Pamphlet inviting poor people to a conference at the Delta Ministry’s headquarters in Mt. Beulah, Mississippi, January 1966. Michael J. Miller Civil Rights Collection, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi.
Black Workers’ Responses to Displacement and Out-Migration
In the summer of 1966, black farmer Willie Williams offered a lesson in southern political economy to a reporter from the Washington Post. Williams was one of the tenants who James Minter had fired from his 11,000-acre cotton plantation in Dallas County, Alabama, earlier that year. The Minters had owned the land for 135 years, and the black families that tended the crops could trace their ancestry back just as far. “He’s one year older than me, Mister James is,” Williams stated. “We were raised as children together. His Daddy carried him to school in a horse and buggy every day right by us colored people’s houses. . . . I didn’t get no higher than second grade. They needed me for the farm. We were working for Mister James to go to school.”1
Williams and other black southerners could see that white people’s wealth was not built solely by individual effort and rested in large part on the work performed by generations of African Americans for little or no pay. For them, justice required more than the formal equality before the law mandated by civil rights legislation. They sought redress of the wrongs inflicted on them by slavery and the Jim Crow system and access to the types of education, jobs, and housing that white Americans enjoyed. After the mid-1960s, participants in the freedom movement continued the struggle against racism by calling for economic reforms that aimed to raise black people’s incomes and ensure a decent standard of living for all the region’s residents.
Social justice activists did not accept explanations for the agricultural crisis that attributed poverty, hunger, and out-migration to the natural workings of the market. They believed these problems were the result of decisions made by the people in power, whose policies protected the interests of the region’s wealthiest residents and neglected the needs of those who were less well off. In the richest nation on earth, in counties with plenty of fertile farmland that produced millions of dollars in profits for its owners, there was no logical reason why people should be starving. The problem was not that the plantation regions were poor and unable to sustain the existing population, they argued, but that resources were not being distributed fairly. To address the imbalance, activists called on the federal government to intervene with direct assistance to displaced workers, improvements in social services and infrastructure, and economic development initiatives to create jobs.
In the late 1960s activists succeeded in convincing many government officials, journalists, and other Americans that southern political leaders were not interested in addressing the extreme economic hardships facing poor black people in their states and would do little to solve the crisis unless they were forced to act by outside pressure. As urban African Americans rebelled against racist oppression in their own communities, policy makers realized the connections between rural poverty and the wave of riots that occurred in cities across the nation between 1964 and 1968. Federal agencies stepped up their efforts to get aid to displaced workers in the South and persuade local officials to cooperate with antipoverty efforts. As a result, food and welfare programs were expanded to reach more people, government agencies paid closer attention to rural problems, and advocates for initiatives to stem out-migration gained allies at both the national and the local levels.
White supremacists’ preference for policies that encouraged African Americans to leave the South came up against black people’s determination to stay. Many of the people being fired and evicted from the plantations in the 1960s felt deeply attached to the land that they and their ancestors had worked for several centuries. In a letter to President John F. Kennedy expressing concern about the impact of mechanization on farmers in Bolivar County, Mississippi, a resident wrote, “They want more than anything else, to stay here, but they also want a decent living for their families.” If it were possible for them to earn enough income, most would choose to remain in the county rather than migrate away. Explaining his reasons for staying in the South when most of his friends and family were leaving, John Brown Jr. stated, “I spent one summer in Detroit and that was enough of Detroit for me.” Brown disliked crowded cities and much preferred rural life. “I’ve always enjoyed the farm,” he said. “I love farming. I love to see things grow.” Reporters from the Houston Post who visited Mississippi in 1964 recorded similar sentiments from people who, though they were desperately poor, wanted to remain in the state. One man who worked on a cotton plantation for 50 cents an hour told them he did not want to leave and “all he wanted to do was stay home and be able to make a living.” Asked why he did not move North like so many other black people, Delta Ministry staffer and native Mississippian John Bradford stated, “My idea is that this is home to me, as I know it, and I think that if the problems here will ever be worked out, then we’re going to have to do it.” At hearings held by the CCR in Alabama in April 1968, panelists heard testimony from African Americans who were frustrated with the slow pace of change and constant violations of their rights yet emphasized that they wanted to stay. Journalist Paul Good observed in the official account of the proceedings, “Home in the South, for all its poverty and exploitation, contains a familiar ambience, a link to past generations, the feel of belonging to the land despite white assertion that black exists there only through white sufferance.”2
