Description
Movement History Initiative
Telling the Civil Rights story from the ground up and the inside out
The Movement History Initiative (MHI) is a collaboration among veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC Legacy Project), today’s activists and grassroots organizations (e.g., New Georgia Project and BYP100), the John Hope Franklin Research Center, Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and noted scholars and archivists at Duke University and other institutions.
The group first met in 2013 to conceive a project that would present a different narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, telling that story from the ground up and the inside out. MHI partners focus on preserving the legacy of the grassroots organizing tradition and its influence on the black freedom struggle of the 1960’s and on identifying how that tradition is carried on through contemporary movements.
Over the years, the MHI has developed two websites (One Person, One Vote and the SNCC Digital Gateway); two expansive Critical Oral History programs, featuring both inter and intra-generational conversations; two K-12 Teacher Institutes; several workshops; a voting rights conference; and video documentation for three national conferences.
Through this work, the partners have built relationships across generations and have documented an intergenerational transfer of movement experience in real time.
