Every January, Charles Cobb Jr. makes the 1,100-mile trek from sunny Jacksonville, Florida, to chilly Providence, Rhode Island. For the past eight years, Cobb--a veteran of the civil rights movement who in the 1960s served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi--becomes a visiting professor of Africana studies at Brown University. There, he teaches a popular course that he designed called "The Organizing Tradition of the Southern Civil Rights Movement." Students enrolled in the course read a half-dozen books focused on SNCC, and Cobb brings in his life experience and many of his friends--all of whom are prominently referenced in the books that his students read--to provide details of the movement. Cobb is one of a handful of civil rights activists from the 1960s who have successfully made the transition to academia, helping students who were born in a different era understand how the freedom struggle transformed America. Cobb and a handful of his former SNCC comrades have developed a proposal aimed at encouraging schools to hire veteran activists for short-term teaching gigs. The proposal comes in the wake of an alarming report released last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center that points out that most graduating high school students know little about the civil rights movement as they enter college.