I was fourteen years old during the summer of 1964 when I heard the news about three young civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi. Andrew Goodman, James Earl Chaney, and Michael Schwerner were spending the summer in the South to register Black voters. Their disappearance and tragic end may not have been the first time I’d heard about student civil rights workers, but it was the first time their work had an emotional and intellectual impact on me. The junior high school I attended in Plainfield, New Jersey, was well integrated, and I was awakening to the injustices faced by people who looked like my classmates. It was impossible to grow up in Plainfield during that era and be blind to the inequities, even in the North. I was moved by the courage and passion of those young civil rights workers who were willing to face danger to do what they felt was right.
When I reached high school age, I often found myself in the library stacks lost in books and articles about racial injustice. At some point, I stumbled across information on the SCOPE program. The memory of that program stayed with me and inspired Ellie’s story in The Last House on the Street.
Although much of the story related to the SCOPE program is based on truth, I took liberties with specific facts. For example, while the program was publicly announced by Hosea Williams in late April, Ellie learns of it a few weeks earlier. The orientation dates, however, are accurate, as is the orientation setting of Morris Brown College in Atlanta. Hosea Williams and Andrew Young were at the orientation and Reverend Young’s conversation with the young female civil rights workers is based on reality. Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed deliver a speech at the orientation.
The most dangerous work in SCOPE took place in the Deep South, but I wanted to write about my adopted home state of North Carolina, where SCOPE’s work was limited to the “Black Belt” counties of Martin and Warren. However, since I was creating my own fictional world, I invented Derby County and its various towns so that I was not constrained by real events. It is true that the KKK had a very strong and growing presence in North Carolina in 1965, inspired in great part by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s also true that the registrars’ offices in those counties shut their doors prior to the August passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which left the SCOPE students having to focus on community work other than actual registration.
How wonderful it would be to be able to say that the Voting Rights Act signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in August 1965 put an end to voting discrimination. As President Johnson signed the bill, he stated that the right to vote was “the basic right without which all others are meaningless.” The Voting Rights Act struck down literacy tests and other regulations that blocked the right to vote and also provided federal protection to people as they registered. Most important, it required that states known for impeding voting rights “pre-clear” any changes to their voting laws with the federal government. In 2013, however, a Supreme Court decision did away with that pre-clearance requirement. As a result, as I write these notes in April 2021, Republican legislators in at least forty-three states are considering more than three hundred and fifty bills that will make voting more difficult, particularly for people of color. Several bills have already been signed into law. It’s distressing that politics continues to play such a pivotal role in what should be a basic American right.
For those of you interested in learning more about SCOPE and the era surrounding it, here are some suggestions. A great introduction to the tenor of the times is the 2014 movie Selma about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, and John Lewis. The first march was halted by a violent attack on the marchers. The second was aborted out of fear of more violence. The third was successful, thanks to federal protection ordered by President Johnson. The marches took place only a few months before the beginning of the SCOPE program.
For an honest and informative accounting of one young college student’s experience with SCOPE during the summer of 1965, I suggest reading Maria Gitin’s This Bright Light of Ours. I devoured this book and corresponded with Maria, who was generous with her time and the sharing of her experiences. One of the many things I most admire about This Bright Light of Ours is Maria’s honesty. Nineteen-year-olds don’t always make the best decisions and often operate out of idealism rather than realism. Maria doesn’t sugarcoat her experience of that summer, yet what comes across most strongly is her passion. That passion combined with youthful naïveté is what I hoped to capture in the character of Ellie.
The late Willy Siegel Leventhal was a SCOPE worker that summer as well and he assembled hundreds of SCOPE-related documents into a massive tome I was able to find on eBay. It was fascinating to read through the contemporaneous letters, messages, and notes related to the program as well as the students’ own assessments of what worked and what didn’t.
A book that describes the heart of the voting rights movement in North Carolina is The Williamston Freedom Movement: A North Carolina Town’s Struggle for Civil Rights, 1957–1970 by Amanda Hilliard Smith.
One final resource played a part in my research and that is the 1965 book The Free Men by the late John Ehle, which covers the 1963–1964 civil rights protests by students at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, including the “kneeling in the street” protest Ellie takes part in.