Northern Student Movement, 1965
Two Boston youths watch a chemistry demonstration by chemistry major John Bergman PhD '66, a graduate student tutor with the Northern Student Movement, 1965. Bergman and another graduate student in Chemistry taught Roxbury and Dorchester youths on Saturdays at MIT with department permission.
Northern Student Movement
Launched in the fall of 1961 by Peter Countryman and a committee of the Student Christian Movement in New England, the Northern Student Movement (NSM) grew from a loose group of campus organizations raising funds for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and its student-led civil rights initiatives in the South, to student-run tutorial programs in the inner-cities of Philadelphia, New York and Hartford, to a federation of community action projects in eight cities in the Northeast and Michigan. By the fall of 1963, NSM had a staff of fifty fulltime activists and more than 2,500 student volunteers. William Strickland succeeded Countryman as executive director in September 1963. The organization flourished until the mid-1960s when white members were ostracized and funding dried up...
[L]arge-scale tutorial projects included the Harlem Education Project in New York City, the Roxbury-South End project in Boston, and the Detroit Education Project. By the fall of 1964, NSM had some 4,000 tutors instructing over 5,000 elementary and high school students. The following year, concerned that the tutorials only addressed one symptom of ghetto life, the organization opted to phase them out. By the summer of 1965, all of the tutorials...were functioning as separate entities.
The national organization was often overshadowed by the tutorial projects and the community groups it either fostered or joined, especially in Boston and Hartford...Boston NSM organized a large-scale tutorial project in the Roxbury-South End area for pre-school, elementary and high school students, and was also involved in adult literacy, voter registration, a Black history workshop, and a Freedom Library of books by and about African-Americans.