The Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality (SEDFRE, Norman grantee 1963–1976) was created in 1963 as the fundraising and legal defense arm of CORE — the Congress of Racial Equality — with Norman family member Andrew E. Norman serving as President of its board of directors.

SEDFRE’s Eleanor Roosevelt Scholarship program awarded up to $1,500 a year to young leaders of proven character and integrity whose civil rights activism had cost them educational opportunities. Some had been expelled from public institutions for daring, as SEDFRE put it, “to take democracy seriously;” others, white as well as Black, needed financial support to integrate previously segregated institutions. Among its recipients were James Potts, the first Black student to attend Louisiana Polytechnic University, who had sacrificed a merit scholarship at a Black college to integrate the school, and Mary Robinson of Sumter, South Carolina, who attended Claflin College on a scholarship as her father had lost his livelihood for leading the local movement. 

Media:

• Civil Rights Movement Archive: SEDFRE brochure from 1965