The War on Poverty and Community Action
President Johnson’s State of the Union address in January 1964 expressed many of the same desires felt by displaced workers in the South: equal treatment under the law, jobs with adequate pay, decent homes, access to education, and economic security for those who were too old or sick to work. Johnson pointed out that as the richest, most powerful nation in the world, the United States surely had the capacity to ensure a comfortable standard of living for all its citizens, but racism and inadequate incomes excluded many people from the opportunities that others took for granted. He promised to wage an “unconditional war on poverty” and listed a slew of proposals that aimed to resolve the problem: enacting youth job programs, revamping the unemployment insurance system, extending coverage of the federal minimum wage to more workers, broadening access to food stamps, increasing funding for education, investing in infrastructure, ensuring affordable housing, and providing health care for the elderly.1 Many of these ideas made their way into the Economic Opportunity Act that Congress passed later that year. Along with the array of new programs to assist poor people, the legislation’s provision for a special office within the government charged with solving poverty raised hopes that the administration was serious about eliminating the inequities that Johnson targeted in his speech.
In its first few years of existence, the Office of Economic Opportunity acted as an ally in the freedom struggle, helping activists to bypass the racist political structures that hindered black southerners’ access to federal programs. During this phase, the agency fostered a variety of innovative projects, including the early childhood development program Head Start, self-help housing initiatives that offered training and employment to poor people as they built their own homes, and comprehensive neighborhood health centers that addressed the social and environmental causes of illness in addition to providing medical care to low-income communities. Antipoverty programs that provided services and job opportunities for poor people encouraged displaced plantation workers to stay in the South and work to improve conditions in their communities instead of migrating away. At the same time, the OEO’s mandate to include poor people themselves in planning and operating programs enabled rural black southerners to directly influence the distribution of resources in their towns and counties, threatening to destabilize long-standing race and class hierarchies.
The War on Poverty undermined the tight control that white landowners and business leaders had maintained over their communities, and they responded by attacking and obstructing antipoverty efforts. Opponents of government intervention to solve economic problems publicized instances of mismanagement and corruption to support their argument that the programs were a waste of taxpayer money. Racist rhetoric and Klan violence discouraged participation by poor white people and created the perception that Great Society initiatives only benefited African Americans. As the decade progressed, the War on Poverty increasingly competed with the war in Vietnam for attention and resources. These factors all contributed to a growing reluctance among citizens and their representatives in Congress to spend money on social programs. Within a few years of promising to end poverty and ensure an equal chance of economic success for all Americans, the Johnson administration backed down on this commitment. Political pressure and budget cuts in the late 1960s weakened the strong support that the OEO had previously given to grassroots social justice organizations, generating suspicion and bitterness toward the government among participants in antipoverty projects. By the end of the decade, African Americans were coming to see that they could not rely on national political leaders to support their struggles any more than they could depend on state or local politicians.
Southern political leaders’ indifferent response to economic problems in the early 1960s convinced many analysts that federal action was needed to address unemployment and poverty in the region. The framers of the Economic Opportunity Act understood that leaving control of government programs in the hands of white elites meant that black southerners were unlikely to benefit from them, and they included measures designed to bypass local governments and get resources directly into the hands of poor people. As the legislation made its way through Congress, some representatives wanted to include provisions that preserved states’ rights by allowing governors to review and veto plans for CAPs. The suggestion drew an exasperated response from Washington senator Warren Magnuson. “Some charge ‘leave it to the local communities,’ ” he stated. “Where do they think the problems have existed? And where do they think action has been lacking, or lagging?” Senator Robert F. Kennedy also asserted that a departure from previous approaches was necessary, noting the inadequacies of existing public assistance programs and the general sense of powerlessness among beneficiaries. Kennedy praised measures that involved poor people in designing antipoverty programs, stating that this gave them “a real voice in their institutions.” The Louisiana Weekly suggested that by providing a direct line to federal resources and a way around the discriminatory practices of local officials, the new law could have an even more transformative effect on black southerners than civil rights legislation.2
The War on Poverty did not aim merely to provide social services but also to empower poor people to change their communities for the better. An important aspect of the provisions for setting up CAPs was that they allowed for private nonprofit groups as well as public entities to seek designation as CAAs and receive OEO funding. This enabled civil rights groups and other organizations to propose projects of their own in places where local political leaders failed to act, and it also meant they could hire people with limited education who were typically shut out of government positions because of civil service regulations.3 The first CAAs to form in many rural southern communities were extensions of the black freedom movement, organized and operated by the same people who were involved in desegregation and voter registration efforts. The Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), which received a grant to operate a Head Start program in summer 1965, was headquartered at the Delta Ministry’s facilities in Mt. Beulah and included numerous veterans of the civil rights movement on its staff. Unita Blackwell and L. C. Dorsey both led efforts to establish Head Start centers in their local communities. Dorsey called antipoverty work “a continuation of the civil rights movement,” noting that the skills used to teach people “how to make the system work for them, how to go to the Welfare Department with records and demand your rights, [and] how to go to elected officials and get things done in your community” were the same as those she learned registering people to vote. Holmes County activist Bernice Johnson recalled community centers being used for Head Start during the day and MFDP meetings at night, and participants across the state were members of other groups such as the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE as well. In Lowndes County, Alabama, civil rights leaders Robert Strickland, John Hulett, Frank Miles Jr., and Lillian McGill were all involved in initiating antipoverty programs. An OEO official found significant overlap in the membership of local civil rights organizations and the county’s CAA board and noted that participants viewed these as part of the same struggle for social justice.4
These activists understood that economic and political progress for black southerners were closely entwined. As Lillian McGill explained, “We could win [elections] in this county if the poverty program gets enough people out of poverty so they can be independent when they go to the polls.” L. C. Dorsey thought the War on Poverty “freed a lot of black folks and poor whites from a strangle hold economy that just didn’t let you live, or barely let you live. We went to work for wages that we never dreamed you could earn in Mississippi, and people were freed for the first time from a system that really controlled you through the threat of starvation.” Similarly, a paper prepared for CORE volunteers in Louisiana in June 1965 highlighted the potential for real challenges to existing conditions that could emerge out of poor people’s participation in Great Society initiatives. “One might say that in any parish in Louisiana it is a political step for a Negro Headstart program even to exist,” the author noted. “Placed in this perspective one can readily see the political value of Headstart as an instrument to build up confidence in the Negro community.” A group of observers who visited a Head Start program in Concordia Parish later that year concluded that it was working in exactly that way. More than 500 local black people were employed by the project, and there was a growing sense among participants that they could do things to improve their own lives and broader social conditions.5
In Bolivar County, Mississippi, two related antipoverty projects emerged that provided examples of what rural poor people could achieve with a little outside help. The county was the second poorest in the nation, with a median annual income less than $1,000 per year. The unemployment rate for black workers was in the double digits, and many families lived in substandard housing lacking adequate plumbing or access to clean drinking water. Sixty out of every 1,000 black babies died within a year after being born, a rate that was three times the national average and comparable with those in the most impoverished developing nations of the world. Surveying conditions in this plantation region in the summer of 1964, H. Jack Geiger of the Medical Committee for Human Rights realized that “one didn’t have to go to Africa, Southeast Asia, or Latin America to find poverty. There was a third world within the United States.”6
Geiger worked with fellow activist Count Gibson of Tufts Medical School in Boston to propose building a health center in the all-black town of Mound Bayou to offer free treatment and preventive care to poor people in the community. The project aimed to go beyond traditional approaches to health care and attack the root causes of disease instead of merely treating problems after they developed. This meant addressing a wide range of social problems, including poverty, unemployment, housing, sanitation, inadequate education, and political powerlessness, all of which prevented poor people from leading healthy and productive lives. In their application for OEO funding, Geiger and Gibson argued that a comprehensive approach to health care that treated the whole community, not just individual patients, could be “a route to social, economic, and political change” in the region. Over opposition from white doctors and political leaders in Mississippi, the OEO agreed to provide a grant of $1.5 million for the construction and operation of a comprehensive health center to serve a population of 14,000 poor people in Bolivar and several neighboring counties.7
The Tufts-Delta Health Center (TDHC) opened in Mound Bayou in November 1967, housed initially in a temporary clinic and moving into a newly constructed, modern facility in December 1968. The project combined direct treatment for illnesses with efforts to create a healthier environment by improving sanitation systems, digging ditches and wells, fitting fly screens, and repairing the ramshackle houses that many poor people inhabited. Health center nurses visited the homes of all new patients to assess the needs of entire households and help families address problems in their physical surroundings that contributed to ill health. “We ask where the family’s water comes from, where the outhouse is located, how many people live in the building (usually one or two rooms), and if they have any income,” nurse obstetrician Stella Simpson explained. “Then we make referrals to the various departments, including sanitation, so they can remedy existing problems.”8
In addition to treating roughly 200 people a day at the clinic or in their homes, the TDHC offered adult education classes, provided technical training, and created dozens of jobs that were filled by local people. Many of these employees were former plantation workers who had received very limited formal education. The health center helped them earn high school diplomas or attend college, taught them new skills, and opened avenues to successful careers in nursing, nutrition, social work, environmental health, office management, administration, and other areas. L. C. Dorsey found employment at the center as an outreach worker, took evening classes to earn her high school diploma, and went on to complete a Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Nurse’s aide Irene Williams later recalled how working at the center changed her life. Williams grew up in a sharecropping family in Round Lake, east of Mound Bayou. After dropping out of school in the fifth grade to work in the cotton fields, she married young and went to work with her husband on a white man’s farm. Eventually the couple bought some land in Mound Bayou and built their own home there using lumber salvaged from condemned houses, but with seven children to support they still struggled financially. Soon after the center opened Williams secured a trainee position at the clinic that paid fifty dollars a week and opened up a new world of opportunity. “It was wonderful,” she stated. “I was able to raise my children half decent, give them some of the things I never would have been able to give them. . . . I couldn’t have done that without [the TDHC], and I’m thankful.”9
The TDHC’s record of job creation and hiring from within the community was much better than those of many private enterprises that located in the rural South. In 1969 twenty-one of the center’s twenty-six nursing staff were local people.10 A year later the TDHC had approximately 200 employees, including 180 from Bolivar County. Some of the workers had previously been subsisting on food stamps or the surplus commodities program and were now earning good incomes as managers of the health center’s own supplemental food programs. According to Jack Geiger, as TDHC training programs prepared more people for employment, “local residents filled more and more of the health center jobs, used their salaries to build decent homes and send their children to college, and taught us all lessons about resilience in the face of adversity.”11
The TDHC also empowered local residents to shape the future of their community by encouraging them to develop and implement ideas of their own. The first phases of the project began before the clinic opened and involved canvassing the service area to determine residents’ health care needs. Organizers and local volunteers visited rural people’s homes and invited them to mass meetings where they could discuss their concerns and help shape the development of the health center. It soon became clear from these conversations that although access to medical treatment was important, certain more basic needs must be met before poor people could achieve better health. Staff members reported that at a meeting in Rosedale, one woman expressed “thanks to Tufts, God and the Government” but told them “if we wished to get to the cause of sickness as we had said, we should look at the inadequate food supply which she felt to be a big cause.” Around 3,000 people in the service population were malnourished, and doctors saw some patients who were “slowly starving to death.”12 The TDHC responded to the problem by stocking food in its pharmacy and giving out prescriptions for groceries that were filled by local stores, explaining to OEO officials who questioned these practices that people were hungry, and the treatment for hunger was food. These measures offered immediate relief for some families, but an idea for a more long-term solution came from local residents: give these agricultural workers access to land, and they could grow food to feed themselves. Tufts-Delta organizer John Hatch explained, “People did not view commodities as the solution and wondered why the government wanted to ship food into Mississippi when they knew how to grow it, were living on top of the richest soil in the world and did not mind working.”13
With help from some black farmers who provided land and equipment, donations from northern supporters, and additional funds raised through fish fries and barbecues, 900 of the county’s poorest families joined together to form the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative (NBCFC) in April 1967. The project received an additional boost when the OEO approved a $150,000 grant as part of its effort to encourage demonstration programs that experimented with innovative solutions to poverty. In the spring and summer of 1968, the NBCFC employed roughly 250 members growing vegetables for $4 in cash plus $6 in food credit per day. The remaining members purchased food from the cooperative at discounted prices. The NBCFC produced more than a million pounds of food in its first season and effectively solved the hunger problem in Bolivar County.14
Not content to be just another food program dependent on government funding, participants researched food-processing and marketing possibilities with the goal of becoming a self-sustaining enterprise. A Ford Foundation grant in 1969 enabled them to buy more land, expanding the cooperative’s growing space to 500 acres. That year the NBCFC provided employment for more than 300 families and produced enough vegetables to supply its members and seven local hot lunch programs for senior citizens and school children, along with some surplus produce that was sold in New Orleans and Detroit. The co-op also built an office building and storage shed, held workshops, and sent staff members to economic development conferences that explored the future of vegetable production in the Delta. A progress report for 1969 stated, “Our first goal was to help people out of malnutrition. We have done it. Now we are moving to help people out of poverty, which is what caused the malnutrition. . . . We are strong and still growing. We have the future potential for economic independence.”15
The TDHC fostered political as well as economic autonomy by encouraging local residents to take an active part in planning and administering its programs. Residents in the towns and hamlets within the target area chose representatives to serve on local health associations whose members met regularly to decide how to address the needs of their constituents. Stella Simpson reported in October 1968: “Each little community in the area now has a well organized group who sort of takes charge of the little things such as finding someone who will drive patients to the clinic from their particular area and getting a house or other building as a place from which to dispense clothes and where we can hold screening and prenatal clinics.” By February 1970 ten local health associations had been organized, comprising a total membership of 2,835 people. Delegates from each of these groups also served on the area-wide North Bolivar County Health Council (NBCHC), an advisory board to the TDHC. Organizers deliberately placed as many projects and decisions as possible in the hands of the council rather than health center staff to enable local residents to gain managerial experience. The long-term goal was for the NBCHC to gradually take on more responsibilities and eventually assume control over the project.16
Participation in the health associations offered rural poor people opportunities to express their views, engage in democratic decision making, and envision alternatives to the social structures that created the problems they were working to solve. In some cases attempts to address the root causes of poverty and illness led to direct confrontations with the people in power. When several clients reported that the white woman in charge of the local post office had made them wait several days before giving them their welfare checks, TDHC staff filed a complaint that resulted in her dismissal.17 In August 1970 a group of residents in Rosedale organized a boycott of white-owned stores and sent a letter to the mayor demanding better water and sewage systems, housing code enforcement, streetlights, and paved roads in the black neighborhood, along with more hiring of African Americans by the municipal government and private businesses. The NBCHC endorsed the boycott and urged members of each local health association to donate funds to help sustain it. Health association members also engaged in voter registration activities, as did many staff members when they were off work. One of the TDHC’s local trainees, Johnny Todd, later became the first black mayor of Rosedale. Whereas some critics viewed such activities as deviating from the TDHC’s health care mission, participants in the project saw connections between political structures and social conditions in their communities. They attributed the poor health of black residents to the neglect of their needs by existing officeholders, and they sought to replace the people in power with elected officials more responsive to their concerns. Consequently, Jack Geiger observed, “there was a real translation of community organization out of this project into political leadership.”18
In addition to challenging the authority of the white men who dominated most of the county’s local governments, TDHC participants upset power relations within the black community in Mound Bayou and the surrounding countryside. Much like their white counterparts in other parts of the state, the black professionals and business leaders who made up the town’s political elite held rural poor people in low regard, viewing them as unintelligent, incompetent, and largely responsible for their own poverty. Nor were they above exploiting the region’s plantation workers for their own ends. Two poorly run fraternal hospitals existed in Mound Bayou before the arrival of the TDHC, chiefly for the purpose of extracting contributions from members in return for substandard service. According to one resident, these entities resembled the town as a whole in being “just a business run by some Black people to rob other Black people.”19 Most poor people struggled to pay the fees charged by the hospitals, and when state legislators passed new regulations in the 1950s that required thousands of dollars in renovations, the hospitals themselves were pushed to the brink of bankruptcy. In conjunction with its grant to establish the TDHC, the OEO provided funds that enabled the fraternal hospitals to merge and form the Mound Bayou Community Hospital (MBCH) in 1967. The MBCH was supposed to provide free hospital treatment that complemented the TDHC’s outpatient services, but the hospital did not always hold up its end of the deal. Stella Simpson and other observers reported that MBCH administrators sometimes denied admission to patients, charged others for services that were paid for by the OEO grant, and used the hospital to enrich themselves rather than providing health care to poor people. Resentful of the competition posed by the TDHC and alarmed by the growing assertiveness of its rural poor clientele, Mound Bayou leaders sought to limit the health center’s disruptive potential by pressuring the OEO to turn control of the project over to themselves.20 The situation in Mound Bayou exposed the class dimensions of conflicts that manifested as racial tensions in other southern communities. More than just attempts to preserve white supremacy, opposition to antipoverty initiatives were also aimed at maintaining economic structures that enabled some people to become wealthy at the expense of others.
Throughout the plantation regions, the transformative effects of the War on Poverty were increasingly evident. The employment opportunities that CAPs generated gave former sharecroppers who had previously been shunned by private employers a chance to prove that they were capable of acquiring the skills needed to perform tasks other than picking cotton, with results that often surprised people who had been skeptical of the value of these programs. In 1967 an engineer in Coahoma County who worked with two ten-man crews of trainees from COI wrote to the CAA’s director to praise its achievements. After admitting to initially having “misgivings about certain aspects of the so-called poverty program,” he explained how the dedication, competence, and production record of COI’s trainees caused a shift in his thinking. “The ‘Operation Main Stream’ Program is one which I can heartily endorse based on the experience we have had with our work crews,” he wrote. “In my opinion, it is an extremely worthwhile program giving suitable and dignified employment to those who obviously want to work. The work accomplished by these crews is in turn an asset and enhancement to the communities in which they live.” Similarly, the board of supervisors in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, emphasized the positive effects of its local Neighborhood Youth Corps, stating, “This program has made a great impact on our county from both an economical and cultural stand point. A great majority of these enrollees have been taken off the welfare rolls and are making a livelihood for themselves.”21
Participants in antipoverty programs developed other useful skills in addition to training for specific jobs. Coahoma Opportunities Inc. offered a broad range of services, including Head Start and adult education programs, legal counseling, small business development assistance, and a credit union that provided low-cost financial services and freed poor people from dependence on local loan sharks. A program that served 459 people in Wilcox County, Alabama, focused on “reading, writing, communicative skill, consumer education, availability of helpful agencies within their reach and individual worth and dignity,” according to project director Thomas Threadgill. Classes that taught basic math, accounting, and financial management enabled people to better navigate the economic system and avoid exploitative credit arrangements that enticed them to borrow money at high interest rates. Threadgill reported that families that had been “trapped in debt for years” were now paying some of it off, and people who had marked their signatures with an X all their lives were “now able, with dignity, to sign their names.” Another CAP in rural Alabama helped seasonal farmworkers secure places in an MDTA project and transfer into higher-paying jobs after completing their training, encouraged tenants and landowners to work together in repairing substandard housing, and increased voter registration among participants in the program from 47 percent to 90 percent.22
The War on Poverty’s impact went beyond improvements in the lives of individual participants to encompass entire communities. In Wilcox County, investigators noted that employment for sixty people made possible by an OEO grant of $302,081 meant that $20,000 in wages and salaries was injected into the local economy every month. When the money spent for supplies and services was factored in, they estimated the impact on the area’s businesses to be $50,000 a month. Staff of the TDHC in Mississippi used their OEO grant money as leverage to enhance banking services in the area. After letting it be known that they had $2 million a year to deposit in a local bank that was willing to establish a branch in Mound Bayou, hire African Americans as tellers, and make loans in a nondiscriminatory manner, they found an eager taker in the Bank of Bolivar County. Described by Jack Geiger as the “smallest, previously most racist bank in the region,” its owners nonetheless jumped at the offer because “whatever kind of trouble they had with black they didn’t have with green.” Similarly, evaluators of COI in Coahoma County observed that local businesses benefited from workers’ upgraded skills, and the presence of a more highly trained labor force could help recruit industries to the area. In Greenville, Mississippi, a local zipper manufacturing plant snapped up all fifty-nine graduates of one training program as soon as they graduated in March 1966, reflecting the demand for skilled labor. Some analysts highlighted the return on taxpayers’ dollars as additional justification for the government’s investments in antipoverty programs. According to one study, for every dollar spent on a high school equivalency education program that helped migrant and seasonal farmworkers secure better jobs, participants returned $1.96 in federal taxes to the national treasury and saved the government $2.73 in expenditures on welfare and other social services.23
Along with the economic benefits, observers noted significant social benefits that resulted from the War on Poverty. Citizens who had previously felt neglected and shut out of mainstream institutions found their voices and became active, engaged members of their communities. Unita Blackwell explained that through inclusion in their local CAPs, “people learned coming off the plantations that they could make some decisions. . . . They learned that they could argue with one another and try to reason and found out they could make some decisions for themselves.” The OEO reported in May 1968 that more than half of the employees in CAPs nationwide were “non-professional residents of the areas served—who were poor until employed.” In addition, more than 51,000 people from low-income target populations served on CAP boards and advisory committees, helping to set policy and determine priorities.24
Poor people’s ideas and expertise not only shaped the direction of OEO programs but also influenced more traditional government bureaucracies. The DOL, the USDA, HEW, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) all altered some of their policies to make it easier for people with limited education and income to qualify for loans, job training, housing assistance, food programs, and other forms of federal aid. Community action also pushed state and local agencies to better meet the needs of poor residents. In Coahoma County, the late 1960s saw the inclusion of a nonwhite representative on the local welfare board and the drafting of an economic development plan that paid some attention to poor people’s concerns. The county’s Chamber of Commerce and a few banks and stores also made efforts to include or hire black people. The OEO reported in 1969 that studies by several outside research firms showed CAPs were “a significant factor in bringing about improvements in public employment services, public schools, public welfare agencies, and major private welfare agencies.”25
In some communities CAPs helped white and black residents to bridge the racial divide. A visit to an adult education program run by Systematic Training and Redevelopment (STAR) in Mississippi led an OEO consultant to predict that it would go a long way toward alleviating white racism in the region. “Caucasian students I talked to all reported the same feelings: Initially wary of their first experience in an integrated situation, they became rapidly enthusiastic members of their classes, devoted to their teachers, and reported feeling a real kinship with their fellow students, regardless of color,” he wrote.26 One STAR worker reported seeing the sheriff of a small rural town chatting amicably on the street with two black women that he now worked with in the program and calling two white women over to meet them. This example of friendly interracial interaction was “the kind of thing that had never been seen in that town before.” Administrators of Mid-State Opportunity, Inc., another Mississippi CAA, also emphasized how antipoverty efforts fostered interracial cooperation around the state. Previously, there had been little communication between white and black Mississippians, but OEO rules stipulating that all segments of society be included in planning and implementing programs forced people to cooperate. “The public is now accepting leaders of both races working and planning together,” they stated, citing this as a laudable achievement of the War on Poverty. A federal investigator who surveyed fifteen southern communities and interviewed more than one hundred people for a report to the Senate Appropriations Committee in 1967 reached the same conclusion. “The progress which has been made in the past two years in racial harmony through anti-poverty programs in the Southeastern area of the country is almost unbelievable,” he wrote. “There appears to be not only general acceptance of the antipoverty programs in Mississippi among the poor and Negro, but by business and a substantial segment of the white community.”27
As this report suggested, some opponents of the War on Poverty changed their minds once they saw the programs in action. In Lowndes County, Alabama, the positive impact of payroll checks and stipends associated with a retraining program for displaced workers circulating through the local economy opened residents’ eyes to the benefits of the project and established “a limited line of communication between the white community and the Negroes,” according to one account. By 1968, some plantation owners in the area who had earlier threatened tenant families with eviction were now encouraging them to participate in antipoverty programs.28 Administrators of similar efforts in Lexington, Mississippi, reported that the success of their early initiatives convinced some white residents to support projects they had previously opposed. The community now had a CAA and an MDTA program, the local courthouse was integrated, and white and black citizens were “communicating for the first time in 150 years.” The directors of CAPs in Bolivar and Sunflower Counties told an OEO analyst in June 1967 that when they first started the programs, “the idea of OEO was not at all accepted.” Now, however, most people were pleased with the CAPs and more were “being won over as time goes by.”29
Antipoverty programs demonstrated that there were viable alternatives to policies that simply discarded displaced agricultural workers or wrote off rural southern communities as unsalvageable. The realization that there were other options offered hope to poor black people and encouraged more of them to stay in the plantation counties rather than leave to seek jobs elsewhere. A handout explaining the purpose of the TDHC for local residents stated that its goal was to “penetrate the environmental circumstances which dictate to Negroes of Bolivar County the following message: ‘Die or get out.’ We hope to change this to ‘Live and let live, fully here in your HOME.”30 After losing 14 percent of its black population in the 1950s and another 18 percent in the 1960s, the rate of out-migration from the county slowed to 8 percent in the 1970s. As Jack Geiger explained to a Senate subcommittee, the project transformed the outlook of people who previously “had no reason to hope or dream.” The TDHC and NBCFC demonstrated that change was possible and inspired multiple locally initiated projects addressing a wide range of problems. An OEO investigator noticed similar life-changing effects on participants in antipoverty programs in Wilcox County, Alabama. “For the first time in their lives, the Negroes of Wilcox County have something that they can call their own . . . something to help them exert their role in their society,” he wrote. “That’s what the anti-poverty program has done for them.”31
Not everyone looked on these developments with the same enthusiasm shown by participants, administrators, and federal officials involved in the War on Poverty. Opponents of antipoverty programs viewed them as a waste of taxpayer money that undermined individualism and encouraged dependence on government. Mississippi newspaper columnist Thurman Sensing doubted that many poor people were being helped and maintained that a better way to solve social problems was by “giving free rein to the initiative and incentive of the individual citizen under the free enterprise system.” The AFBF also dismissed the effectiveness of antipoverty programs and stated that they “led to confusion, waste, and duplication of effort and have contributed to inflation and concentration of power in the federal government.” Plantation owner Leon Bramlett, who served for a while on the board of COI but resigned along with two other board members in November 1965, told an OEO investigator that antipoverty programs destroyed participants’ individual initiative and that “Negroes all over the Delta are taking the attitude that the world owes them a living.” Bramlett believed the programs were based on a “Robin Hood philosophy of taking from the provident to sustain the improvident” that bordered on socialism. A couple in Alabama expressed similar views in a letter to John Sparkman, informing him that they needed no help from the government and asking him to oppose expansions of the welfare state that threatened to destroy Americans’ property rights. Like many white southerners, they viewed the poverty problem and federal initiatives to address it in racial terms that pictured the people who benefited from government programs as black and those who paid for them as white. “We still have our pride, and are willing to do honest work to pay for the services we need,” they stated. “But the negro is not.”32
The racial overtones that imbued many criticisms reflected significant overlap between segregationists and opponents of the War on Poverty. Alabama congressman George Andrews viewed the Economic Opportunity Act as “nothing but another vehicle to be used to promote integration” and pledged to do all that he could to prevent it from passing. Thomas Abernethy also suspected the Johnson administration’s motives, telling a constituent that antipoverty money was being sent to Mississippi “for the purpose of financing and expanding” the civil rights movement. In 1966 an article in the New York Times noted that racist resistance to any program that offered equal access to black as well as white residents was one reason why southern governments were slow to apply for federal funds. Complaints by white citizens about the War on Poverty were frequently peppered with derogatory references to African Americans that cast them as lazy, promiscuous, illiterate, and lacking initiative. Objecting to the use of taxpayer funds to rehabilitate low-income neighborhoods in Monroe, Louisiana, Mrs. N. E. Roberts asserted, “Most of those Negroes are already on ‘welfare’—getting more in their welfare checks, for doing nothing, (mostly bringing illegitimate children into the world for the State to support) than some of us old folks are receiving—having worked and tried to earn our keep.” In Tunica County, Mississippi, journalist Neil Maxwell recorded similar sentiments expressed by local white residents who resented a job training program for displaced workers. One woman told him African Americans did not deserve any sympathy because they preferred to live on welfare. Plantation owner R. I. Abbey agreed. “They don’t want to get ahead; just want to sit and rock,” he stated.33
Some opponents of the War on Poverty used tactics that were similar to those they had deployed earlier against the civil rights movement. An anonymous flyer distributed to antipoverty workers in Mississippi warned them not to “mix with the niggers by teaching in nigger schools” and urged these “white trash scum traitors” to leave the area. White supremacists terrorized participants and torched a school that was being used for summer Head Start classes in Louisiana as well. Three churches associated with antipoverty projects in Lowndes County, Alabama, were also burned down.34 In Wilcox County, black people who were involved in setting up the local CAA suffered economic reprisals. “Formerly sympathetic banks are now refusing additional loans presumably because of the participation of these people in voting rights and poverty committee activities,” an OEO official reported. In 1967 a “summary of accomplishments and disappointments” concerning a seven-county project in rural Alabama listed several incidents of harassment and stated that in every community participants “were subjected to some intimidation from extremist groups.”35
Segregationist opposition and the dangers faced by antipoverty program staff, boards of directors, and enrollees made it difficult to involve white southerners in the projects. A common refrain from administrators was that it was virtually impossible to meet the OEO’s requirement that programs be integrated because white people refused to participate. In July 1965, African Americans working to initiate a CAP in Mississippi reported that they had tried to get support from local political and business leaders with no success. “Seemingly the white people don’t want to work with the negroes to work out this program, but we want to work with them, but to no avail,” they wrote. Antipoverty workers in Wilcox County also encountered problems convincing local white residents to support their efforts and ended up hiring white people from outside the region so that the project would not be staffed entirely by black people. The scarcity of white Alabamians willing to get involved was such that one man, Francis X. Walter of the Selma Inter-Religious Project, served on four different CAP boards in his area and shouldered a disproportionate responsibility for ensuring their eligibility for funding. As one black resident put it, “Francis integrates all our boards.”36
Even poor white people who stood to benefit from antipoverty programs were reluctant to participate. A survey conducted by a CAA in Alabama to prepare for a Head Start program located 1,004 black children but only 20 white children interested in registering. South Delta Community Action Association was even less successful with its Head Start initiative in Concordia Parish, Louisiana. “In spite of extensive recruitment efforts,” the group admitted in a report to the OEO, “it was not possible to enroll any white children in the program.” In Mississippi, CDGM staff encountered one white boy who came to the Head Start center in Rose Hill several days in a row but was caught and reprimanded each time by relatives who did not want him to be there. When the center’s director visited the family’s home to ask why they would not allow him to attend the program, the boy’s grandmother said it was because Head Start was “for the colored children.” Many people who would have liked to participate were afraid to do so because they feared negative reactions from white supremacists in their communities. Visitors to Wilcox County, Alabama, observed that although its antipoverty programs were open to all, no white people applied for inclusion. One person they interviewed told them: “I have heard a white say to another that he wished he could go to the poverty school. The power structure not only denies the Negro, but the poor whites are being handicapped because of the few whites who have money.”37
In some communities where county governments or school boards initiated projects, administrators deliberately discouraged white participation to ensure programs were not integrated. In 1967 the OEO’s civil rights coordinator for the Southeast region, Robert Saunders, recommended denying an application for a Head Start program from school administrators in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, because they had made no effort to include white children. Superintendent Murphy Lowther explained that he only submitted the application because some local black people asked him to do it. “The applicant’s attitude is that the program is only for Negroes and that he is doing them a special favor by applying,” Saunders reported. The board of supervisors in Leflore County also lost funding for its Head Start program because of the failure to integrate. Administrators located all the centers in black schools and did no recruitment in white communities, then claimed that white families were just not interested. Yet when the OEO sent a representative to see if he could find some white people to participate, he managed to recruit the first ten families he spoke with.38 Saunders observed that political leaders in the South portrayed antipoverty projects as black programs to imply that supporting the War on Poverty meant supporting civil rights, and “they never tell their poor white constituents that the programs are aimed to help all of the poor people in the community.” By the late 1960s the perception that antipoverty programs helped only African Americans was so pervasive that the Baltimore Sun outlined plans for a self-help housing project in Wilcox County under the headline “All-Negro City Set in Alabama.” In fact, an OEO official explained, the project was open to poor white as well as black people, the racial composition of the one hundred families that had expressed interest was unknown, the staff was integrated, and the board that screened applications from potential participants included four white members.39
Reports of waste and corruption publicized by opponents of antipoverty programs also frequently departed from reality. The War on Poverty was not devoid of problems such as misuse of federal funds, staff misconduct, or bureaucratic bungling, but unsympathetic observers presented relatively minor cases of mismanagement as if they were nefarious conspiracies to bankrupt the nation and turn it over to black political domination. Mississippi congressional representative John Bell Williams called the War on Poverty “the most colossal and collectively crooked raid on the treasury in this nation’s history,” charging that it benefited only “self-seeking politicians and poverty bureaucrats” who were using taxpayers’ money to buy votes and reward supporters with jobs. Edwin Strickland of the Alabama Legislative Commission to Preserve the Peace accused the OEO of “using persons of questionable background and character to administer its radical programs” and channeling funds to “white-hating ‘black power’ groups” that aimed to take over the South’s plantation counties. Thurman Sensing also believed the War on Poverty was a vehicle for political agitation and argued that efforts to help “residents of slum areas” meant “the productive citizen is penalized in order to confer privileges on the non-productive citizens.” In a similar vein, an article by Vant Neff in the Bolivar County Democrat linked antipoverty projects to political corruption and urban riots. “Tell your Congressman your opinion,” Neff exhorted readers. “After all, the War on Poverty is wasting your money!”40
Citizen watchdogs often did inform political leaders when they saw or heard about dubious expenditures in antipoverty programs. Thomas Herren wrote to George Andrews in August 1967 to complain, “Many of the poverty programs are being administered by negroes, ignorant and inexperienced, who are actually teaching the overthrow of the government. . . . All poverty programs and other schemes to spend the taxpayers money dreamed up by do-gooders should be carefully examined—and cut to the bone.” A resident of Alabama who noticed the color logo on envelopes mailed out by a CAA in Wetumpka sent one to Congressman Bill Nichols with a note saying, “Seems to me this is mighty fancy stationery and that the ‘pore folks’ could be helped more if less sophisticated printing were used.” Similarly, constituent John Morrow wrote to John Sparkman after seeing a group of Job Corps trainees boarding a plane to suggest that cheaper means of transportation could have been used. Sparkman passed the complaint on to Sargent Shriver, who explained that the OEO used the most cost-effective methods available and that air travel was sometimes cheapest when other expenses associated with bus or rail travel, such as meals and accommodation, were taken into account.41
The OEO’s director and staff frequently felt compelled to correct misinformation about the agency’s activities. In 1967 Shriver wrote to Louisiana congressman John Rarick to express concern that Rarick had inserted “numerous factual errors and misleading statements” into the Congressional Record, including claims that an OEO grantee in Lafayette had never been audited, employed subversives who hated America, and failed to properly justify or document its expenses. All these statements were false. An internal document titled “Myths and Facts about OEO” armed staffers with arguments and statistics for refuting critics, including some helpful comparisons between the amounts Americans spent each year on alcohol ($12.9 billion), tobacco ($4.3 billion), and OEO programs (about $1.5 billion). The size of the agency, with its staff of 2,600 administrators in Washington and regional offices across the nation, was tiny compared with other federal bureaucracies such as the Small Business Administration (twice the size of OEO) or the Department of Defense (500 times the size of OEO). “If you abolished OEO, fired every employee, closed down every program, the taxpayer would pay one and a half cent less on his tax dollar,” the document stated. Contrary to the popular belief that the Job Corps spent $25,000 to $50,000 per year for each trainee, the actual cost was $7,000. Moreover, this was money invested, not wasted, because when trainees moved off the unemployment rolls and into jobs, their higher earnings were recycled back into the economy in the form of consumer spending and the tax dollars they repaid to the government.42
Outside evaluations of the OEO’s activities confirmed that the agency provided valuable services to poor people and contributed to the economic well-being of the nation as a whole. At the direction of Congress, the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity conducted an extensive study of antipoverty efforts based on hundreds of OEO reports, research studies by independent agencies, congressional hearings and committee studies, and comments solicited from state and local officials as well as private organizations representing diverse political leanings, from the Chamber of Commerce to the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty. Although its report was not due until 1968, the council released an interim statement summarizing some of its early findings in August 1967 because of members’ concerns that growing criticism and talk of abolishing the OEO threatened to destroy what they had found to be an innovative and effective means of fighting poverty.43 Rather than extending traditional welfare services through more government “handouts,” as some critics claimed, OEO programs fostered empowerment and independence by involving poor people in solving their own problems. The council’s draft report in January 1968 stated that this approach appeared to be working and praised CAPs in particular. The main problem was not that billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money was being wasted but that Congress was fighting “a limited, not an unconditional, war on poverty” that reached only 6 million of the nation’s 30 million poor people.44
In 1969 the federal government’s General Accounting Office (GAO) reached similar conclusions based on fourteen months of studying OEO programs. Its report stated that despite some administrative problems, these initiatives were contributing usefully to the decline in poverty rates and that their effectiveness was hindered by uncertain funding as well as conflicts with state and local officials and other federal agencies. Staff at the OEO viewed the findings as largely positive and pointed out that the GAO found no widespread corruption in antipoverty programs or any evidence to support opponents’ fears that federal money was being used to fund revolutionary activity by black power groups. Justice Department officials confirmed that allegations of rampant corruption in OEO programs were unfounded. “While there are a substantial number of matters and cases in the Department arising out of these programs, the number of really significant ones is limited,” the attorney general’s office reported.45
The OEO’s achievements notwithstanding, a growing number of Americans became convinced that the War on Poverty was a waste of money. Hundreds of people wrote to the president, congressional representatives, and the OEO itself to express this view, revealing what one analyst called “a startling social attitude and a degree of gullibility influenced by a conservative if not reactionary press.” President Johnson’s escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War provided an additional rationale for limiting government spending on social programs. In response to a constituent urging him to vote against continued funding for the OEO and other Great Society initiatives in 1966, Thomas Abernethy agreed and indicated his fear that these programs were draining resources from the military conflict. John Stennis also thought that ensuring victory in Vietnam was more important than solving poverty in the United States. In an address to state legislators in Mississippi, Stennis stated that the war “should be the first order of business throughout Washington” and that “those Great Society programs with the billions that they are gulping down, should be relegated to the rear.” The New York Times reported that annual spending on defense was $54 billion and projected to rise by $6 billion per year between 1965 and 1967, raising questions about whether the nation could afford to wage both the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam.46 Although proponents of antipoverty efforts argued that these should take priority, policy makers ultimately gave precedence to the defense budget. Even the president’s commitment to the Great Society waned as discord over his foreign and domestic policies grew within the United States. In December 1966 Johnson told an aide that many people associated the War on Poverty with black people and antiwar “Commies” whose demands that funds be redirected from Vietnam to domestic programs seemed unpatriotic to other Americans. In this climate, requesting too much money for social spending could add to the backlash and risk killing the initiatives.47
In the late 1960s lawmakers moved to limit appropriations for the War on Poverty and passed amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act that deradicalized antipoverty programs. Concerned that political activism by CAP participants and conflicts between CAAs and local governments were undermining public support for the programs, the Johnson administration included measures that gave state and local governments a bigger role in antipoverty efforts when it submitted a revised bill to Congress for reauthorization in 1967. The final version of the legislation gave local officials the power to designate which agencies or organizations could operate programs in their communities and mandated that representation on CAP boards be balanced evenly among public officials, poor people, and community groups. Antipoverty workers were also forbidden to engage in political activity or encourage protests and demonstrations while they were on the job. Fearing for their agency’s survival, OEO staff became much less willing to champion grassroots organizations that challenged traditional power relationships. In a report on the CAA in Wilcox County, Alabama, in January 1968, Al From stated that it was performing well but warned that the influence of local civil rights activists needed to be curtailed. In an election year with critics such as George Wallace ready to “blast OEO’s activities” at every turn, the agency could not risk “money collected at its centers going to subsidize persons engaged in partisan political activities whether they be Republican, Democrat or Black Panther.”48
Cartoon by Vic Runtz noting the federal government’s shift in focus away from the War on Poverty to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Bangor Daily News, 8 November 1967. AAEC Editorial Cartoons Collection, McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi.
Budget cuts as well as political concerns limited the effectiveness of antipoverty efforts in the later part of the decade. For fiscal year 1967, Congress voted to allocate $1.6 billion to OEO programs, $150 million less than the president initially requested. Although lawmakers later approved an additional appropriation of $75 million, many programs lost funding and had to be discontinued. In January 1968 Sargent Shriver reported to the president that Congress’s failure to adequately fund the OEO necessitated the closing of 23 Job Corps centers, exclusion of 13,000 children from full-year Head Start programs, and the loss of 170,000 positions in the Neighborhood Youth Corps, among other cuts.49 The OEO also came under pressure from the Bureau of the Budget to decrease the number of CAAs operating around the nation to a maximum of 900, about half the number that the agency was funding in 1968. The process of merging or defunding existing CAAs and refusing to fund new ones left many communities without programs, and the number of OEO field staff was reduced to levels that were not adequate to serve the CAAs that remained. A black Vietnam War veteran on leave in Alabama wrote to President Johnson to protest the cuts, stating, “The saddest thing about it is that the program calls for so little money for so many people. So much more is needed and yet Washington cut down on even that small amount to appease the Southern racists.”50 At the end of the decade the GAO reported that Head Start programs reached only one in three of those eligible to participate, and the Neighborhood Youth Corps only 6 percent. As one analyst concluded in 1970, there really was no “war” on poverty, “just a continuing series of skirmishes sorely compromised by limited resources. . . . Within two years of launching the Economic Opportunity Act it was clear that neither the nation, Congress nor the President were prepared to extend increasing financial resources to that War, and certainly not to Community Action Programs.”51
Inadequately funded to begin with, annual battles over appropriations and the constant threat of budget cuts made it difficult for programs to function effectively or engage in long-term planning. In December 1966, with no guarantee of continued OEO support after its current contract expired, STAR administrators in Mississippi expressed concerns that some of the CAA’s most dedicated and competent staff members might begin looking elsewhere for work. The director of COI reported in March 1967: ‘ “Have you got the money yet?’ is the question that has replaced ‘How are you?’ as most widely used in this community.” As testimony to local residents’ determination and organization, they continued with their plans despite delays and uncertainty of funding and managed to have a job training project up and running less than two weeks after the OEO finally approved it. Other groups were not so lucky. Unable to tell participants the exact starting date of an education program for seasonal farmworkers in Alabama, administrators found that many prospective trainees eventually gave up and migrated away to look for work. The reduced level of funding that did come through made it necessary to cut the number of centers in operation down to two, which made it hard for people who lacked transportation to attend classes. In May 1969, Jack Geiger told a Senate subcommittee that only a profound commitment to social justice kept many of the TDHC’s employees working for the Mississippi health center. One local staff member likened the situation to the “short-rations” system on the plantations that “never let you look ahead or get ahead.” Similarly, the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity’s assessment of the War on Poverty noted, “Uncertainty of funds has a crippling effect on CAAs. They are admonished to plan, develop, coordinate, and evaluate. But . . . it is difficult to employ staff when there is no assurance of a relatively permanent job. It is difficult to contract with other agencies for the operation of component projects when there is no assurance of funds for financing.”52
Politically motivated attacks on programs that threatened the traditional social order also interfered with antipoverty efforts. In Mississippi, the CDGM operated its Head Start program for just eight days before John Stennis accused its administrators of mishandling federal funds and demanded an investigation. Participants and many sympathetic observers believed Stennis’s real motivation was to close down a program that was being run by African Americans and encouraged poor black people to believe they could aspire to more than a lifetime of low-wage labor or dependence on welfare. When the OEO caved to Stennis’s pressure to cut off funding to the project, civil rights organizations and other supporters mobilized to defend it. Their counterpressure persuaded Sargent Shriver to temporarily restore funds, but fears that Stennis might use his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to destroy the OEO caused federal officials to turn the Head Start programs over to Mississippi Action for Progress, a biracial group of middle-class moderates, in August 1966. The new administrators did not encourage poor people to take an active part in running the centers and tended to do things “to and for” participants instead of letting them make decisions for themselves.53
The CDGM’s fate was not uncommon. Many of the most effective antipoverty programs across the South fell victim to similar misconduct charges and investigations that, if they did not destroy programs completely, circumscribed efforts to challenge injustice. In 1966 George Wallace delayed funding for adult education and retraining programs for seasonal farmworkers proposed by the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights by charging that the organization was promoting black power ideology. The OEO looked into the matter, found nothing untoward, and eventually released the grant money, but it imposed conditions aimed at curbing the group’s political activities and its close association with the local civil rights movement. Several activist board members voluntarily resigned their positions so as not to invite further trouble for the CAA.54 The OEO faced increasing scrutiny from congressional representatives under pressure from their constituents in the late 1960s, along with numerous requests to investigate programs. In 1970 the Mississippi Council on Human Relations outlined the familiar pattern afflicting CAPs that proved too successful in empowering poor people: “Funds are withheld and the program closes for an indefinite period, or it operates on a volunteer basis. An investigation by a federal agency follows. The program usually is refunded with a number of senseless conditions that only create busy work and divert time and energy away from the Poor.”55
These problems cast doubt on the federal government’s reliability as an ally in poor people’s struggles for justice. In June 1966, a participant in a conference at Mt. Beulah called to discuss possibilities for organizing rural black southerners to form cooperatives reported that most of the attendees opposed seeking OEO funds “as this would limit our freedom to do anything useful, relevant or meaningful.” Francis X. Walter reported similar feelings of disillusionment among participants in antipoverty programs in Lowndes and Wilcox Counties in Alabama while they waited for the OEO to release the grant money being held up by Governor Wallace’s black power charges. Robert Saunders argued in a 1967 memorandum that opponents’ obstruction of antipoverty projects was laying the ground for riots in southern cities. Recent violence in Jackson, Mississippi, he noted, was perpetrated by black youths who saw “no future for themselves and know few friends.” The following year, the chairman of the CCR’s Alabama advisory committee asserted that after years of having their hopes raised and crushed, African Americans were wary of federal promises to ensure fairness or equality. “The black people of Alabama don’t believe these words and they told us so in countless meetings across this State,” he stated. “We say it is a serious thing when people have lost faith in their Government.”56
The War on Poverty began with high hopes and examples of what poor people could achieve when they were empowered to devise their own solutions to the problems in their communities. However, opponents of antipoverty programs undermined their effectiveness and generated negative publicity that turned many Americans against these projects. Social justice efforts also lost some powerful allies as policy makers gave priority to fighting communism overseas rather than to ending poverty at home. The OEO’s increasing reluctance to support truly transformative initiatives disappointed many activists and caused them to doubt the wisdom of relying on the federal government for help. Although they continued to pressure political leaders to allocate more money and resources to the War on Poverty, they also sought ways to enhance black autonomy and economic dependence through forming cooperatives and black-owned businesses.
