Hope’s Kids is full of stories about the summer of 1965 from the tedious to the dangerous. Canvassing and taking people to the registrars on the days one could do so were the most important activities of the summer, but it would be a dull book that devoted many words to these. Desegregation of various white institutions makes a more exciting reading. So does the wide variety of interpersonal relationships, among the students, and between students and locals.
Venable writes about all of these, including many local teenagers who would otherwise be missing from civil rights histories. He confirms what all civil right workers who went South quickly learned, that Southern black teenagers were the infantry of the Southern civil rights movement.
While they all did a lot of canvassing, the teenagers wanted a little excitement, which meant sit-ins and demonstrations. The (white) library and the swimming pool in Calhoun Co. closed when they tried to use them. The pool was buried in sand.
Other excitement came from local whites. The Klan held a rally for which "The White Public is Invited." Crosses were burned. The cops stopped SCOPE cars whenever they could and issued tickets, or just hauled the driver to jail. Fortunately, two of the few black lawyers in S.C. were in Columbia and Orangeburg.
There was some violence, but no injuries. A shotgun blasted a hole in the front window of one of their hosts. If anyone had been sitting in the living room at that time, death would have been the most likely result. Overall there was probably less violence against civil rights workers in South Carolina than the other Deep South states, largely because the state police worked to suppress it. South Carolina was dominated by its business community and they didn’t want bad publicity.
The only event of the summer to make the newspapers happened in Orangeburg, a much larger county south of Calhoun. With a local election pending, its registration office was open on a day that Calhoun County’s was not. SCOPErs and some of the people they worked with went to Orangeburg to help out.
At the end of the day a couple hundred people were still sitting in the courthouse waiting to register. Someone decided that they wouldn’t leave until everyone was registered. The Sheriff said 'go or be arrested'. A couple dozen were dragged to jail, including several from the Brandeis group. Venable describes the experience of being in jail, but not the trial. Their conviction was later overturned.
For those who want to know what it was like to be a civil rights worker in the South for a summer, this is a good book to read.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act, August 6, 1965, LBJ Library; photography by White House Photographer, Yoichi R. Okamoto
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