It’s a time to reflect on some of the milestones in Movement history. One is the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

On February 1, 1960, when I was a senior at Spelman College in Atlanta, four Black freshmen from North Carolina A&T State University sat in at the Whites-only lunch counter in the Greensboro, N. C., Woolworth’s store.

It was the spark so many Black youth were waiting for to stand up against the segregation that daily assaulted our dignity and lives. We were galvanized to strike our blow for freedom, giving birth to the sit-in movement, the formation of SNCC, and a new era of student activism that energized the larger civil rights movement.

On the frontline

Children and youth were major frontline soldiers in the civil rights movement. Little Ruby Bridges in New Orleans and the Little Rock Nine and other young Black children desegregated schools across the South, often standing up to howling mobs. Young people coordinated voter registration drives, participated in Freedom Rides testing segregation laws on interstate buses, conducted voter education and other activities during 1964’s Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and more.

SNCC lasted only six years; SNCC alumni carried on. Rep. John Lewis has been a member of Congress since 1986 and continues to be one of our country’s strongest advocates for equality and justice. Julian Bond served in the Georgia General Assembly more than twenty years before becoming chairman of the NAACP. The quiet and brilliant Bob Moses – who we all looked up to although he was just a few years older –returned to his calling as a teacher, later founding the Algebra Project to improve math education for children of color.

When the first sit-ins began, there was no mechanism in place to connect us all, but Mrs. Ella Baker, who worked with Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), reached out and organized the April 1960 meeting at Shaw University that brought student sit-in activists together.

I took my first plane ride traveling from Spelman to Shaw on a plane chartered by SCLC to join Dr. King with about 200 other college students that Easter weekend, which led to SNCC’s creation.

Our own group

Ella Baker insisted that we find our own voice and form our own organization and not become the youth arm of SCLC or an established civil rights group. She became a trusted SNCC advisor and mentor who demanded the best of me and all the young and older adults around her.

When SNCC activists began the Mississippi voter registration effort in Sunflower County, Miss. and appealed for supporters, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was the first to raise her hand. She became a SNCC field secretary; helped organize voter registration drives at great risk to life and limb during the 1964 Freedom Summer; and was the most prominent member of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that famously challenged Mississippi’s all-White official delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention which led to a new Democratic Party. Every time my courage wanes, I think of her. ?

Sense of purpose

The feisty and empowered children and youth of the 1950s and 1960s are examples for today’s teenagers and college-aged young people. They need to hear that you are never too young to fight for what you believe in and they need to be empowered to stand up for themselves and their communities.

They need to know their proud legacy of struggle and how SNCC and many younger children challenged the entrenched White power structure and faced daily risk of arrest, injury, or death.

How do we give our young people today a similar sense of purpose and a cause worth dying for as they face the war zones in their cities and a cradle to prison pipeline that threatens the last 50 years of social and racial progress? How do we catalyze the next civil rights movement to end the pervasive poverty, illiteracy, and racial disparities that staunch the hopes and dreams of millions of our children? It’s time.

Marian Wright Edelman is president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund (www.childrensdefense.org).