Civil Rights Events

SCOPE Project

Getting Started

The Selma Voting Rights Campaign and March to Montgomery are victorious — a voting rights bill has been introduced in Congress and with LBJ's backing it is certain to eventually pass. But SCLC as an organization is in disarray. Dr. King is physically and emotionally exhausted, and the savage murder of Viola Liuzzo, mother of five, hits him hard. And like soldiers after a long, hard-won battle, SCLC's small field staff in the Alabama Black Belt is worn down from three months of intense and brutal action.

On the plus side, the organization is flush with money and as Spring evolves towards Summer contributions remain steady. With this new influx of cash, the field staff of a few dozen is now swelling towards 200. Half of SCLC's income is personally raised by Dr. King through his speaking engagements and appeals in the North. Most of the rest comes in the form of modest mail-in contributions averaging around $10 (equal to $70 in 2012) — primarily from New York City and other urban areas of the Northeast, the Chicago area, Southern California, and the San Francisco Bay region. But this means that SCLC is becoming financially dependent on northern whites rather than its original financial base of southern Black churches.

A week after the march ends in Montgomery, SCLC leaders meet in Baltimore to plan what the organization should do next. There is dissension, disagreement, and fierce rivalry among the Executive Staff directly below King. Three quite different strategies are proposed and argued:

Undertaking a new initiative in a northern urban ghetto.

Extending and expanding the Alabama campaign with direct action and an economic boycott.

A massive, multi-state voter registration effort.

There is no consensus. Unable to agree on a single strategic direction, all proposals are approved in one form or another even though everyone knows they don't have the necessary staff or funds for three major initiatives (Now 1).

One unintended result of the Selma victory is that Black communities in the North are now intensifying their calls (demands, in some cases) that Dr. King and SCLC apply their magic touch to the festering misery of urban ghettos. King, himself, had previously said, "I realize I must more and more extend my work beyond the borders of the South, and become involved to a much greater extent with the problems of the urban North." At the Baltimore meeting, Andrew Young proposes that SCLC answer those calls.

But many SCLC leaders oppose any move North. SCLC's southern affiliates all face urgent local problems with scant resources. They desperately need help and support from Atlanta. Some board members argue that SCLC has no base of churches or affiliates in the North, little experience with issues of defacto rather than dejure segregation, and no strategy for addressing pervasive covert discrimination or intractable urban poverty. Many question how — and whether — nonviolent strategies and tactics can be applied in the North, and what support they will find among the bitterly alienated urban poor (Go 1).

…

James Bevel, architect and field commander of the Birmingham and Selma campaigns, passionately argues for continuing and intensifying the freedom struggle in Alabama with both an economic boycott of the state and a return to the original Alabama Project concept of mass direct action and civil-disobedience in Montgomery. "We want the federal government to come in here, register Negroes, and throw out the present government as un-Constitutional," and then hold new elections in which everyone over the age of 21 is allowed to vote.

Dr. King has already announced the boycott as necessary to halt Alabama's "reign of terror," and at the Baltimore meeting he lays out a strategy of three successive stages. First, applying pressure on Washington to enforce the laws denying federal funds to programs practicing discrimination while simultaneously issuing a call for northern corporations to halt new investments in the state. Second, mobilize unions, businesses, churches and other organizations to withdraw their investments from Alabama. Third, organize a massive consumer boycott of Alabama products.

Public opposition to the boycott is immediate and intense. The Johnson administration condemns the idea. The New York Times calls it "wrong in principle ... and unworkable in practice." Sympathetic politicians like Governors "Pat" Brown of California and Mark Hatfield of Oregon reject it. Labor unions who had supported SCLC in the past come out against the boycott. …

There are also practical problems. Business and consumer boycotts are difficult at best and require a massive commitment of organizational time and resources. Corporations are rarely amenable to altering their investment strategies to meet social concerns ….

… Ultimately, the Alabama boycott proves unworkable and withers away. By Summer it has been effectively dropped ….

