{"id":1873,"date":"2016-07-27T22:23:48","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T02:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/?p=1873"},"modified":"2016-07-27T22:23:48","modified_gmt":"2016-07-28T02:23:48","slug":"voter-education-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/2016\/07\/27\/voter-education-project\/","title":{"rendered":"Voter Education Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Voter Education Project (VEP) was a civil rights program that operated in the American South during the 1960s. \u00a0Over 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. \u00a0VEP was administered through the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a nonpartisan, biracial group based in Atlanta. \u00a0Three private foundations–the Stern Family Fund, the Taconic Foundation and the Field Foundation–provided an overwhelming majority of the funding for VEP. \u00a0Over 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. \u00a0During this Ford project, we worked with documents from the Taconic Foundation, stored at the Rockefeller Archive. \u00a0Additionally, we worked with microfilmed documents from the Southern Regional Council that pertained to the Voter Education Project. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite VEP\u2019s remarkable results, very little has been published about it. \u00a0We examined VEP from several different angles, including some of SNCC\u2019s files, some of SCLC\u2019s files, in addition to the SRC\u2019s own files on VEP. \u00a0In conjunction with the limited secondary source material available, we gleaned a slightly different picture of the origins than some of the published material. \u00a0Stephen 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. \u00a0By 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. \u00a0Smaller organizations often had problems with the reporting requirements, leading to many letters asking for documentation from the grant-makers. \u00a0Being 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. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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. \u00a0Especially 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.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Voter Education Project (VEP) was a civil rights program that operated in the American South during the 1960s. \u00a0Over 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4228,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4228"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1873"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2022,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1873\/revisions\/2022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}