New Book: Women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. WorldCat record with Google Preview

Founded in 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a pivotal role in many of the key events of the American civil rights movement.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, 52 women offer their personal stories of working for SNCC. In addition to coverage of the founding of the SNCC and work in the national SNCC office, the volume provides new perspectives on a variety of topics: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and Freedom Rides; the 1963 March on Washington; the Mississippi Freedom Summer; the movements in Georgia, Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power.

Editors and contributors have recently appeared on two forums to discuss the book and their personal experiences in SNCC: 

Hands on the Freedom Plow (BookTV; video; 1 hr, 20 min) Importance of music in the movement;

Sisters in the Struggle: Women in the Civil Rights Movement (Forum Network; video, 54 min.) 

 For additional sources that document the history of SNCC, see the Civil Rights Digital Libary.