Pictured left to right are Freddie Greene Biddle, Jennifer Lawson and Karen Spellman.
SUNY Geneseo's annual April commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy will feature panel discussions with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists Jennifer Lawson, Karen Spellman, and Freddie Greene Biddle.
The Civil Rights era activists will take part in “Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights Movement: An Intergenerational Conversation of 50+ Years of Struggle,” a panel with Shaketa Redden of Black Love Resists in the Rust, a Buffalo-based group that is influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement. The discussion takes place in MacVittie College Union Ball Room Monday, April 3, 4-6:00 p.m.
On Tuesday, April 4, the SNCC activists will take part in a second panel discussion, “Civil Rights Movement, Black Power and Justice Today.” The talk will be held in Newton Hall, room 202, 6-8:00 p.m., and will be followed by a reception.
Both discussions are free and open to the public.
SNCC was founded in 1960 by students and young leaders of the sit-in protest movement initiated earlier that year by four black college students in Greensboro, N.C. The group grew into a large organization with many supporters in the North who helped raise funds to support SNCC’s work.
Emilye Crosby, professor of history and organizer of the events, says that at a young age, all of the SNCC women stood up for something. “All three got involved in the movement as students and have retained a commitment to justice throughout their lives, even as they moved on to highly successful professional careers.”
“As part of SNCC,” Crosby said, “they were part of an organization of young people that was the cutting edge of the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). SNCC organized in the most dangerous parts of the South. They were creative and hardworking and learned extraordinary lessons about power and justice.”
Jennifer Lawson was a SNCC field secretary and full-time organizer in Alabama’s Black Belt before going on to work at the organization’s headquarters in Atlanta. She later became the head of programming at PBS.
Karen Spellman’s father was the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Greensboro. As the daughter of a “freedom fighter” she got involved with SNCC at Howard University and eventually worked in Atlanta where she helped start the Aframerican News Service (ANS) to counter the “distorted or unreported” coverage of Black America in white-owned news media.
Freddie Greene Biddle was “pushed” into joining SNCC by a bullet that was shot into her family’s Mississippi living room. Just out of high school, Biddle worked to register voters, helped in freedom schools, and distributed food and clothing to families-in-need.
Recently Lawson, Spellman, and Biddle have been involved with efforts to document and interpret their CRM work, but also how they are relevant today. Spellman serves on the SNCC Legacy Project board and all three are profiled on the SNCC Digital Gateway. Four Geneseo students and an alum are working on the project.
The Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration events are sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Black Studies Program, Department of History, Xerox Center for Multicultural Teacher Education, Department of Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies, Teaching and Learning Center, Office of Multicultural Programs and Services, and the Institute of Community Well-Being.