Civil Rights Activist & Troy native Rev. John Reynolds on SCOPE60

Rev. Dr. John Reynolds returned to his native Troy in March 2025 to observe the 60th anniversary of the SCOPE Registration drive for Black voters. He brought along his wife and Steve and Susan Gutherz, the two grown children of Leon Gutherz, the man who recruited him for the Project. Dr. Reynolds spoke to us about this historic trip. (He previously visited our studios several years ago and spoke about his 2012 book, "The Fight for Freedom: A Memoir of My Years in the Civil Rights Movement". That podcast is also available at onthebookshelf.podbean.com.)

Reynolds had volunteered as an 18-year-old in 1965 to help student civil rights workers sent to Alabama by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as part of the SCOPE Project, a campaign to register Black voters. At the end of that summer he received training at the Penn Center in South Carolina, and was hired for the field staff of SCLC by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  His next seven years involved working ac ross the South in Selma, Birmingham, Green County and Greensboro in Alabama, as well as on the Meredith March in Mississippi. Reynolds also worked with Dr. King on the Open Housing Campaign in Chicago, organized the Poor People's Campaign in New England, and served as Sanitation Director in Resurrection City Washington, DC. as well as worker's strikes in Charleston and a successful SCLC project in South Carolina to get Native American children admitted to public schools. He left SCLC in 1971 and eventually served as Pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Rhode Island from 1997 to 2008.