Oral History Project

SCOPE50.org John Reynolds was born in Troy, Alabama, and at the age of 17 was working as a custodian at Troy State College when SCOPE workers came to Pike County in 1965. He quit his job to work with them that summer. After he received training at the Penn Center in South Carolina at the end of the summer, Septima Clark recommended to Dr. King that he be hired as an SCLC staff member. John spent the next seven years on the field staff of SCLC, working throughout the South – Selma, Birmingham, Greene County, Greensboro, Alabama, and the Meredith March in Mississippi. He worked with Dr. King on the Open Housing Campaign in Chicago; organized the Poor People’s Campaign in New England and then served as Sanitation Director in Resurrection City; worked with SCLC to support the hospital workers’ strike in Charleston; and directed a successful SCLC project in Ridgeville, SC, to get Native American children admitted to the public schools. After leaving SCLC in 1971, John settled in Providence, RI, where he served as Assistant Chaplain at Brown University for three years, and then worked for several years in social service agencies, including the Martin Luther King Center in Newport. He received a B.A. degree in Political Science from Rhode Island College in 1982 and an M.Div. degree from Andover Newton Theological School in 2000. He served as Interim Pastor and then as Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, from 1997 to 2008. He is the author of The Fight for Freedom; A Memoir of My Years in the Civil Rights Movement, published in 2012. John and his wife Gloria now live in South Carolina. ©2018 SCOPE50

SCOPE50.org Barbara Williams Emerson is a veteran activist, academic leader, and consultant.  Having started as a voter registration organizer at age fifteen, she worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, D. C., and Chicago.  Dr. Emerson staffed Congress on Racial Equality initiatives in Harlem and organized the 25th Anniversary Reunion of the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project volunteers.  On countless occasions, she has worked with Atlanta’s Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless, the largest direct-to-client food service agency in the southeast, and for a decade served as Secretary to the Board. Her numerous national and international lectures include King Day and keynote addresses in Corvallis, Ore., Newburgh, NY, Washington, DC, and Candler, AZ and speeches at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the University of Peking in China.   Her publications include “Coming of Age in the Civil Rights Movement;” “My Brother’s Keeper;” Bagamoyo: Lay Down Your Burden (editor) about the east African slave trade; “Drum Majors for Justice” (commentator), and “The Other Guy on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.”  Dr. Emerson earned a B.A. at New York University and master and doctorate degrees from Columbia University.  Her career in higher education included positions at the City University of New York; Vice President at the New School for Social Research; Vice President for Academic Affairs at Metropolitan College of NY; and Visiting Scholar at the International College of the Cayman Islands.  Currently, she is President of Emerson Educational and Management Consultants. She is a founding Board member of Be the Change PEOPLE, Inc. which supports disadvantaged students studying medicine and health sciences in Uganda, East Africa. ©2018 SCOPE50

SCOPE50.org ©2018 SCOPE50

SCOPE50.org Jo Freeman is a writer and photographer. She joined SCOPE after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, where she had been active in the Bay Area civil rights movement and the Free Speech Movement.  She worked in Newberry Co. SC and Henry Co. AL. After SCOPE she joined the SCLC staff, working in Alabama and Mississippi for the next year. She was arrested five times in three states and spent 28 days in jail for those arrests. Her work in the South ended when the Jackson Daily News published an editorial actually written by the director of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission which “exposed” her as a professional agitator, implying from her Free Speech Movement activities that she was a Communist or at least a sympathizer. She left the field to work in Atlanta as Coretta Scott King’s assistant for a few weeks before being transferred to Chicago. There Jo took what she had learned from her four years in the civil rights movement and applied it to organizing women. She was one of the founders of the first women’s liberation group in Chicago and published the first newsletter. Jo subsequently received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago (1973) and a J.D. from New York University School of Law (1982). She has been a Brookings Fellow, an APSA Congressional Fellow, a Kings County Assistant District Attorney, counsel to the Committee on Higher Education of the New York State Assembly, and a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC. She has published 11 books, two of which won political science prizes for scholarship, and a couple hundred articles. More information available at www.jofreeman.com ©2018 SCOPE50

SCOPE50.org Lanny Kaufer is a musician, songwriter and retired high school teacher from Ojai, CA. He has had a long career as a volunteer non-violent social and environmental activist dating back to the 1960s, including working in the Civil Rights Movement, the Peace Movement, and the Anti-Nuclear Movement. Today Mr. Kaufer is an active member of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Committee of Ventura County and an associate member of Veterans for Peace, Ventura County chapter. He exercises his teaching skills by presenting slideshow talks on the Civil Rights Movement and edible and medicinal plants of Southern California. While a freshman at UC Santa Barbara in 1964, Kaufer was recruited by Rev. Hosea Williams to serve in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCOPE Project. SCOPE sent about 350 college students to register voters in the South in the summer of 1965 to coincide with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The UCSB group was stationed in three small towns in rural southern Virginia, where they were hosted by a small, courageous group of local African-Americans. It was during that summer that Mr. Kaufer met and shook hands with Dr. King and witnessed first-hand the power of nonviolent direct action. The experiences he had that summer in the SCOPE Project, his involvement in further non-violent actions, and the music that accompanied all of it, are the subjects of his presentation, “Martin Luther King and the Spirit of the ‘60s.” ©2018 SCOPE50