SNCC was founded at Shaw University in April 1960, at Ella Baker's urging, to coordinate the lunch-counter sit-in movement that had exploded from Greensboro across the South — a movement that filled southern jails with thousands of students in its first year. Baker's vision of group-centered leadership made SNCC the movement's radical democratic wing.
In February 1961, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the Friendship Nine made the movement's decisive tactical turn: refusing to pay fines or accept bail, they served thirty days on a chain gang — "jail, no bail" — converting punishment into protest and draining segregation's courts of their leverage. Their convictions were formally vacated by a South Carolina judge only in 2015, fifty-four years later.