Aside from a preference for remaining in the places they called home, many rural poor people were not convinced that leaving the South would lead to much improvement in their lives. The war-driven economic boom that generated full employment and ensured jobs for those who moved north in the 1940s had subsided by the 1960s, and manufacturers were closing plants in Detroit, Chicago, and other cities that had once offered hope for a better life. Moreover, African Americans in those cities faced the same obstacles to economic opportunity that existed in the South and found their prospects limited by employment discrimination, inferior schooling, and housing segregation. Informal practices as well as government policies created separate and unequal communities in the urban North that mirrored the oppressions African Americans felt in the rural South, making migration a less-than-satisfactory solution to black southerners’ problems. A study of seasonally employed farmworkers in Alabama found that, contrary to the popular belief that cities were inherently more attractive than rural life, small farmers did not want to leave and saw “no future in migrating to the big cities to join the ranks of the unemployed.”3
Taking such factors into account, some analysts asserted that there were better approaches to the unemployment crisis than encouraging out-migration and that policy makers should instead support programs that enabled displaced workers to remain in their home communities. John Hatch, a social worker and native southerner employed by the Boston Housing Authority, was convinced that poverty was harder and “more disabling” for African Americans in the North than in the South. People living in the city’s public housing projects seemed to lack the social networks and community support that black southerners, however poor, could rely on during times of economic desperation. Hatch eventually chose to leave his job in Boston to work on an antipoverty project in Mississippi, hoping to create “opportunities for community building and developing, so that the choice to stay South would not mean neglect of hopes and dreams.” As he explained to an interviewer, “If I thought for a moment that [migrants] were really moving toward a better life, I would not have seen it with the kind of urgency that I did. But my feeling was that this was not occurring.” The leaders of Southern Rural Action, an organization formed in 1966 to experiment with new models for regional development, shared Hatch’s view. In a proposal to the OEO seeking funds for its efforts, the group noted that attempts to export poor people from the South had proven ineffective and it was time to try something else. Forcing people to move to northern and western cities was “destructive, massively costly, and socially and politically unacceptable,” these activists asserted. “The idea that a cycle of readjustment could be achieved in this way, by getting rid of ‘surplus people’ from Southern agriculture, has proved to be fallacious.” Wilkinson County NAACP president James Joliff Jr. concurred. “We must realize that the real answer is to stay here and to make things better,” he stated. “Most Negroes run off to Chicago, New Orleans or California, not realizing that they’re just going from a small ghetto to a large one. But I wouldn’t trade Mississippi for all the tea in China. Sure, there’s guys pushing you here, but you just got to push back.”4
Activists pushed back against pressures on black people to leave by offering financial assistance to laid-off workers, publicizing the human suffering that existed in the plantation regions, and pressuring political leaders to do more to address the crisis. In response to the economic reprisals against African Americans who attempted to vote in the early 1960s, supporters of the civil rights struggle formed Operation Freedom to provide loans and other aid to people who lost their jobs, homes, or access to credit because of their political activities. “A voting Negro population in Mississippi will change this state and eventually the nation, and those who fear the change know it,” the Southern Patriot observed. “Economic strangulation is the only weapon strong enough to defeat them; if the people who believe in democracy provide the money to help them defeat this weapon, they will win.” In November 1964 the National Student Association organized the one-day Thanksgiving Fast for Freedom, which raised $34,000 for the Delta Ministry’s efforts to get food to hungry people in counties where local officials refused to participate in federal food programs. When some workers at the Andrews Brothers Plantation in Tribbett were evicted after going on strike to demand an eight-hour day and higher wages, the Delta Ministry provided tents, food, and medical care to the families. Assistance from these and other initiatives enabled African Americans who might have had to leave the state to remain in the region and continue to fight for their rights. Civil rights groups and northern donors provided similar aid to local activists in many other communities, and traditions of sharing among rural black southerners also mitigated the effects of economic reprisals. Lawrence Guyot praised local people’s persistence, which signaled to white supremacists that it was “no simple matter to dispose of sufficient Negroes to eradicate their potential political strength.”5
