Press Release, Statement on Intensified Voter Registration Drive
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: April 5, 1962
Location: Atlanta, Ga.?
Genre: Press Release
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Travels
Voter registration
Details
On the heels of the official announcement of the start of the Voter Education Project (VEP), King sends this press release describing SCLC’s quest to double the number of registered African American voters within two years.1
I am happy to announce that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference has begun its intensified voter registration drive. We are actively participating in this effort with the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. We now visualize the doubling of the number of Negro registered voters within the next two years.
For practical reasons we have carved out a territory for ourselves in which our work will not duplicate the work of the other participating civil rights organizations.
That segment of the South comprises South Carolina {(Charleston)}, Georgia, Alabama, the Fourth Congressional District or the Southside of Virginia, Eastern North Carolina, Northern Louisiana, the Delta area of Mississippi from Vicksburg to Clarksdale; East Tennessee and West Texas {(Marshall)}.
We have been working in this territory on our own from the beginning of this year with our limited staff. Now that our program has moved into high gear, we have been forced to expand our field staff to cope with it.
These six new staff persons are: John H. Calhoun, Herbert V. Coulton, James L. Bevel, Fred C. Bennette, Jr., Bernard S. Lee, and Harry Blake.
John H. Calhoun will serve as Georgia State Organizer for 1962–63 in the voter registration drive. Herbert V. Coulton of Petersburg, Virginia, will serve as Field Secretary in the drive in Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. Mr. Coulton will concentrate his efforts in the 4th Congressional District in the South end of Virginia. James L. Bevel is Field Secretary in the area of Mississippi. Field Secretary for Georgia is Fred C. Bennette, Jr. Bernard S. Lee will serve as Student Liaison in the five key states (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana). Harry Blake will serve as Field Secretary in North Louisiana from Shreveport to the Mississippi Delta. In addition, three or four specialists will be added in the future.2
During my “people-to-people” trips, I have recruited more than 1000 volunteers in Georgia, Mississippi and Virginia alone.3 I am happy that I have been able to be a part of this drive personally, I am more than gratified with the response which my pleas for volunteers for voter registration and the “non-violent” army received in the rural areas of the South. I will continue to participate personally.4
Our procedure is to go into a town to recruit volunteers. We then send these volunteers to our McIntosh training center, one of our other schools for specialized training. These trainees then return to their home communities and recruit and train other volunteers to continue the voter registration drive and the spread of citizenship education.
To date we have trained over 930 persons in the Citizenship Education Program in the 95 schools which we are operating in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina.5
We are totally committed to this work and fully intend to carry it through to its fruitful objective—full citizenship for Negroes everywhere in the United States.
1. The Southern Regional Council (SRC) announced on 29 March that the new tax-exempt organization would coordinate and fund voter registration efforts of the major civil rights organizations (SRC, Press release, Voter Education Project to study voter registration in the South, 29 March 1962). From 15 February to 1 September, SCLC received $11,500 from the VEP and spent $34,000 of the organization’s own funds on voter registration (Jack H. O’Dell, “Report on voter registration work, February 15–September 1 1962,” 28 September 1962).
2. Among the others added to SCLC staff were Golden Frinks and Fred H. LaGarde in North Carolina, Benjamin Mack in South Carolina, Hosea Williams in Georgia, and Annell Ponder in Mississippi (Young to Wiley A. Branton, September 1962).
3. During the People to People tours, King spoke with local leaders to help build grassroots leadership. For more on King’s tours of the Mississippi Delta and Virginia, see King, “People in Action: Pathos and Hope,” 3 March 1962, and King, “People in Action: Virginia’s Black Belt,” 14 April 1962, pp. 419–421 and pp. 437–440 in this volume, respectively.
4. As part of the People to People tours, King also traveled to South Carolina in April and to Louisiana in June (see Introduction, and King, “People in Action: New Harassment,” 23 June 1962, p. 29 and pp. 486–488 in this volume, respectively).
5. Headed by Andrew Young, SCLC’s Citizenship Education Project invited potential leaders to attend a five-day training session with expenses paid at Dorchester Center in Midway, Georgia. After training on community organizing and voter registration methods, the attendees were expected to establish local Citizenship Schools in their communities.
Source: DABCC-INP, Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church Collection.