Poll Power: The Voter Education Project and the Movement for the Ballot in the American South

According to Khalilah Brown-Dean and co-authors of Fifty Years of the Voting Rights Act: The State of Race in Politics, between 1960 and 1970, the gap in voter registration rates among Black and white residents of the former Confederate states narrowed from nearly thirty to just over eight percent (Washington, DC: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2015). In Poll Power, Evan Faulkenbury argues that a portion of the credit for the massive increase in Black registration goes to the Voter Education Project (VEP), a nonprofit clearinghouse that funded southern voter registration drives for roughly fifteen years. While the organization if often cited, and its most influential project directors—Wiley Branton, Vernon Jordan, and John Lewis—are well known, Poll Power is the first organizational history of the VEP.The book begins with two chapters that set the scene, highlighting the VEP's roots and its emergence. Some elements of the VEP's origin story have been told elsewhere, such as the involvement of officials from John F. Kennedy's Department of Justice. Faulkenbury provides depth, highlighting the difficulties of bringing together private philanthropic funding, from Stephen and Audrey Currier's Taconic Foundation, among others, and the major civil rights organizations. The keystone in the process was the role of the Southern Regional Council (SRC), an interracial, liberal research organization headquartered in Atlanta, in sponsoring the Voter Education Project. Of critical importance was the SRC's tax exemption, based on its status as an educational organization that did not participate in partisan politics.The history of the VEP provides flesh to the reality that Black voter registration increased dramatically in the years immediately prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). SRC initially launched the project in March of 1962, with enough funding to last until the November 1964 election. The project was relaunched almost a year later following the passage of the VRA, before being launched a third and final time in 1968. The first and second iterations are the focus of the book's middle chapters. Through brief glimpses into a wide array of campaigns, from the most well-known—Selma, Greenwood, Albany—to little-known local drives, Poll Power illustrates the wide distribution of VEP funds and advice. While its founders envisioned the VEP as a bridge between major national civil rights organizations, over time its project directors grew disillusioned with those organizations’ rivalries and focused on distributing directly to local coalitions through state VEPs. The wide distribution of funds undoubtedly had an impact. Funds spent by the first VEP helped register an estimated 688,000 southerners between 1962 and 1964 (p. 82). After 1965, the VEP produced a study demonstrating the impact of its projects, particularly when co-located with federal examiners authorized by the VRA (p. 101).The book's final chapter covers the organization's lean years after 1969, in part the product of that year's Tax Reform Act. The SRC's 501(c)(3) tax status, which was so central to the VEP's flourishing, required something of a mischaracterization of the organization's work. As the book amply demonstrates, the focus was registration, not education; its aim was the political empowerment of Black people through the vote. Faulkenbury frames Texan Wright Patman's attack on this tax arrangement as a thinly veiled conservative attack on civil rights. Undoubtedly, the Tax Reform Act of 1969 harmed the third VEP, which split from the SRC to become an independent organization after 1969 and began its decline thereafter. Yet, Poll Power underplays the extent to which Patman raised profound questions about why wealthy individuals of whatever political orientation should maintain control of what—via tax exemptions—was properly public money.Faulkenbury's sympathy for the courageous work of voting rights activists also leads to an evasion of broader questions about politics. Poll Power remains tightly focused on organizational matters at the expense of deeper consideration of the meaning of the right to vote. In the words of Steven F. Lawson (In Pursuit of Power), it keeps the “faith in the curative power of the ballot” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). When Faulkenbury claims that Black southerners built “poll power,” he rarely stops to consider the connection between voter registration and the broader aims that drove civil rights activists or the ultimate limitations of Black voter registration as a strategy for amassing power. We would all do well to note, in the words of SRC director Leslie Dunbar, while it is a precondition to any social advance, “voting is not a panacea” (p. 79).