How wonderful it would be to be able to say that the Voting Rights Act signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in August 1965 put an end to voting discrimination. As President Johnson signed the bill, he stated that the right to vote was “the basic right without which all others are meaningless.” The Voting Rights Act struck down literacy tests and other regulations that blocked the right to vote and also provided federal protection to people as they registered. Most important, it required that states known for impeding voting rights “pre-clear” any changes to their voting laws with the federal government. In 2013, however, a Supreme Court decision did away with that pre-clearance requirement. As a result, as I write these notes in April 2021, Republican legislators in at least forty-three states are considering more than three hundred and fifty bills that will make voting more difficult, particularly for people of color. Several bills have already been signed into law. It’s distressing that politics continues to play such a pivotal role in what should be a basic American right.
For those of you interested in learning more about SCOPE and the era surrounding it, here are some suggestions. A great introduction to the tenor of the times is the 2014 movie Selma about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches led by Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams, and John Lewis. The first march was halted by a violent attack on the marchers. The second was aborted out of fear of more violence. The third was successful, thanks to federal protection ordered by President Johnson. The marches took place only a few months before the beginning of the SCOPE program.
For an honest and informative accounting of one young college student’s experience with SCOPE during the summer of 1965, I suggest reading Maria Gitin’s This Bright Light of Ours. I devoured this book and corresponded with Maria, who was generous with her time and the sharing of her experiences. One of the many things I most admire about This Bright Light of Ours is Maria’s honesty. Nineteen-year-olds don’t always make the best decisions and often operate out of idealism rather than realism. Maria doesn’t sugarcoat her experience of that summer, yet what comes across most strongly is her passion. That passion combined with youthful na?veté is what I hoped to capture in the character of Ellie.
The late Willy Siegel Leventhal was a SCOPE worker that summer as well and he assembled hundreds of SCOPE-related documents into a massive tome I was able to find on eBay. It was fascinating to read through the contemporaneous letters, messages, and notes related to the program as well as the students’ own assessments of what worked and what didn’t.
A book that describes the heart of the voting rights movement in North Carolina is The Williamston Freedom Movement: A North Carolina Town’s Struggle for Civil Rights, 1957–1970 by Amanda Hilliard Smith.
One final resource played a part in my research and that is the 1965 book The Free Men by the late John Ehle, which covers the 1963–1964 civil rights protests by students at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, including the “kneeling in the street” protest Ellie takes part in.
Acknowledgments
In addition to Maria Gitin, whose firsthand experience of SCOPE was invaluable to me, I’d like to thank Cynthia Lewis at the King Center in Atlanta; my research assistant, Kathy Williamson; my ever-supportive significant other, John Pagliuca; and my phenomenal agent and friend, Susan Ginsburg from Writers House. I’m also grateful for everyone else at Writers House for their hard work and enthusiasm, especially Catherine Bradshaw and Peggy Boulos Smith.
I’m delighted to now be working with my enthusiastic United Kingdom editor at Headline Books, Sherise Hobbs, as well as with Headline’s marketing director, Jo Liddiard, and all the behind-the-scenes Headline people who have embraced The Last House on the Street with such dedication.
As usual, my U.S. editor Jen Enderlin zeroed in on the heart of my story and helped me bring it to life. Jen both challenges and inspires me. She is now the president of St. Martin’s Press and it’s a huge honor to be able to continue working with such an amazing editor.
Thank you to my publicist, Katie Bassel, who would never let a little thing like a pandemic get in the way of her already challenging job. I’m grateful to all the other supportive folks at St. Martin’s—Sally Richardson, Erica Martirano, Brant Janeway, Sallie Lotz, Jeffery Dodes, Lisa Senz, Erik Platt, Tom Thompson, and everyone in the sales department who does so much to get my books into the hands of my readers.
Special thanks go to sensitivity reader Grace Wynter, for her insight and encouragement. As a white author writing about racial issues in the South, I was very grateful to have Grace’s input.