"The Civil Rights Movement: Grassroots Perspectives (1940—1980)" Summer Institute Receives NEH Grant

Participants at the first NEH-funded summer institute in 2018 toured the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina.

Participants at the first NEH-funded summer institute in 2018 toured the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, North Carolina.

NOTE: Due to safety concerns related to COVID-19, and in accordance with the NEH and Duke University, the institute originally scheduled for July 2020 has been rescheduled and will be held online July 6–23, 2021. Applications are due March 1, 2021; institute information and application instructions are posted on the institute website at sites.duke.edu/dukecrmsummerinstitute/.


The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University received a National Endowment for the Humanities award to conduct “The Civil Rights Movement: Grassroots Perspectives (1940–1980)." Originally scheduled for July 2020, the institute has been rescheduled and will be held online July 6–23, 2021. Applications will be open soon on the institute website at sites.duke.edu/dukecrmsummerinstitute. The institute was offered for the first time in summer 2018; for the 2021 institute, CDS is again working in partnership with the SNCC Legacy Projectand Teaching for Change.  

The NEH-funded institute will invite thirty teachers (grades 7–12) from across the U.S. for a three-week residency at Duke. The institute is designed by a collaborative team of scholars, civil rights movement veterans, and educators from Duke, the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) Legacy Project, and Teaching for Change. Participants will learn the bottom-up history of the civil rights movement; receive resources, including extensive use of our collaborative project, the SNCC Digital Gateway; and develop teaching strategies for incorporating the material in their classrooms. They will have the unique opportunity to learn from civil rights activists, from one another, and from leading scholars—and the most recent scholarship—on the era.

The institute builds on a unique collaboration between the SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University Libraries, and Teaching for Change. Since 2013, the partnership has strived to build a more thorough and accurate archival history of civil rights activism during the 1960s, including the SNCC Digital Gateway, an online reference and portal to digitized materials that makes SNCC’s informational wealth widely available to current and future generations.

For more information, please contact Allison Raven at allison.raven@duke.edu


Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in “The Civil Rights Movement: Grassroots Perspectives” institute do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

The NEH is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States.