Hope’s Kids: A Voting Rights Summer

Spring 1965. In the wake of Selma, a bill is finally wending through Congress to end the rigged literacy tests and other devices in place since Reconstruction to keep southern blacks out of voting and government. At the same time, Dr. King’s non-violent wild man Hosea Williams is laying the groundwork for hundreds of students to canvass the south in a summer voting rights project called SCOPE. Two dozen sign up at Brandeis, a vibrant young Boston area college, to work in South Carolina.

Late June. The Voting Rights Bill still hung up in Congress, the Brandeis SCOPErs arrive in urban Richland County, soon spreading out to hinterlands in adjoining Kershaw and Calhoun Counties. In each place they confront a powerful mix of intimidation, persisting sanctioned segregation and astonishing poverty. Sheltered in black homes, they place themselves in the service of local leaders in a century’s struggle for equal rights. To the kids from Boston, it will be scary, surprising, inspiring, complex; above all rewarding.