Civil rights workers viewed the decision to leave or to stay as a political one and often described those who remained in the South in heroic terms. Mississippi activist Joseph Wheatley explained, “Relocation is a dirty word to Negroes here in the Delta. The white politicians think it is the social remedy. Our people want to build decent homes and stay here.” Sue Geiger made the same point in explaining why local residents opposed a plan to relocate 300 black families to the Gulf Coast area instead of letting them use antipoverty funds to build homes in Washington County. “We see this as a plan to move Negroes to an area where they will have no political power,” she stated. “This is their home. We say they have a right to jobs and homes here.” In Lowndes County, Alabama, Robert Strickland told a reporter in 1967, “The jack rabbits have stopped running,” meaning that “frightened Negroes have left, that those remaining intend to stay put and fight for a better life.”6 Southwest Alabama Self-Help Housing, a group that applied for federal funding to help poor people build their own homes in Lowndes and several other counties, noted that many of the families evicted from the surrounding plantations had left the area, but “others have elected to stay in the county and help solve the problems of their native land. These people deserve the right to be given the chance to be productive citizens in this place of their choosing.” A follow-up proposal outlined the organization’s history and the tribulations these displaced workers endured after being laid off from their jobs, put out of their homes, and moving into a tent city in 1966: “Sanitation in this tent city was poor and winter’s cold was devastating. Yet they remained. They were threatened by Klansmen and Whites they had once called friends, yet they remained. Sometimes there was little or no food because the families had no adequate jobs after the evictions. Yet they remained. And because these people remained we see as a shining light illuminating the way saying this is America, the Land of the Free.”7
Pamphlet inviting poor people to a conference at the Delta Ministry’s headquarters in Mt. Beulah, Mississippi, January 1966. Michael J. Miller Civil Rights Collection, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi.
Asserting that people had a right to live where they chose and not be forced by economic circumstances to move away from their homes directly countered the arguments of those who thought market forces should dictate these decisions. When some activists in Louisiana proposed a program to assist small farmers in St. Landry Parish they noted that this intervention might be deemed useless by some economic theorists but made a case that diversifying into vegetable and livestock production could enable farmers to remain on the land. “Some people and experts would argue that migration is a natural movement and may even be beneficial to an area by removing persons who are un- or underemployed [and use] social services which raises the general tax burden,” they acknowledged. Yet out-migration only relocated poverty rather than solving it, as conditions in many of the nation’s urban neighborhoods showed. A better alternative was to provide training and loans for farm families to shift into vegetable production, which was labor intensive and, thanks to the region’s mild climate, could provide year-round income. This plan was “designed to arrest further migration from St. Landry Parish by helping the existing small farmers to make a better income where they are with what they have.” Similarly, the director of a literacy program in Lexington, Mississippi, explained that most black people did not accept that out-migration was a solution to mass unemployment. He told a reporter: “The power structure’s idea is to ship 5,000 Negroes out of the Delta and cut down that 2–1 Negro population ratio. Our idea is to bring in more industry and have the federal government supply public works jobs.”8
To make the case for government action to stem out-migration and for economic policies that enabled rural people to continue living in their home communities, activists drew attention to the failures of the economic system that were on display everywhere in the plantation regions and invited news reporters and government officials to come and see for themselves how free enterprise was working there. New York congressman Joseph Resnick visited Mississippi in November 1965 to meet with members of the MFDP and other local people, who showed him the results of unemployment, evictions, and denial of assistance by the administrators of federal farm programs and welfare agencies. Resnick publicly expressed his concern that none of the state’s leaders seemed to care about the plight of thousands of displaced workers who were losing their jobs and homes, and he told a reporter who asked why a representative from New York should concern himself with Mississippi’s affairs that black residents lacked anyone to speak for them in Congress. In a letter to Orville Freeman, Resnick stated that planters and local officials were blocking efforts to get food to hungry people and said he was “frightened at the lengths these people will go to keep the Negro from taking his rightful place in American society.” Reports of the USDA’s inaction and indifference circulated by civil rights groups led more than a dozen of Resnick’s congressional colleagues to inquire about the situation, ramping up the pressure on the agency to act.9
