In the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the historic sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter by four North Carolina A&T college students, From Sit-Ins to SNCC brings together the work of leading civil rights scholars to offer a new and groundbreaking perspective on student-oriented activism in the 1960s.

The substantive essays in this collection not only delineate the role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) over the course of the struggle for African American civil rights, but also offer an updated perspective on the development and impact of the sit-in movement in light of new research into organizational records and the personal papers of key actors. The contributors provide provocative analyses of such topics as the dynamics of grassroots student civil rights activism, the organizational and cultural changes within SNCC, the impact of the sit-ins on the white South, the evolution of black nationalist ideology within the student movement, works of fiction written by movement activists, and the changing international outlook of student-organized civil rights movements.