On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership, Charles Cobb invited former members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to Brown University for the week of November 2nd through November 9th, 2014 to participate in the SNCC Legacy Project (SLP), an oral history project. He interviewed them about their backgrounds and their involvement with the SNCC.

Charles E. Cobb Jr. had a long career in journalism. He began as a reporter for WHUR Radio in Washington, DC in 1974, became a foreign affairs reporter at National Public Radio in 1976, then served as a member of the Editorial Staff of National Geographic magazine from 1985-1997. He was a senior analyst for AllAfrica.com before his retirement. Cobb was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2008.

He was a SNCC field secretary in Mississippi from 1962-67. A student at Howard University and already involved in the sit-in movement, his arrival in Jackson, Mississippi in the summer of 1962 was meant to be a stop-over on his way to a workshop for young civil rights activists to be held in Houston, Texas. But, after he introduced himself to local activists in Jackson, they asked him why he was moving on to Texas when "[he] was in the war zone here!" Convinced, he stayed in Mississippi for the next 4-5 years, working on voter registration.

Cobb was a Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice and a board member of the SLP when he conducted these interviews in 2014. The SNCC Legacy Project was founded as a result of the SNCC 50th anniversary at Shaw University in 2010. The project is meant to "bring the legacy—the ideas, the thinking, the practices of what was the only student-led national civil rights organization of the 1960s—to new audiences." A multi-level project, Cobb's recorded interviews are part of the project's archive of SNCC material, digitized to make them "easily accessible for use."

The 50th anniversary of the Brown-Tougaloo Partnership was a fitting occasion for these interviews–the partnership was born during the days of the SNCC's height. SNCC originally emerged in 1960 as a result of the sit-in movement, a channel for organized student action, but it eventually became "an organization of organizers" (called "field secretaries") who integrated themselves into communities in the Black Belt to address the pressing issue of voter registration.

Mississippi was a center of their (and others') concerted direct action. Tougaloo, as the only college in Mississippi that permitted the activism of its students, served as a haven for SNCC and for students coming down from the Northeast—often from rich, white universities like Brown—to join the effort. The partnership formed in the wake of that collaboration.

Brown University's Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice commemorated the occasion with the SNCC Legacy Veterans Symposium. The veterans whom Cobb interviewed served as the symposium's panelists. Cobb interviewed Worth Long, Brenda Travis, MacArthur Cotton, Carol Rogoff Hallstrom, Annie Pearl Avery, Reginald Robinson, and Mukasa Willie Ricks.

Worth Long: In 1963, Durham North Carolina native Worth Long was one of the first SNCC field secretaries to enter Selma, Alabama and begin organizing for voter registration among the city's disenfranchised blacks. He was badly beaten while in the Dallas County jail. Earlier he had been one of the leaders of the sit-in movement that erupted from the campus of historically black Philander Smith College in Little Rock Arkansas. In addition to being a civil and human rights activist, he is a prominent blues historian, cultural worker, and folklorist.

Brenda Travis: In 1961 at just 15-years of age and a high school student, Brenda Travis and two others sat in the whites only section of the Greyhound bus station in McComb, Mississippi, one of the most Klan infested regions of the state, and was arrested. She was sent to the county jail and then to reform school where she was confined for months without trial. Upon her release she was expelled from school and her expulsion sparked a student walkout and student movement from which emerged some of SNCC's earliest organizers in Mississippi.

MacArthur Cotton: When student protest erupted in Jackson, Mississippi in 1961, Kosciusko, Mississippi native MacArthur Cotton, then a Tougaloo College student, quickly involved himself with them. He followed-up on this protest with organizing work in rural Wathall County, one of the most dangerous places in Mississippi at the time. A premier organizer, he symbolizes the basic fact that Mississippi's movement, and the southern movement, was led by Mississippians—often young Mississippians.

Carol Rogoff Hallstrom: The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who settled in Brooklyn, New York where she grew up, Carol Rogoff Hallstrom first became involved with the movement participating in protests in Cambridge, Maryland while a student in 1962. A year later she was a SNCC volunteer in the organization's New York office, and the following year became a field secretary in Amite County, Mississippi. In New York she had recruited Andrew Goodman, one of the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in June 1964. She returned to her studies in 1965; became an attorney giving particular emphasis to immigration issues.

Annie Pearl Avery: Few, if any, of SNCC's field secretaries were more fearless than Birmingham, Alabama born Annie Pearl Avery. She first became involved with SNCC when she was 16-years-old. As a SNCC field secretary she worked all over the south and had more arrests for her work than many in the movement. Although she says she often feared for her life, her response to fear is worth noting for its relevance today: "You get motivated to do something, and that fear thing is overcome."

Reginald Robinson: "the Reg" as he is widely known in the movement grew up inBaltimore, Maryland. Reggie Robinson was one of SNCC's earliest field secretaries and the first to join SNCC's Bob Moses in 1961 when Moses began organizing SNCC's first voter registration project in McComb, Mississippi. When protests led by the fiery Gloria Richardson erupted in Cambridge, Maryland in 1962 they asked SNCC for help and Reggie Robinson was sent there as SNCC's key organizer. He has remained active in local politics in Washington, DC where he currently resides.

Mukasa Willie Ricks: Although it is usually credited to Stokely Carmichael, it was Willie Ricks of Chattanooga, Tennessee who first shouted out "black power" on the June 1966 James Meredith march Against Fear in Mississippi. He had been using the phrase in his organizing work in Alabama and all along the Mississippi Meredith march route. As a SNCC field secretary, Ricks actively planned and organized sit-ins, marches and public demonstrations throughout Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Later, Ricks became active in the Black Panther Party, along with Stokely Carmichael. He has continued organizing in the Pan African tradition.