Reviewed by Jo Freeman

Hope’s Kids: A Voting Rights Summer

By Alan Venable

Published by One Monkey Books San Francisco 2017

218 pp with many photographs

Everyone’s heard of Freedom Summer. Virtually no one knows that there was a second freedom summer in 1965, despite the publication of several memoirs by people who went South for civil rights in 1965. This book is the latest.

After the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965 the major civil rights organizations expected the Voting Rights Act to pass in June. Wanting to register as many new voters as possible, but knowing that they couldn’t work together, they carved up the South and ran separate projects. SCOPE was the summer project run by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, otherwise known as Dr. King’s organization.Its director was Hosea Williams, another major civil rights figure who has been overlooked by historians. 

Hope Williams (no relation to Hosea) was a civil rights leader in Calhoun County, South Carolina. He farmed his own land, raised 14 children with his wife, chaired Calhoun County’s NAACP and was SCLC’s local contact. He asked SCLC to send him some kids. 

Alan Venable was one of Hope’s kids. A junior at Harvard, he joined 18 students from Brandeis University and four from other Boston area schools to go to Columbia S.C. for ten weeks. After two weeks, six of them moved to Calhoun County. When they started canvassing only 490 blacks were registered to vote in that county. They registered 114 in July, under the very restrictive registration rules typical of the Southern states, which were generally applied to blacks but not to whites. When the VRA became law on August 6, it removed the literacy test. Another 500 registered in the next two months.

While most of the Brandeis group stayed in Richland County (Columbia), five others went to Kershaw County and a couple ended up in Orangeburg County working with a SCOPE group from New York City.  

South Carolina prospective voters lined up for registration; Brandeis University, Lynn Goldsmith papers;  Calhoun County, South Carolina, 1965

Hope’s Kids is about all of the Brandeis group and the counties they worked in. Venable was able to locate all but one of the other 22 students who came from Boston. Their diaries, letters and photographs allowed him to capture some of what they experienced without relying solely on memories. Venable returned to South Carolina a couple times, initially to visit the people they worked and lived with, later to do research for this book.