Northern Student Movement

The Northern Student Movement (NSM) was a twentieth-century American civil rights group. Their mission was to support the work of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the South and to challenge racial discrimination in the North. Peter Countryman, a white Yale undergraduate, founded the NSM in the fall of 1961. Community projects and tutoring in segregated and impoverished areas in northern cities were a strong focus of the group. These efforts provided Black students with better educational resources and classes in Black history and the arts, forums about dealing with police brutality, and information on discriminatory practices.

NSM also worked to spread information about and rally support for civil rights organizing in the South. By the fall of 1963 they had fifty full-time staff and 2,500 student volunteers. Initially membership was primarily white, but Black members were recruited from colleges and communities where NSM held programs. By the mid-1960s many civil rights groups began to realize that tutoring was not enough to cause significant change and this also led to a shift within NSM.

By 1964, under the leadership of William Strickland, NSM began to focus more on local organizing activities like rent strikes and school boycotts, as well as shifting towards an all-Black membership. The feeling within NSM was that Black people themselves needed to be determining what their communities needed. White members were asked to leave the organization and to continue to advocate in the white community. Two of the last major initiatives that NSM organized were a national conference of Black students in Philadelphia and the formation of the Black People's Movement, designed to attract Black professionals. By the end of the 1960s the organization had for the most part ceased activities.