The direct action component of Bevel's campaign also encounters problems. … Many of those arrested had been bailed out on property bonds, but people willing to put up their homes and farms for bail have already done so, and property that was used to bail someone out in February cannot be used for someone else in May. Without assurances that SCLC will bail them out of jail, it will be difficult to mobilize thousands of protesters to deliberately court arrest by engaging in mass civil-disobedience. …

SCLC's local affiliate is the Montgomery Improvement Association and its leaders — mostly ministers and businessmen — have little enthusiasm for Bevel's radical plans. After the March to Montgomery, with finals and term papers now on the horizon, a form of protest-fatigue sets in among the students who had earlier filled the jails. … The direct action campaign sputters out and is quietly shelved (Alabama 1-3).

Hosea Williams, leader of the powerful Savannah Movement and the "Bloody Sunday" march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, argues for a Summer Community Organization & Political Education (SCOPE) project focused on voter registration. He calls for recruiting 2,000 volunteers — mostly northerners, mostly white, mostly college students — to register voters in 120 southern counties across six states. He and Bevel are SCLC's main direct action leaders. They are also bitter personal rivals. At the Baltimore meeting, SCOPE and the Alabama campaign are pitted against each other.

In some respects, the SCOPE proposal is similar to SNCC/COFO's Mississippi Summer Project of the previous year, but SCOPE advocates assume there will be one huge difference. Despite the courage and dedication of Freedom Summer's local and outside activists, only a few new voters had been added to the rolls. But now Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (who presides over the Senate) has assured Movement leaders that the filibuster will be broken and the Voting Rights Act passed before the end of June. This means that Afro-Americans in the Deep South will be able to register in large numbers. A massive registration effort under the new law could actually begin to shift the balance of political power in the southern Black Belt.

Hosea Williams is noted for his defiant courage, passionate oratory, direct action creativity, and hair-trigger temper, but not so much for administration. Some SCOPE opponents question his ability to fund and coordinate thousands of volunteers and staff across multiple states. For the 1964 Freedom Summer, SNCC/COFO had five and a half months to plan, recruit, train, and prepare projects for 1,000 volunteers working roughly 40 counties in a single state under guidance of a field staff that had been organizing in Mississippi for almost three years. The initial SCOPE proposal calls for twice as many volunteers spread over six states in 120 counties many of which have had no organizers preparing the way at all. And SCOPE must come together in two and a half months. It's bold, it's ambitious, and the Baltimore meeting adopts it as SCLC's major focus for the coming months (Summer 1-2).

Meanwhile, tension between SCLC and SNCC continues to fester. Many SNCC workers oppose the entire concept of bringing white volunteers to work in Black communities, and they want nothing to do with SCLC. "It will be the same shit as Selma, the SCLC executives are gone and have left the flunkies — mainly white northern students left there," says Alabama project director Silas Norman. In the opinion of Annie Pearl Avery, a SNCC field secretary working in rural Hale County, "SCLC will come in after SNCC does the ground work. All SCLC has is King and Reverends."

But others in SNCC are coming around to a different view. In mid-April, the SNCC Executive Committee meets in Holly Springs MS. Says former SNCC Chairman Marion Barry, "What we have to do is to try to radicalize King. Those of us who have been around for awhile can see the great change in King, and there are members of SCLC who are pushing for the same thing." He urges SNCC to work with SCOPE. A week later Harry Belafonte mediates a sit-down in Atlanta between leaders of SNCC and SCLC. Coming out of that meeting, Stokely Carmichael reports: "In terms of overall goals, SCLC is very radical. King said economic problems were the real issue of the country, but didn't know how to get to them. I think the cats are honest." He argues that SNCC should cooperate with SCOPE and use King's mass appeal, pointing out that SCLC has access to churches in places like Hale County that SNCC does not. "The students coming down with SCOPE will have to come to the SNCC workers. The same holds true for King. ... The people will follow King, but he'll still have to go through the SNCC workers."

