Oakland, California. Dedicated to revolutionary internationalism and armed self-defense of Black communities, the Panthers initially operated in Oakland and Berkeley then in San Francisco and Richmond. In May 1967, the organization gained world-wide media attention when Seale led a contingent of heavily armed Panthers into the California state capital in Sacramento to demonstrate their opposition to a proposed law that would restrict the right to carry loaded weapons on city streets. With membership surging in the Bay Area, self proclaimed Panther units were established in many other locations. Faced with this unauthorized expansion, in spring 1968 the Oakland organization began officially chartering chapters, requiring allegiance to BPP principles and centralizing authority. While BPP adherents could be found in cities and towns across the country, officially the Party chartered thirteen chapters.
