The Voter Education Project (VEP) was a civil rights program that operated in the American South during the 1960s.  Over the course of this summer, we focused largely on the first iteration of the Project, which registered over one million African Americans between 1962 and the 1964 election, which was a major feat one year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act.  VEP was administered through the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a nonpartisan, biracial group based in Atlanta.  Three private foundations–the Stern Family Fund, the Taconic Foundation and the Field Foundation–provided an overwhelming majority of the funding for VEP.  Over the course of the Project, the SRC distributed almost $1 million to civil rights groups, such as SNCC, the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC, among others, for voter education and registration.  During this Ford project, we worked with documents from the Taconic Foundation, stored at the Rockefeller Archive.  Additionally, we worked with microfilmed documents from the Southern Regional Council that pertained to the Voter Education Project.  

Despite VEP’s remarkable results, very little has been published about it.  We examined VEP from several different angles, including some of SNCC’s files, some of SCLC’s files, in addition to the SRC’s own files on VEP.  In conjunction with the limited secondary source material available, we gleaned a slightly different picture of the origins than some of the published material.  Stephen Currier, the President of the Taconic Foundation, seems to have in the end played a larger role in the creation of the project than he had previously been given credit for.  By focusing on primary documents from both sides (the grant recipients and the grant-making organizations) we were able to see some of the tensions caused throughout the process.  Smaller organizations often had problems with the reporting requirements, leading to many letters asking for documentation from the grant-makers.  Being able to view this dynamic, and how it was not nearly as much of an issue for the larger organizations such as the NAACP was quite fascinating.   

Working on a project about voting rights during an election year, especially one as fraught as the 2016 election, placed our research in a broader perspective.  Especially in light of the recent near-gutting of the Voting Rights Act, recognizing the absurd lengths white registrars went to in Mississippi to prevent black voters from voting has rarely ever been so important.