Brown and Roach began collaborating in 1959 on a longer piece that they planned to perform at the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963. However, the urgency of civil rights issues steered them towards a new project in 1960, the album that would become the "Freedom Now Suite". This urgency was sparked by the Greensboro sit-ins at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the rapidly spreading momentum of the civil rights movement aided by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).