This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) Project. Now reorganized as SCOPE50, this year’s reunion is being led in part by former SCOPE participant and life-long activist Lanny Kaufer to bring participants to Montgomery, Alabama, during the weekend of March 8 and 9 to celebrate their work in the project as well as join the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee for the 60th anniversary of the Selma March.
“I’m really excited about joining,” Kaufer said. “And just to be part of that history.” His involvement with the Civil Rights Movement is highlighted by his participation in the 1965 SCOPE project, which was announced by Martin Luther King Jr. to increase voter registration in the South.
Since high school, Kaufer has been involved in activist groups and during the spring quarter of his first year at UCSB, Rev. Hosea Williams from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) came to campus to recruit students. Kaufer, his roommate Phil McKenna, and six other UCSB students helped to form the SCOPE chapter at the university where they prepared to spend their summer.
They joined hundreds of other university students from across the nation in Atlanta for a week of orientation where they learned the Freedom Songs and practiced nonviolent forms of protest and activism. Leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were their teachers and speakers during their orientation, Kaufer said. From there, the student participants were organized into groups and sent to 20 different countries across the South.
“There’s a powerful thing that happens when people sing,” Kaufer said. “You all feel like you’re one.” Sharing the Freedom Songs to sing during protests and demonstrations was essential to strengthening the community and helping to rally for voting rights.
Kaufer and his group were sent to Sussex County, Virginia, where State Senator Garland Gray had started the “Massive Resistance” in response to the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate schools after the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.
“We had a few adults, but all the kids showed up to greet us,” he recalled. “It was summer vacation, and they heard there were civil rights workers from California coming to their town, from Dr. King.” Though Kaufer and his group were only there for one summer, he looked back on a number of incidents including a series of demonstrations through town, being refused service at restaurants, and handling violent counter protestors.
When Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a nearby university in Virginia, Kaufer and the other SCOPE participants stood behind the stage and briefly spoke with King afterwards.
“He was already my hero, but I had no idea what a huge hero he would become in history,” Kaufer said. Twenty years after his summer in Sussex County, Kaufer had the opportunity to revisit and see the lasting change that he and his peers had been a part of.
SCOPE50’s reunion in 2015 was a powerful moment for Kaufer, who hadn’t been able to see so many people from the original project after that summer. Now with the SCOPE50 60th anniversary reunion coinciding with the Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee, Kaufer is looking forward to being a part of a demonstration today.
“There’s definitely a resistance happening across the country right now to this turning back the clock to a previous racist time in our country,” Kaufer said. Many of the participants that he knows will be attending the Jubilee are also people who participated in demonstrations during the Civil Rights Movement.
“We have something that we want to say and share and hopefully people are interested in hearing that,” he said.
For more information about SCOPE50’s work, visit scope50.org.
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