Category 1960s Youth Organizing

The Selma Literacy Project takes on Alabama’s discriminatory literacy tests, laying groundwork for the 1965 voting rights marches.

In 1963, Dallas County, Alabama — where Selma is the county seat — had 15,000 Black residents of voting age, and fewer than 300 registered Black voters. Working with SNCC and the Northern Student Movement, the US National Student Association…

Norman funds the first Freedom Ride with a $35,000 loan to CORE — one of the earliest grants to the frontline civil rights movement.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE, Norman grantee 1961–1966) launched the Freedom Rides in May 1961, sending interracial groups of primarily college student activists onto interstate buses to challenge the Supreme Court’s ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that segregation in…