Civil Rights Veterans Teach the Movement: Every January, Charles Cobb Jr. makes the 1,100-mile trek from sunny Jacksonville, Fla., to chilly Providence, R.I. For the past eight years, Cobb — a veteran of the civil rights movement who in the 1960s served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in Mississippi — becomes a visiting professor of Africana studies at Brown University.
There, he teaches a popular course that he designed called “The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.” Students enrolled in the course read a half-dozen books focused on SNCC, and Cobb brings in his life experience and many of his friends — all of whom are prominently referenced in the books that his students read — to provide details of the movement.