More publicity came in January 1966, when the MFDP and the Delta Ministry convened the Poor People’s Conference at Mt. Beulah. The event drew hundreds of participants from around Mississippi to discuss the problems caused by agricultural displacement and how they could encourage the government to do more. Attendees included Isaac Foster and Ida Mae Lawrence, farm laborers who had participated in the organizing efforts that led to the eviction of workers on the Andrews plantation, along with dozens of others who had lost their livelihoods and had nowhere to go. James Hartfield was unemployed and could not secure any help from welfare officials in Sunflower County, where he lived in a leaky, freezing shack. Viola Wall described the hardships she had faced that winter and how she scratched together an income by “cutting and selling firewood like a man.” Ora Wilson, a day laborer and single mother of four who was finding it impossible to support her family by chopping and picking cotton a few weeks of the year, decided to attend the meeting after hearing about it on the radio. “They said it was for poor peoples and, Lord knows, we were poor,” she stated. “Ever’body was hungry at that time and we sure was.”10
After discussing their plight and possible solutions, the unemployed and homeless workers considered occupying Greenville Air Force Base, a disused facility where 300 warm and dry buildings that could be used to house people inexplicably sat empty. Isaac Foster later recalled that almost everyone at the conference supported the plan, but they were also afraid. Then, “Mrs. Ida Mae Lawrence, who ain’t afraid of nobody, finally broke out with, ‘Dammit, I’m goin’.’ All of you too afraid, go home and eat some more greens.’ ” The MFDP’s Unita Blackwell indicated her willingness to join the protest, and the two women convinced Foster to go with them as “the man leader.” About fifty people eventually took part in the action, slipping onto the base in the early hours of January 31 with mattresses, blankets, food, and stoves.11 In a statement calling on President Johnson to provide immediate assistance for people who could not find work and lacked adequate incomes, they explained: “We are here because we are hungry. . . . We are here because we have no jobs. Many of us have been thrown off the plantations where we worked for nothing all of our lives. We don’t want charity. We demand our rights to jobs, so that we can do something with our lives and build us a future.” In response, federal authorities sent 140 military police to evict the protesters. The families found refuge in the tent city in Tribbett and expressed their intention to find a way to survive in Mississippi, with or without help from their government. Ida Mae Lawrence told reporters that the Johnson administration’s decision to evict them from the base showed that political leaders cared more about property than people, causing her to conclude, “There’s no way out but to begin your own beginning, whatever way you can.”12
The Greenville sit-in made national headlines and inspired more visits by reporters, congressional representatives, and government agents to investigate conditions in Mississippi and other southern states. Newsweek examined the circumstances that sparked the protest in its article “DP’s in the Delta” in February 1966, and a second report in March called displaced workers “the kindling of revolution.” An OEO official who visited several Delta counties in late February concurred with this assessment, observing that people were desperate, unable to secure housing or feed their families, and convinced that political leaders did not care if they lived or died. Worried that this might lead to more attempts to seize public or private property and perhaps food riots, he concluded: “Jobs, cash income, food, housing, medical care, education and training programs must reach Negro farm workers as soon as possible.” After touring some of the nation’s most depressed rural areas in 1967, Orville Freeman reported to President Johnson that he visited “dozens of miserable hovels, South and North, where families live in shocking poverty. . . . It matches in some instances the worst I have seen in less developed countries around the world.”13 In April that year the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty held hearings in Jackson, Mississippi, that provided a forum for residents to express their grievances and convinced some legislators that more government action was needed to solve the crisis. Following testimony of “malnutrition, unemployment, and actual starving,” committee member George Murphy called on the president to declare an emergency and take immediate steps to alleviate the suffering. At the opening of a second set of hearings held in the nation’s capital in July, Senator Jacob Javits emphatically rejected the notion that the situation was the result of natural economic forces that people just had to accept. “The United States does have agencies, the United States does have food, the United States does have the money to see that there is no poverty in this country,” he asserted.14
The publicity campaign put pressure on southern governments and nudged them toward accepting some forms of federal assistance they had previously shunned. After the Delta Ministry provided the USDA with a list of counties in Mississippi that did not have food programs and offered to distribute surplus commodities in those places itself, nine counties agreed to initiate programs, expanding access to 64,000 more people. Southern officials did not want radical civil rights groups coming into their communities and providing services to poor people, and they were equally afraid of federal intervention if they failed to act. The late 1960s saw a gradual increase in the number of rural southern counties that participated in the commodities or food stamp programs as activists and federal officials persuaded, cajoled, or threatened local leaders into accepting them. In March 1966 Mississippi became the first southern state to have food programs in every county. With help from an OEO grant, the state’s Department of Public Welfare planned to extend food assistance to half a million more poor people over the next six months. In a letter to congresswoman Edith Green, Orville Freeman explained: “The people of Mississippi do not like programs to come in from the outside. The threat of this program coming in meant that some of the constructive folks were able to convince some of the obstructionist ones that it was to the interest of Mississippi as well as the needy folks that this food be made available.”15 In July 1968 Freeman announced that the USDA planned to make sure that every one of the nation’s 1,000 poorest counties had food programs, stating that the agency was prepared to pay for administrative costs and operate programs itself if local governments refused. This initiative extended food assistance to another 4 million poor people nationwide, bringing the total to 10 million by 1970 and extending coverage to all but 22 of the nation’s 3,091 counties.16
