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Empowered: Female students fought for civil rights

Â鶹´«Ã½ University on April 4 hosted the Student Non-Violent and Coordinating Committee and Grassroots Organizing Women and Gender Roundtable.

“So, some of this is that there was space in the organization (SNCC) and some of this is that women just made that space.”

Â鶹´«Ã½ University on April 4 hosted the Student Non-Violent and Coordinating Committee and Grassroots Organizing Women and Gender Roundtable. SNCC veterans Jennifer Lawson and Judy Richardson shared their experiences in the SNCC organization, informing the audience of women's roles in SNCC. 

SNCC was founded in April 1960 after various student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters. SNCC was fueled by African American HBCU students and activists. 

Catherine Adams, co-organizer of the SNCC Roundtable series, explained the importance of SNCC. 

“At its core, SNCC helped community members feel empowered to make choices and act on the issues that most impacted their lives and their communities,” Adams said. 

One of the panelists and SNCC veteran Jennifer Lawson shared how she became involved in SNCC.

Her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, sparked her early involvement in organizing and protesting, Lawson said. When she was a high school student, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed because of protesting. 

“I was a high school student in Fairfield, Alabama. Fairfield is a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, and at that time in 1963, I was 16 years old, and Martin Luther King was in jail in Birmingham. … SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Council) and others were asking for people to demonstrate, to march, to protest the fact that King was being held in Birmingham jail,” Lawson said. 

During the civil rights era, Birmingham became known as “Bombingham” because of recurring bombings, she said.

Lawson’s parents were concerned for her safety, but she wanted to make a change. 

“We students decided, we high school students decided that enough is enough, and we'd like to see a change in our lives. And so we decided that we would go and demonstrate. We would go and continue the marches,” Lawson said. 

Lawson went to Tuskegee University to become a doctor. However, during her time at Tuskegee, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed and the late President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She knew there were changes to be made. 

“So, it was a time of change, a time of turmoil and a time of real, I think for us, we felt that you couldn't just accept life as it was, that you really needed to move forward. And that the people in my student group, it was always young women and men,” Lawson said.

At Tuskegee, she went into organizing to help African Americans with voting rights and equal opportunities. 

“And I started working both on campus and then in the rural area around Tuskegee and Macon County on voting rights. And that led me to demonstrations at the state capital of Montgomery, Alabama, where I got arrested and spent over a week in Montgomery jail, Lawson said.

Lawson left Tuskegee University and became the full-time SNCC field secretary.

Similar to Lawson, Judy Richardson, a filmmaker and educator, began her journey with SNCC at a young age. Richardson grew up in Tarrytown, New York, in a low-income area.  African Americans lived “under the hill near the railroad tracks,” she said.

Her father worked at a Chevrolet plant and organized a union there. This introduced her to the act of organizing. After her father died, her mother got her to Swarthmore College. 

“My mother becomes a single parent. She gets my sister and me into college. She had had an eighth-grade education. I get into Swarthmore College, which was in Pennsylvania,” Richardson said. 

At Swarthmore, Richardson joined the Students for Democratic Society. This was an “all primarily white, northern-based progressive student group.”

Richardson found out that SDS was organizing a protest at Cambridge, Maryland. 

“I start going to see, you know, what else is on campus and I go to this meeting and it's an SDS meeting. … So I go to this meeting and I find out that they're doing a few things, but among them is demonstrations,” Richardson said. 

The Cambridge, Maryland, movement involved students protesting about segregation at a roller rink. Richardson recalled that the SDS chapter on Swarthmore’s campus transported members to Cambridge to support the African Americans-led movement. 

She later met a student named Penny Patch, who took a year off from college to work at SNCC’s headquarters. After some convincing, Richardson followed suit. 

“And Penny Patch had taken off her sophomore year to go to work with SNCC in Albany, Georgia, and southwest Georgia. And so, she comes back, and she comes in my room, and she says, ‘Why don't you just take off the next semester … and try and get on SNCC staff?’” Richardson said. 

She began working alongside Jim Forman, an SNCC organizer who worked in the national SNCC office in Atlanta. Richardson worked the role as secretary. 

Jennifer Lawson said working for SNCC impacted her.

“The experience of working SNCC for those years was incredible, and it is something that has never left me,” Lawson said.