By Gregory Zlotnick

50 years after a group of students gathered at Shaw University and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, activists and leaders returned to Raleigh, North Carolina this past weekend to commemorate the organization’s golden anniversary.

Attorney General Eric Holder gave the keynote address at the conference, describing the “direct line” from SNCC’s protests and activism to President Barack Obama’s 2008 election and Holder’s own appointment as Attorney General. His presence and words of praise were far from the, to put it mildly, wary regard SNCC activists and Justice Department attorneys had for each other in the 1960s. The symbolism of the first African-American head of the Justice Department serving in the administration of the first African-American president was lost on no one. Yet more importantly, the importance of continued protection of equal rights was not lost upon Holder. The Attorney General highlighted the key role the Justice Department plays in protecting the core rights for which SNCC so valiantly struggled, and spoke of strengthening civil rights protections in areas from housing to voting.

SNCC’s crucial role in voter registration has failed to capture America’s collective memory, yet it deserves celebration. “Without the vote,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. explained in 1965, the Civil Rights Act provided “dignity without strength.” After the “mighty walk” from Selma to the capital, Montgomery, Dr. King made a rousing call to action, adding to the nationwide momentum that resulted in the Voting Rights Act later that year.

That law is widely regarded as the most effective civil rights legislation Congress has ever enacted, but it would not have been achieved without SNCC’s brave actions. The organization’s later militancy and fracturing may capture reductive narratives, but SNCC’s steadfast courage in expanding political participation to black Americans across the South is far more deserving of remembrance this year, the 50th anniversary of its founding and the 45th anniversary of the Act’s passage.

Like any organization fighting for social change, SNCC was a complex, at times contradictory, group. Too often, the public forgets that the organization of Stokely Carmichael was also the organization of John Lewis; of H. Rap Brown and of Bob Moses; of direct participation seeking integration in public accommodations and of sustained voter registration drives in Mississippi and Alabama.

SNCC’s methods of organizing poor, rural, often-uneducated blacks in the Deep South—yes, they too were community organizers—happened at the margins of society. While the images from Birmingham and Selma seared the nation’s consciousness, the conversations between uncertain, often rightfully frightened, black citizens and SNCC staffers occurred in private, far from klieg lights and columnists.

Yet these private and peaceful acts of bravery and democracy advanced equal rights as much as SNCC and the Civil Rights Movement’s more public acts of nonviolent protest. With each discussion that yielded a voter registration, SNCC’s workers built the foundation for a continual movement of nonviolent renewal: voting. The simple yet powerful act of voting, so long denied to so many, became a reality through the tireless work of SNCC. Without SNCC’s active engagement in registering voters, the Voting Rights Act would have protected civil rights in theory only. With SNCC’s help, the Voting Rights Act protected the civil rights of an organized, powerful community.

SNCC also practiced the policies it sought to attain on a national level, courageously deploying an integrated staff in its voter registration. White and black volunteers alike knocked on doors and organized community meetings in Mississippi and Alabama. For volunteers and residents alike, this upended racial stereotypes.

In the uneasy conversations across racial lines and in SNCC’s continued efforts to work with disenfranchised citizens across the South, SNCC’s multiracial staff provided a glimpse into a future where segregation no longer dominated American life. The association of SNCC with racial separatism does a disservice to the organization’s profound, practical commitment to integration—in society, and in its own ranks.

50 years ago, when a small group of committed individuals formed SNCC, they led America to live up to its own creed of equality and opportunity. This weekend’s commemorations in Raleigh should inspire us to continue to remember SNCC’s sacrifice and courage in bringing to all Americans the dignity of equal treatment under our laws and the strength of the ballot to shape our future.

Gregory Zlotnick is an LDF Fellow and a student at the Georgetown University Law Center.