Troy native Rev. John Reynolds will lead the 60th anniversary of the SCOPE Project. 

SCOPE (Summer Community Organization for Political Education) was developed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to register voters in 1965. After the 50th anniversary of SCOPE, it was reorganized into SCOPE50 with Reynolds serving as president. 

SCOPE50 will hold its 60th anniversary reunion March 6-9 at the Courtyard Montgomery, 5555 Carmichael Road, Montgomery.  The reunion will culminate on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to honor the Selma-to-Montgomery March of “Bloody Sunday” in March, 1965. 

Reynolds grew up in Troy and was immersed in the Civil Rights movement. He volunteered to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as part of the SCOPE Project, a campaign to register Black voters, in 1965. At the end of the summer, Reynolds received training at the Penn Center in South Carolina and was recommended to be hired as a SCLC staff member. 

Reynolds was interviewed and hired by King and went on to spend the next seven years working for the SCLC on various projects in Selma, Birmingham, Greene County and Greensboro in Alabama – as well as on the Meredith March in Mississippi. 

He also 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, Washington, DC.  He worked with SCLC to support the hospital workers’ strike in Charleston and directed a successful SCLC project in Ridgeville, South Carolina, to get Native American children admitted to the public schools.