At the end of April, a joint statement is issued by Dr. King and SNCC Chairman John Lewis stating that SCLC and SNCC will work together on a program of voter education and political organization across six Southern states. As a practical matter, there are significant numbers of SNCC staff in only two of the states where SCOPE plans projects — Alabama and Southwest Georgia. In some areas over the summer there is tension, distrust, and occasional open hostility between SCLC/SCOPE and SNCC, in others they work separately but without overt rancor, and in some counties there is close cooperation — in a few instances so close that they form what is, in effect, a joint project. (Meanwhile, over the summer of 1965, SNCC projects continue in Mississippi & Arkansas and CORE organizes its own summer project for Louisiana.) (SCLC/SCOPE 1-2).

Recruitment gets underway in April. Learning from the Freedom Summer experience, emphasis is placed on creating campus-based SCOPE chapters with volunteers who already know each other, will work together in an assigned county, and be supported by their college community. The goal is to create an ongoing connection between that campus and the Freedom Movement in the "adopted" county. …

…

Many northern colleges have active Friends of SNCC and CORE chapters and often a cadre of Freedom Summer veterans. Within SNCC there had been proposals and discussion of SNCC mounting a major summer project for 1965, but that does not occur. At some colleges, the SNCC chapters cooperate with and support the SCOPE recruiters, at others less so. … at some of the most politically-aware campuses, committed activists are beginning to turn their attention away from civil rights towards Vietnam. Above all, time is short — too short for SCOPE to recruit the number of northern volunteers originally hoped for. As April turns into May, expectations are scaled back from 2,000 in 120 counties to 500 or so working in roughly 80 counties.

Meetings are held with local Black community leaders from some, though not all, of the counties where there will be SCOPE projects. It is these local leaders who will direct SCOPE activities, arrange meals and housing for the northern volunteers, and provide somewhere for the project to meet and work. They are also responsible for recruiting the team of local volunteers — primarily Black high school and college students — who will partner with the northerners in canvassing and organizing (SCOPE 1-3).

Maria Gitin (known at that time as Joyce Brians) was one of the white college students recruited to work as a SCOPE project volunteer. She wrote about her experiences in her unpublished book 1965 This Bright Light of Ours: a Memoir and Stories of the Wilcox County Freedom Fight.

In 1965, I joined hundreds of other college students in a voter education and registration drive aimed at supporting disenfranchised African Americans in poor rural counties across the Deep South in their long struggle to register to vote. …

On March 8th I saw Dr Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. He pointed his finger directly at me and what I heard him say was, "We need you white northern students to come down this summer and join our nonviolent struggle, become part of The Movement and help our people fight for our rights."

In an era when there were only three channels, the images on the small black and white TV at my friend Jeff Freed's parents' house were grainy, but unforgettable. Jeff kept trying to explain the political significance, but I could only watch in horror as masses of white Alabama state troopers and Selma policemen attacked peaceful primarily black marchers from the safety of their horses. Tear gas canisters were launched from huge guns. Troopers beat hundreds of people including young children as they scrambled for safety, just because they had assembled to march to Montgomery for voting rights. …

I headed to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) office on campus [San Francisco State College] because I had heard that their effective Mississippi Freedom Summer got the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. There I was told I could only belong to Friends of SNCC, the white support group, so I joined that and began to get some instruction in the role of whites in the Freedom Movement. …

While I was trying to figure out what I could do specifically to respond to Dr. King's call for action, down in Atlanta SCLC's Rev. Hosea Williams and SNCC Chairman John Lewis, an SCLC board member, were planning an ambitious voter education and political organization program named the Summer Community Organizing and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, spearheaded by SCLC.

During the spring, the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was supposed to fix the remaining voting exclusion loopholes left in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was making its way through Congress. The SCOPE project was timed to coincide with what SCLC strategists had good reason to believe would be the first summer that the new Voting Rights Act (1965 VRA) would be available as a tool. The 1965 VRA was expected to become law before the project began in June.

…

… Wilcox County, where I was assigned, was selected as one of the Alabama counties for the SCLC-SCOPE voting rights campaign and for continued filing in federal courts.

