SCOPE Project
The Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was a voter registration civil rights initiative conducted from 1965 to 1966 in 120 counties in six southern states. The goal was to recruit white college students to help prepare African Americans for voting and to maintain pressure on Congress to pass what became the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Dr. Martin Luther King announced the project at UCLA in April 1965, and other leaders recruited students nationwide. Founding While leading the Chatham County Crusade For Voters in Savannah, Georgia, one of many SCLC affiliates across the South, Rev. Hosea Williams, an aide to SCLC chairman Martin Luther King Jr., was joined by white college students for various short-term civil rights projects. From that interracial success, they developed the idea of SCOPE. Dr. King and SCLC leaders decided to recruit white college students to journey south to join with local activists. The goals included preparing African Americans for voting, as they had mostly been long disenfranchised throughout the South. If necessary, they could participate in organizing street demonstrations to help put political pressure on Congress, should the proposed Voting Rights Act of 1965 be met with congressional resistance and stalling by segregationist forces. In the winter and spring of 1965, the Voting Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama, and the Selma to Montgomery marches were challenging the segregated status quo. During the spring of 1965, Dr. King assigned Williams, SCLC's Director of Voter Registration and Political Education, to lead the SCOPE Project. The SCLC executive committee had approved it in December 1964. The project continued into the Fall of 1965 and Spring of 1966. Some of the white college volunteers returned in the summer of 1966, and a few enrolled in Black southern colleges and continued community organization activities beyond the spring of 1966. Dr. King announced the SCOPE project in a speech at UCLA on April 27, 1965, and his visit resulted in the recruitment of twenty UCLA students, including Joel Siegel and Rick Tuttle, who worked with Williams and Andrew Young. Tuttle was held for two months in a Savannah jail as a result of his movement activities. Tuttle's case resulted in a court ruling to allow the use of property bonds for bail for civil rights workers. The SCLC staff sent regional recruitment teams to visit colleges and universities nationwide. Gwendolyn Green, the executive director of the Western Christian Leadership Conference, joined Dr. King at UCLA and was temporarily assigned to the Atlanta office to serve as the Assistant SCOPE director, reporting to Williams and King. Youth volunteers Initially, the SCLC had hoped to recruit 2000 volunteers, but college students from the north and west did not respond in the hoped-for numbers. This was believed due to the sometimes extreme danger that had already erupted against activists in the mid-60s civil rights movement in the South, such as the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders and Selma to Montgomery march. Eventually about 500