THE SCOPE OF S.C.O.P.E. I: THE PROJECT [A column for Black History Month.] [R, 2-24-22]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Renata Justin, a Terre Haute MD, loaned her station wagon to our SCOPE Chapter for its voter registration work in the freedom summer of 1965 in Albany, GA. Twenty-one year old IN State U rising senior, Bob Mullins, the summer driver, was afraid to face her when they returned. The wagon was punctured with several bullet holes, the result of a chase by a bunch of rednecks in a pickup truck. “I’m afraid the pistons are probably shot, too,” Bob confided to Dr. Judson. “I was pushing it pretty hard.” Dr. Judson said that she would take care of the pistons, but the holes would remain. “I want everyone to see them," she said. "I want people to know.”

The Indiana State Legislature today would probably make her cover up those bullet holes, because their reality “would make people uncomfortable.” That’s the reason they are trying to pass a law that not only can parents opt their children out of any “uncomfortable” history and social studies lessons, especially about race, they want to make it illegal for teachers to teach those lessons in the first place.

In fact, Sprunica Elementary School, in Brown County, Indiana, has gotten a head start by telling parents that they can opt out of letting children read this column. Well, not exactly. They’ve told them they can opt out of all black history lessons, and this column is the start of a black history lesson for Black History Month. [After sending a letter to parents announcing that policy, they have now backtracked on it.]

 

John Lewis founded The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] in 1960 to further the civil rights movement that so many people, including state legislatures, now want to ignore. Throughout the South, the written and unwritten laws insisted on “separate but unequal,” and, especially, no voting by black people.

 

SNCC went about the work of voter registration throughout the South through a project called SCOPE. SCOPE was short for “Community Organization and Political Education.” Students on many university campuses founded SCOPE chapters, to send students South to participate. That included The Wesley Foundation [Methodist campus ministry] at Indiana State U, and students and nuns from St. Mary of the Woods College, who formed a Terre Haute chapter.

So it was that we had gathered at St. Mary of the Woods in June of 1965 to send off six students and two nuns to spend the long, hot summer in Georgia, registering black folks to vote, and teaching illiterate adults to read so that they could be informed voters, and trying to get children from inferior schools caught up with their white counterparts. I was holding two-year-old Katie in my arms as the priest came along, shaking a censor of holy water on everybody present. The highly indignant Katie made a great show of wiping the holy water off her Methodist personage. That got a great laugh from all the nuns, which only encouraged her.

With the students from all the other university chapters, our nuns and students spent a week of orientation at Morris Brown College, in Atlanta, and then were sent to Albany, Georgia. SNCC thought it would be the easiest place, because Albany had a reputation for forward thinking about race relations, at least compared to the rest of Georgia, and because “those nuns won’t last two weeks.” Boy, were they wrong! About Albany, and especially about those nuns!

 

John Robert McFarland

This is the first of a four part series for Black History Month, remembering the Terre Haute Chapter of SCOPE, in special defiance of all those who want us to ignore and forget the history of race relations in this country.