Existing comment:
Status Report on the Voter Education Project
In April 1962, the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the National Urban League launched the Voter Education Project (VEP), a coordinated effort to register black voters in the South. Attorney General Robert Kennedy secured $870,000 from the Taconic Foundation and other private foundations to give VEP tax exempt status. He also offered federal protection to civil rights workers engaged in the project. VEP recorded a jump in Southern black adults who were registered to vote from twenty-five to forty percent between 1962 and 1964. The increase, however, was mainly in the urban and upper South. In Mississippi, where most of VEP's money had been spent, the proportion rose from 5.3 to 6.7 percent. |