Tell About the South: Evan Faulkenbury

The money to pay for the Civil Rights Movement had to come from somewhere. In this talk, Evan Faulkenbury will tell the story of the Voter Education Project (VEP) and how philanthropic foundations paid for and influenced the course of the movement during the 1960s. The VEP solicited grants from foundations, then dispersed the money to hundreds of grassroots voter registration campaigns across the eleven states of the Old Confederacy. With these grants, ranging from $200 to $20,000, local civil rights movements sprang up across the South, coalescing into the broader African American freedom struggle. The VEP was the behind-the-scenes engine of the Civil Rights Movement, empowering local activists to register people, to challenge Jim Crow at the polls, and to revolutionize southern and national politics.

Please join us at the Center for a lunchtime discussion with Faulkenbury, a PhD candidate in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Field Scholar with the Southern Oral History Program. This event is free and open to the public, and light refreshments will be served. Please RSVP to Patrick Horn at pathorn@unc.edu.