The struggle to address the hunger crisis succeeded in forcing political leaders to accept some responsibility for alleviating economic hardship, but activists knew that simply handing out food to poor people was not enough. A leaflet prepared by the Freedom Information Service explained that the USDA’s surplus commodities program was designed for the benefit of large agribusinesses, not poor people. Growers produced more than they could sell at profitable margins, so the government purchased the extra food to keep farm incomes at a healthy level. This enabled landowners to invest in machinery and dispense with human laborers, who then relied on the government’s food programs to survive. As the leaflet noted, the system was an inadequate solution to poverty and invited questions regarding the sanity of the nation’s policy makers: “Poor people ask ‘is this the way a Great Society works?’ Without jobs poor people get poorer. Food only helps them stay alive and poorer longer.” Similarly, John Brown Jr. and other community organizers understood that their long-term goal must be to empower people to help themselves. Sometimes solving a problem meant pressuring those responsible for creating a problem to fix it, and sometimes it meant mobilizing resources within the community. “Real progress comes when people begin to do something for themselves,” Brown stated. “My judgment is that this is what the government, this is what everybody who believes in human development and human dignity should be about.”17
Just as much as did those who urged poor people to exercise their own initiative and strive for self-reliance, displaced laborers recognized the centrality of work to achieving economic success in the United States. Black southerners’ often expressed and deeply held desire for employment contradicted white racists’ claims that laziness and a preference for welfare handouts explained the high poverty rates in their communities. John Hatch recalled that even when there was no money to pay workers on the project he headed in Mississippi, “there was no shortage of volunteers. . . . The will to better yourself and to become involved and to expend energy. It was abundantly demonstrated.” As one black Mississippian emphasized, “People that are able to work want to work. We don’t want welfare. We want work to do, where we can make [a] living for our familys.” In a journal entry written in July 1966, Natchez antipoverty worker Marjorie Baroni described a woman she knew who wanted “very much to get off welfare” and could be helped if training programs were expanded to reach more people.18 Community organizers seeking to set up adult education classes and job training projects noted that local people responded enthusiastically and that there were not enough spots for everyone who wanted to participate. In April 1967 a meeting held to inform residents in a five-county area of Mississippi about a planned retraining program for agricultural workers drew 1,000 people for 300 available positions. Health care providers at an OEO-funded clinic in Bolivar County recalled, “People would walk twelve miles and sit in our front yards when we got up in the morning looking for jobs.” Similarly, South Delta Community Action Association in Louisiana reported receiving five times as many applicants as there were available employment opportunities in one of its programs.19
Federal administrators also observed evidence of the priority African Americans placed on employment. Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz corrected a Louisiana correspondent’s statement that “Negroes want handouts, not jobs,” by informing her: “Evidence speaks quite loudly to the contrary. The success of job-training programs proves that the disadvantaged want only a chance to stand on their own two feet. They want the opportunity which will enable them to be financially independent.” Officials at the OEO echoed this assertion in their 1968 annual report. “The large majority of poor people entering neighborhood centers in poverty areas every day are there seeking jobs, or training, or information on where to go for employment assistance,” they stated. “Decent jobs are basic to ending poverty.” The following year, the SCLC’s Ralph Abernathy reminded President Nixon’s new labor secretary that African Americans were still waiting for meaningful solutions to the unemployment problem. “All we are asking here is that we be given a chance to prove that we are not lazy and be given a chance to add to the productivity of the American system and stop having to take the degrading handouts of welfare,” he stated. Reliance on private businesses to generate enough jobs was ineffective, he argued, because the need was so much greater than the capacity of free enterprise alone to meet the demand for employment. Only a “massive Federal Effort” could hope to create the 3 million or more new jobs that were needed to absorb displaced workers.20
Although the resources political leaders allocated to antipoverty and job creation initiatives were not enough to solve the unemployment problem, federal officials did attempt to channel more aid to rural southern communities in the late 1960s. The Greenville sit-in led to a flurry of activity as the OEO, DOL, EDA, and USDA worked together and separately to convince poor people that the government was on their side. Within a few weeks of the protest the OEO and the DOL jointly pledged nearly $4 million for adult education and job training programs for 1,000 farmworkers in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Staff from the USDA, Job Corps, and Forest Service met with representatives from the MFDP and the NAACP in March 1966 and assured them that federal agencies were actively seeking ways to address rural poverty through food programs, job training, and literacy classes for displaced workers.21 The same month, officials at the EDA reported that they were making some progress in extending economic development efforts in Mississippi, quoting an aide to the governor as saying, “This will work now even though it would have been impossible a few months ago.” In addition to approving ten training programs in McComb, Greenville, Kosciusko, and Mound Bayou, the EDA worked with the MFDP and the Delta Ministry to promote small businesses and other self-employment opportunities for displaced workers. Officials from both the OEO and the EDA traveled to Mississippi to speak with state and local leaders, informing them about federal programs and encouraging them to work with civic organizations and community activists to alleviate poverty.22
Supporters of government intervention cited moral and pragmatic reasons for their position. Jacob Javits compared calls for relocating rural poor people to other parts of the country to initiatives that might be expected in totalitarian nations, not a democracy like the United States. “Population movements ‘encouraged’ to solve social problems are the greatest interference in private, individual lives, and have historically been the hallmark of tyrannical societies,” he stated. Noting the failure of southern segregationists to convince many African Americans to take up offers of free transportation to northern cities, Javits concluded that this proved “the great majority of southern Negroes, just like southern whites, obviously would prefer to live in the area of the Nation in which they were born and have lived.” As part of its Poor People’s Campaign in 1968, the SCLC outlined the vast disparities in wealth that existed in the nation and questioned whether spending $2 billion a month on the Vietnam War was a defensible use of taxpayers’ money when there were people starving at home. Surely, the SCLC suggested, the government could redirect some of these resources to people in need. Noting that poverty severely hindered people’s ability to enjoy the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence, these activists built on earlier arguments in favor of civil rights legislation to make a case for action based on the need to fully realize national ideals.23
Other observers highlighted practical reasons for investing resources in distressed communities and argued that failing to do so would cost the nation more in the long run. Texas lawyer and congressman Wright Patman outlined the need for more rural development to address the impact of mechanization and agricultural displacement in an article that was read into the Congressional Record in March 1964. Unless something was done, he warned, the nation’s rural counties would be “little better than ‘poor farms,’ ” costing taxpayers “billions of dollars in relief payments to support the destitute inhabitants of these economically blighted areas.” The movement of displaced workers to urban areas promoted by some economists and business leaders was not an effective solution, both because cities lacked the capacity to absorb all of them and because of the strong attachments most of them felt to their local communities. For these reasons, Patman asserted, “it makes better sense to help rural people develop new opportunities at home. And this can be done through the cooperation of government and people.”24
Uprisings by poor people in Watts, Harlem, Detroit, and other inner-city communities helped undermine the arguments of those who promoted out-migration as a solution to the South’s economic problems. As numerous observers pointed out, this approach did not eliminate poverty but simply moved it from one place to another. Urban riots drew attention to the shared experiences of African Americans in the North and South and the futility of trying to solve problems in the nation’s cities without first addressing the mass displacement of rural workers. An analysis prepared by the USDA in October 1966 asserted, “The weed of urban poverty—slums, ghettoes, overcrowding, crime—has its roots in a rural America lacking enough jobs and health and education services—the essentials needed to halt the out-migration of people from country to city.” The following month, Assistant Secretary of Commerce Eugene Foley told an audience at the annual conference of the Regional Planning Association that the EDA planned to make more grants and loans available to rural communities in an attempt to alleviate problems created by the influx of southern migrants to northern cities. Officials at the OEO also perceived the rural-urban poverty connection and sought to fund demonstration projects that would “give the government a plan for discouraging out-migration of the poor from the rural area to the urban slums in spite of prophets of doom and gloom about the inevitability of this trend.” When Congress made amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act in 1967, it specifically directed the OEO to fund rural programs that provided alternatives to migration and enabled people to become economically self-sufficient in their own communities. Meanwhile, President Johnson’s National Advisory Committee on Rural Poverty gave rural development the same moral imperative as civil rights legislation by proclaiming that all Americans had the right to equal economic opportunity regardless of “race, religion, national origin, or place of residence.”25
White southerners were not monolithically opposed to this idea, and advocates for economic development sometimes managed to gain allies among regional elites and other residents of rural southern counties. “I always thought we had foolish policies to try to encourage blacks to leave the south,” recalled native Louisianian and agricultural economist Ray Marshall. “That always struck me as one of the dumbest things we ever tried.” Marshall thought a better solution would be to upgrade people’s education and skills to prepare them for participation in a changing economy. When EDA representative Wilfred Leland visited Mississippi in December 1965 to impress upon the state’s local planning committees that the agency would not grant funds for projects that excluded African Americans from the benefits, he found that, contrary to expectations, some of the people he spoke with welcomed the initiative and expressed their willingness to cooperate. “Those leaders who favor economic expansion in the area (there are some who oppose it) recognize the need to develop and use the potential skills of Negro, Indian, and white workers to meet the labor requirements for such expansion,” he stated. He recommended reorganizing the committees to replace reactionaries who resisted such efforts with people who had more progressive leanings. Mississippi state senator A. J. Foster might have been an example of the type of person Leland had in mind. Foster served as executive director for a three-county antipoverty program in the northeastern part of the state and wrote to Orville Freeman in April 1966 to express support for the USDA’s efforts to pay more attention to small farmers and displaced workers. Noting that there were half a million people in the area who relied on federal food programs for survival, Foster stated, “A few of these people don’t want anything any better, but by and large these are good poor people that want homes and independence just as any other red-blooded American. They will work if given any incentive.” Foster cited the success of New Deal programs that loaned money to people to buy land in the 1930s, which produced “educated nice families who are our leading citizens now.” Like those earlier generations, the people who were being thrown off the plantations could prosper and make valuable contributions to their communities “if given the proper opportunity and just a little help.”26
Some of Senator John Sparkman’s white constituents in Alabama supported similar solutions to their state’s racial and economic problems. Jennie Burrell asked the senator to support fair housing and civil rights legislation pending in Congress so that the legacies of past racism would not haunt future generations, expressing her willingness to pay higher taxes if necessary to carry out the programs. “I do not feel these taxes will be a burden,” Burrell wrote. “I feel they will be ‘money in the bank,’ an investment in my children’s future and in the future of their country.” Claire Benjamin stated that she was looking to Congress to “show the Negro that we are indeed willing to give them a decent beginning and a share in our hope” by enacting a program of guaranteed employment for all workers seeking jobs. Charles Watson also believed Alabama’s political leaders should “make a greater effort now to improve the life and rights of the Negro in the state” and urged Sparkman to support antipoverty and job training programs. Similarly, Alabama’s director of vocational education urged the senator to vote in favor of legislation providing federal funding for job training and economic development, telling him that it was hard to secure money for these purposes at the state and local levels.27
Mounting pressure from activists and the threat of federal intervention in the late 1960s made regional elites more responsive to demands for initiatives aimed at addressing unemployment and out-migration. Governor Paul Johnson in Mississippi warned his constituents that the only way to preserve states’ rights was to introduce reforms that demonstrated a commitment to solving social problems. Mississippians could either start doing this themselves or face the prospect of federal agencies doing it for them. In March 1966 the EDA’s assistant for intergovernmental relations, William Nagle, reported that the resistance many Mississippians had shown toward economic development efforts was abating and that state officials had invited staff from the agency to help them develop programs for retraining displaced workers. Later the same month, Nagle noted that some white as well as black residents supported the EDA’s efforts and held it in high regard. He identified several leading white moderates, including state treasurer William Winter, Greenville mayor Pat Dunne, and Clarksdale plantation owner Andrew Carr, who seemed “genuinely interested in creating jobs and solving unemployment problems for all the people of the area.” An article in Business Week in June 1968 also noticed a change in attitude among legislators and business leaders in Mississippi, quoting Jackson banker Nat Rogers as saying, “In the past, the so-called ‘no-never’ attitude dominated. We now know that the poor, both white and Negro, must be educated and trained, not only for their own benefit, but for the public at large.”28
For these and other reasons, the late 1960s saw a slight thawing in white southerners’ attitudes toward the War on Poverty. Sometimes this shift was motivated by pure self-interest, as when local political leaders filed applications for federal grants themselves to prevent other organizations from receiving funds and to ensure that they retained control of any money coming into their communities. Southern governors also tried to minimize disruptions to the existing social order by staffing State Economic Opportunity Offices (SEOOs) with people they trusted not to demonstrate independence or mobilize challenges to their own authority. The governors of Louisiana and Mississippi both came under fire in March 1965 for appointing segregationists with little experience or interest in working with poor people to head their state antipoverty offices.29 Meanwhile, Alabama governor George Wallace frequently interfered with appointments to the boards of directors of programs in his state to prevent people he viewed as too militant from taking part. An OEO report on southern antipoverty initiatives expressed concern that a number of community action agencies (CAAs) were operated by the region’s “lily-white political power structures” with “one or two safe Negroes on a board, or parallel Negro subcommittees that meet to approve the minutes of the main board.”30
At the same time, there was genuine goodwill and willingness on the part of some white southerners to make serious attempts to alleviate poverty. In Wilcox County, Alabama, an investigator found several white business owners who were willing to quietly support the local SCLC branch’s efforts to set up a CAA, though they could not be too open about it for fear of retaliation from segregationists. Several of them agreed to serve on the agency’s board of directors but did not attend meetings. Camden mayor Reginald Albritton explained, “The whites don’t know I’m on the board. If they did, they’d use it against me. It would be pure dynamite for me to go to a meeting.” Yet he and the other secret board members wanted to see change come to the community. “The other whites on the board feel as I do that they’re (the Negroes) are human beings and need help,” the mayor stated. “They’d like to see these programs.”31
Activists in Mississippi were also not entirely without white allies. L. C. Dorsey recalled that white landowner Ben Walker was “an unusual man who really did not believe in all the nonsense that some of the other plantation owners professed” and that he was one of several local farmers who offered help to the evicted and blacklisted workers from the Andrews plantation in Tribbett. The president of the board of supervisors in Wilkinson County also sympathized with social justice efforts. Writing to OEO director Sargent Shriver in November 1966, he expressed agreement with Shriver’s decision to override Governor Johnson’s veto of an antipoverty project and stated, “This area needs help real bad. I have been trying hard for some time to bring in an industry to our county but so far I have not had very much luck.” Lexington newspaper editor Hazel Brannon Smith castigated opponents of the War on Poverty and called on the state’s congressional representatives to support funding for programs that helped poor people. In particular, Smith praised the OEO’s Migrant and Seasonal Farm Workers Program for giving displaced farmworkers the chance to retrain for other jobs.32
In Coahoma County, Andrew Carr played a key role in setting up the local CAA, Coahoma Opportunities Inc. (COI). Assistant Director Bennie Gooden explained that Carr “opened doors of the power structure. We couldn’t get the Board of Supervisors or any local officials to meet with us. He’s rich enough, and influential enough, and brave enough not to have to give in to the pressure.” Asked what motivated him, Carr stated that he had always believed in equal rights and thought the injustices inflicted on black people threatened social stability in his community. “I’ve got five children,” he said. “I want peace here.” Carr’s brother Oscar, a banker who was not afraid to anger local segregationists by loaning money to African Americans, also helped secure white leaders’ support for the project, telling those who were reluctant to join the effort that the alternative was more federal intervention in their community and an antipoverty program run by black people. In terms that closely resembled the analyses presented by civil rights activists seeking to address the economic legacies of Jim Crow, Andrew Carr told OEO investigators: “The Negro in the Mississippi Delta has never really had help to realize his potential development. You’ve had help; I’ve had help; the anti-poverty program is the Negro’s chance for help.”33
Against the arguments of free market proponents who presented out-migration as natural and inevitable, advocates for government intervention asserted that agricultural modernization need not force thousands of people from their homes. Social justice activists viewed the poverty and suffering in rural southern communities as unnecessary and intolerable, defined inaction as an immoral violation of human rights, and proposed alternative solutions that respected displaced workers’ desire to stay in the rural counties where they had lived all their lives. By publicizing conditions in the plantation regions, activists convinced federal and southern officials to act and drew some white allies into the cause. At the same time, antipoverty efforts continued to face obstruction from white supremacists. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the OEO’s community action programs emerged as a key battlefield in the struggle for racial equality and economic justice.