Voter Education Project

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From 1962 to 1968, the Voter Education Project (VEP) raised and distributed foundation funds to civil rights organizations for voter education and registration work in the American South

Starting in 1960, the explosion of student-led Civil Rights activism, sit-ins, and Freedom Rides created a public relations and foreign policy embarrassment for the Kennedy administration. In the early 1960s, Asian and African nations were liberating themselves from generations of racist colonial rule, and both the U.S. and Soviet Union were fiercely competing with each other in a cold war struggle for the support of these new nations. The world-wide news stories, photos, and TV images of racist brutality, burning buses, and police suppression of Black civil rights undercut the State Department's effort to convince Asian and African nations to align themselves with Free World camp in international affairs.^[1]

Believing that the flood of negative news stories about race-relations in America were caused by the wave of student protests, the Kennedy brothers urged civil rights leaders and organizations to engage in voter registration rather than nonviolent direct-action demonstrations. Unofficially, they convinced several non-profit foundations to fund voter registration work in the South.^[2] The Taconic, Field, New World, and Stern Family foundations agreed to contribute significant funds. To raise, administer, and distribute the money, the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC formed the Voter Education Project (VEP) under the auspices of the non-profit Southern Regional Council (SRC). ^[3]

Between mid-1962 and the end of 1964, under the direction of Wiley Branton, the VEP distributed close to $900,000 (equal to $5,700,000 in 2006 dollars) to civil rights groups doing voter registration in the South. During this period, almost 700,000 new Black voters were added to the rolls, most of them in the mid- and upper-south states. But in the face of fierce resistance from white politicians and officials, few Blacks were registered in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. It is only after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that VEP-funded registration drives succeeded in registering large numbers of Black voters in those Deep South states.

The VEP continued funding voter registration, education, and research efforts in the South until 1968 under subsequent directors Randolph Blackwell, Vernon Jordan, and John Lewis.

Kennedy's belief that shifting the civil rights focus from protest to voter registration would reduce embarrassing news stories proved to be incorrect. In the Deep South, white resistance to Black voting rights turned out to be even more violent than their opposition to integrating lunch counters and bus depots. Instead of diminishing, news stories of police repression, brutality, bombings, and murders increased as white political leaders, the Ku Klux Klan, and White Citizen Councils, used arrests, terrorism, and economic retaliation to prevent Blacks from voting.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Voter Education Project ~ Civil Rights Movement Veterans