| dc.description.abstract | At a March 31, 1965, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) executive leadership meeting, Hosea Williams proposed a summer voter registration project, called SCOPE, that recruited hundreds of student volunteers and sent them, in teams, to dozens of counties across six Southern states. The SCLC's president, Martin Luther King Jr., approved the project, thinking that a historic voting rights bill, the Voting Rights Act, would pass before the volunteers went South in June. To the project's misfortune, the Voting Rights Act was not signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson until August 6, leaving the inexperienced student volunteers vulnerable as they confronted the deeply entrenched racial discrimination of the Jim Crow South. The SCOPE project provides a composite image of the simultaneous but distinct local civil rights movements happening in the summer of 1965. This thesis looks at the SCOPE projects in Wilcox County, Alabama and Taliaferro County, Georgia to understand the relationship between outsider volunteers and local Black leaders and people. Tensions emerged between SCLC directives and local leaders' desired goals and methods of securing stronger citizenship rights for Black Americans. Negotiating this tension was at the heart of the SCOPE project and an important dynamic within the broader Civil Rights Movement. Where national organizational imperatives could be flexible to local contexts and movements, outsider SCOPE volunteers contributed to the growth and sustenance of local civil rights fights that were not covered by national media. Often incorrectly maligned by extant historiography as a project defined by scandal and mismanagement, SCOPE was actually a significant attempt at interracial coalition-based organizing that registered tens of thousands of eligible Black voters and made a lasting impact on the lives of the volunteers and local people. | en_US |
