Notes on Recruitment of Volunteers
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: February 7, 1962 to February 9, 1962?
Location: Atlanta, Ga.?
Genre: Article
Topic: Voter registration
Details
In February, King began a series of trips through the South to recruit volunteers for SCLC’s voter registration and direct action campaigns.1 Through these People to People tours, he hoped to connect personally with African Americans in regions of the South that he might not otherwise reach. These notes reflect King’s thoughts about his first tour through the Mississippi Delta.2
The immediate aim of this tour is personally to recruit hundreds of volunteers to work in our [strikeout illegible] intensified southwide voter registration drive and [strikeout illegible] enlist a small number of persons for a non violent army that will speahead direct actions [strikeout illegible] enlist a small number of volunteers to serve in [strikeout illegible] a nonviolent army.3 [strikeout illegible] This NVA will be composed of persons who can be on call to engage in direct action programs and who will be [strikeout illegible] will be prepared for prolonged jailing when necessary.
Along with the ecomic [word illegible] that the whole state of Mississippi inflicts upon the Negro, there is the ever present problem of physical violence. As we rode along the roads of the Delta our riding companion cited about unbelievable cases of police brutality and brutal incidents of brutal lynchings that are totally unknown to the outside world.4
In spite of this there is hope
The immediate aim of this tour is is Recruitment of a “Freedom Corps.” This “freedom Corps” will be composed of two units. On the one hand, it will consist of volunteers to work in the intensified southwide voter registration drive. On the other hand, [remainder missing]
1. The direct action volunteers, also called the “nonviolent army,” would be a group of on-call volunteers who would be available for mass demonstrations or open-ended jail stays (SCLC, Press release, Martin Luther King Jr. to begin People to People program, 1 February 1962). The plan for the voter registration campaign was discussed at SCLC’s annual convention held in Nashville in September 1961. The goal was to double the number of black voters in the South (SCLC, “Minutes of annual board meeting,” 27 September 1961; “Southern Negroes Map Voter Drive,” New York Times, 30 September 1961; King, “Nonviolence on Tour,” 17 March 1962). In December 1959, SCLC in conjunction with the NAACP had launched a similar voter registration campaign aimed at registering over one million new black voters by the November 1960 presidential election (Charles Moore, “Drive Launch Here Seeks Million More Negro Voters,” Atlanta Constitution, 29 December 1959).
2. On 7 February King began his tour in Clarksdale, Mississippi, joined by Wyatt Tee Walker and Dorothy Cotton. Over the next three days, he delivered more than a dozen speeches at churches and schools in six different towns throughout Mississippi’s Third Congressional District. More than 150 people from the Mississippi Delta volunteered for the Voter Registration Crusade (SCLC, Press release, “King’s ‘People to People’ tour sweeps Delta,” 21 February 1962; Jack O’Dell to Harry Blake, 22 February 1962).
3. King conducted similar tours of other southern states over the next few months, including Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia.
4. Much of the language of these notes resurfaced in King’s longer editorial “People in Action: Pathos and Hope,” published in the New York Amsterdam News on 3 March 1962 (pp. 419–421 in this volume).
Source: MCMLK-RWWL, Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives and Special Collections, Atlanta, Ga.