We invite you to join us in recording, remembering, and reflecting on the experience of those who joined the Northern Student Movement in the 1960s. The history of NSM is yet to be written. As with the Southern Movement, the stories can best be told by those who experienced them. What is your story? When did you join NSM? What projects did you work on, and where? What inspired you to take on the challenges of race, class, and justice in the North? What impact has NSM had on your life and work since the 1960s? What do you want to see about NSM in the history books of the future?
We are taking a cue from the web site of the Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement from 1951 - 1968, http://www.crmvet.org/index.htm
We are taking a cue from the web site of the Veterans of the Southern Freedom Movement from 1951 - 1968, http://www.crmvet.org/index.htm
Today, from what you see in the mass media and read in textbooks and websites, you would think that the Freedom Movement only existed in a few states of the deep South, — but that is not so. The Freedom Movement lived and fought in every state and every city of America, North, South, East, and West. There were some differences between the Southern and Northern wings of the Movement, but those differences were minor compared to the Movement's essence. North or South, it was the same movement everywhere.
This website is devoted to the "Southern Freedom Movement," the Freedom Movement as it existed in the South. Not because the Northern wing of the Movement was unimportant — it was enormously important, — but because the Southern Movement was the part of the Movement that we participated in and know enough about to build this website. Hopefully, some day soon activists from the Northern wing of the Movement will do the same."
Peter Countryman and I both collected books at Yale, under the auspices of Dwight Hall and with the help of Jack Russell, the Methodist chaplain at Yale, in the spring of 1961 and we drove them down to Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Va. as a contribution to the college library. I moved to Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge in the fall and Peter was still in school in New Haven. Largely through his initiative, but with others of us in Cambridge as well, after a few meetings the Northern Student Movement was born. Though Peter later moved to New York, the first meetings were largely in Cambridge and the Boston area.
ReplyDeleteWayne Proudfoot