Every January, Charles Cobb Jr. makes the 1,100-mile trek from sunny Jacksonville, Fla., to chilly Providence, R.I. 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, or 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.

“It’s fun,” says Cobb, who began a career as a journalist in 1974 and has written two books focusing on the civil rights movement. “I make them write a lot because I am a journalist, but in some ways what I do in the classroom is what we tried to do in the South — get people to engage in conversations.”

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.

In the years after the civil rights movement, a few colleges and universities hired activists. The University of Massachusetts- Amherst hired SNCC member Ekwueme Michael Thelwell in 1970 as founding chairman of its W.E.B Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies. The school recruited John H. Bracey Jr. — active in civil rights, Black liberation and other social justice movements in Chicago — to the department two years later.

Dr. Angela Davis, a former Black Panther, recently retired from her teaching post in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Kathleen Cleaver, who also was a member of the Black Panther Party, teaches law at Emory University. Dr. Joyce Ladner, a renowned sociologist and the first woman president of Howard University, was a member of SNCC. She and her sister Dorie organized protests in Mississippi alongside Medgar Evers and were jailed for their activism.