This book takes a new look at the central lessons of the civil rights movement. Between 1960 and 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) created some of the civil rights movement's boldest experiments in freedom. Wesley Hogan explores how the organization fostered so much social change in such a short time. She offers new insights into the internal dynamics of SNCC as well as the workings of the larger civil rights movement of which it was a part. Beyond the movement itself, SNCC laid the foundation for the emergence of the New Left and created new definitions of political leadership during the civil rights and Vietnam eras. Hogan traces the ways other social movements - such as Black Power, women's liberation, and the antiwar movement - adapted practices developed within SNCC to apply to their particular causes.