Civil rights collection

1960-1977

Roberta "Bobbi" Yancy attended Barnard College in 1959, one of only two Black students in her class. She often volunteered at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's New York office headed up by Jack O'Dell. During her sophomore year, Yancy helped organize, and chaired, a Race Relations Committee on campus. In late 1961, she spearheaded a regional civil rights action conference that laid the groundwork for continued northern student activism. Yancy's involvement with the Race Relations Committee taught her invaluable administrative and organizing skills that she brought south when she started working as a campus coordinator for the YWCA in 1962. She joined Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's staff in 1963, serving as both a campus coordinator and a conference organizer. One of her first SNCC tasks was to organize a three-day leadership training institute at Howard University. The conference focused on the economic exploitation of poor Black southerners. Yancy's role in SNCC was largely administrative, but she also participated in direct action protests in Atlanta, including a sit-in at SNCC's Atlanta office objecting to the fact that women almost always took the minutes at organizational meetings. Yancy also helped stage a sit-in at a Toddle House Restaurant in Atlanta, where she and other protesters were refused service and jailed. The protests gained national attention, and within weeks, the Dobbs Corporation (the restaurant's parent company) agreed to desegregate its businesses. In 1964, James Forman asked Yancy to head up SNCC's fundraising efforts in New York City, where she remained until 1968. She later went on to hold a leadership position at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. The Roberta Yancy Civil Rights collection contains material generated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other organizations. The collection contains historical data; correspondence; reports; writings; speeches by Stokely Carmichael, James Forman and John Lewis; and publications, manuscripts of freedom songs, and calendars produced by the SNCC. Also included is printed material from the Child Development Group of Mississippi (1966-67), Council of Federated Organizations (1964), Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (1964), and the Southern Education and Research Institute (n.d.); a list of "Black Elected Officials in the Southern States" compiled by the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council (1969); and a "National Roster of Black Elected Officials" from the Joint Center for Political Studies (1971).