…

SCOPE training materials said that this project planned to meet three objectives: local recruitment of potential elected officials from the black community, voter registration, and political education. SCOPE activities were expected to build on grass-roots community organizations that had been carrying the burden for a long time, bringing in fresh student "troops" who would hopefully return summer after summer to volunteer in school integration efforts, the new federal War on Poverty initiative and to support the education and election of new African American leaders.

The project resulted in over 1,200 SCOPE workers, including 650 college students from across the nation; 150 SCLC staff members, mostly scarcely paid field workers ($5 a week was a typical stipend), and 400 local volunteers, working in 6 southern states to organize, educate and assist African Americans in registering to vote. As soon as I heard about the project from SNCC and got more information at the Ec House, I signed up.

In order to join the project, I had to raise $200 for my travel and living expenses, a huge sum of money for me in those days, get my parent's permission, and attend intensive briefing sessions in Berkeley every Saturday for a month. …

Since I was under 21, I had to convince my father to sign an affidavit swearing that he wouldn't sue SCLC if I were injured or killed, which I did by telling him that I would forge his signature if he would not sign. My parents knew that they had already lost what little control they had over me by not supporting me financially through college because I disobeyed their dictum that their children must live at home and attend a local community college to gain their financial support.

…

The Saturday SCOPE briefings emphasized history and nonviolent theory along with updates on current events in the southern Civil Rights Movement. The instruction we received from professors, ministers and activists was based in a genuine belief in strict nonviolence and the benefits of integration. We were informed that SCOPE was the brainchild of brilliant civil rights strategist Rev. Hosea Williams, an SCLC Program Director who they told us organized the Selma to Montgomery marches.

…

SNCC was born with these stated ideals, however a rapidly emerging philosophy of self-determination and black liberation was permeating the organization as I already understood from being denied membership in the "real" SNCC on campus. SCLC leaders were still staunchly pro-integration and believed that we mostly white SCOPE student volunteers would bring media, money and perhaps safety although the increasing violence towards whites and blacks working together in The South did not auger well for that outcome. Some SNCC leaders anticipated that we would bring more violence because white racists go crazy when they see white women with black men. They also anticipated that we would bring superior attitudes that disrespected their sacrifices and achievements. Dr. King believed strongly that integration of all races and faiths would result in equal justice and opportunity for all. I took careful notes and wondered what it would be like in the trenches; how things would play out in whichever county I was assigned.

…

I eagerly looked forward to each of the briefing sessions during which they tried to teach us the entire history of segregation, the status of past and pending civil rights legislation, how The Movement worked, how to control our own unconscious bias, what to expect and how to behave when we went South. Much of it was a blur, but I remember feeling that it was a great turning point for me and for the United States. The leaders made it very clear that we were to be white allies to an entirely black led organization, which was just fine with me.

The person who stands out most clearly from the briefing sessions is Rev. Cecil Williams, the dynamic young African American preacher from [San Francisco’s] Glide Memorial Methodist Church who exhorted us to make the South safer for black voter registration with our young, white, eminently newsworthy, federally- protectable bodies. One fact that stood out in my mind was that we could be killed but, worse, girls could, had been and probably would be raped by jail guards and Ku Klux Klan members.

We reviewed footage of the beatings and tear gas canisters fired at marchers during Bloody Sunday in which Rev Williams himself had been injured. We listened to stories from people who had been on the big successful Montgomery to Selma march and heard about the recent murders of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Viola Luizzo and Rev. James Reeb in Alabama as well as the previous summer of 1964 assassinations of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman while they were working with SNCC to establish Freedom Schools in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The message I got was that this was risky business; the stakes were high but the cry for justice was more important than any of our lives (Gitin 1-14).

Works cited:

“Alabama Boycott & Montgomery Direct Action?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

Gitin, Maria. “SCLC/SCOPE Project.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/info/scope1.htm

“Go North?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“Now what?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“SCLC/SCOPE and SNCC.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“SCOPE Recruitment and Training.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“Summer Community Organization & Political Education (SCOPE)?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope