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===Young Activists and Civil Rights===
Providing a new spark and energy to the tradition of direct action, young activists during the early 1960s helped expose the nation to the evils of segregation executing a number of sit-ins that made public accommodations a key issue in the fight for civil rights. These students were products of complex histories. One group of students were was Southern-born and bred and came to the movement out of a deep antipathy for the environments that fostered the hate that underpinned segregation. They were the products of the inadequate schools, their parents were the laborers who were cheated out of economic opportunity. But in 1955, when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi, they felt the call to do something. Calling themselves, “The Emmett Till generation,” they joined their local NAACPs and many of them attended local HBCUs and used those spaces as the launching pad for the sit-in movement.
Another group came to the movement from the north. They were Black and experienced levels of poverty and dispossession, but did not experience Jim Crow in the same way until they came south to attend college. Many of them, however, did come with a previous understanding of socialism and pacifism and other radical ideologies that they picked up from various Northern environments. They saw ways to immediately apply these tactics to the Southern struggle.
[[File:sitin.jpg|thumb|The Greensboro Four]]
The fusion of these two groups created a prime opportunity to develop a national struggle. After the Greensboro Four, sparked a new way wave of sit-ins on February 1, 1960, Black students across the nation begin to emulate their example. Seeing the need to organize this fervor , longtime activist and current organizer of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ella J. Baker sent out a call for a meeting on Easter Weekend. The result of that call was the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
===Conclusion===