“Our Story. Our Terms: Documenting Movement Building from the Inside Out”

Members of the "Our Story" project planning group

A new initiative developed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Legacy Project (SLP), the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Duke Libraries, the New Georgia Project, BYP 100, and the Ohio Voice and made possible by a $630,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to document how today’s activists built their social and political movements.  An understanding of the present day mobilizing of protest and political organizing will allow future generations to learn from the experience of today’s movements, their development, and how their achievements offer practical lessons in the struggle for human and civil rights.

The multi-generational project team based in the Duke University Libraries will convene and record conversations among three generations of activists that over the last sixty years, says SLP chair Courtland Cox, shaped “the idea and ideal of American Democracy”—SNCC veterans of the Emmett Till generation, young people of the Trayvon Martin generation now leading the Movement for Black Lives, and the new generation of organizers mobilizing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Read the full announcement on the Duke University Libraries website for more information on the "Our Story" project, and see examples of other collaborations between Duke, the SNCC Legacy Project, the Center for Documentary Studies, and other project partners.