The War on Poverty in Mississippi

From Massive Resistance to New Conservatism

Emma J. Folwell

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496827449
• eBook ISBN: 9781496827418
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty instigated a ferocious backlash in Mississippi. Federally funded programs—the embodiment of 1960s liberalism—directly clashed with Mississippi's closed society. From 1965 to 1973, opposing forces transformed the state. In this state-level history of the war on poverty, Emma J. Folwell traces the attempts of white and black Mississippians to address the state's dire economic circumstances through antipoverty programs. At times, the war on poverty became a powerful tool for black empowerment. But more often, antipoverty programs served as a potent catalyst of white resistance to black advancement. After the momentous events of 1964, both black activism and white opposition to black empowerment evolved due to these federal efforts. White Mississippians deployed massive resistance in part to stifle any black economic empowerment, twisting antipoverty programs into tools to marginalize black political power. Folwell uncovers how the grassroots war against the war on poverty laid the foundation for the fight against 1960s liberalism, as Mississippi became a national model for stonewalling social change. As Folwell indicates, many white Mississippians hardwired elements of massive resistance into the political, economic, and social structure. Meanwhile, they abandoned the Democratic Party and honed the state's Republican Party, spurred by a new conservatism.

- Chapter One -

FROM CIVIL RIGHTS TO ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT

In his 1964 State of the Union address, President Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty.” “It will not be a short or easy struggle,” Johnson acknowledged. But, he vowed, “We shall not rest until that war is won.” The war on poverty was to be the centerpiece of his Great Society, and Johnson threw his considerable political skill behind it. He made a quick decision for his choice of war on poverty architect, selecting Kennedy’s brother-in-law and Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver. The president believed Shriver was ideal for the job. Shriver had the ability to “think unashamedly in the big” and his leadership of the Peace Corps had proven his ability to forge new initiatives into success. Shriver’s appointment also ensured the war on poverty retained “a Kennedy imprimatur,” which Johnson felt was vital to its success. While President Johnson was sure Shriver was the right man for the job, Shriver himself was less convinced. According to his biographer, Shriver wanted to stick with the Peace Corps, and he felt he did not know enough about poverty—particularly as Johnson wanted to announce his appointment quickly in order to retain the support of Congress and the public, who were still shocked by Kennedy’s assassination. Johnson got his way, however, when Shriver reluctantly accepted the position. The announcement of Shriver’s appointment as “Special Assistant to the President in the organization and the administration of the war on poverty program” was made less than one month after Johnson’s January 8 State of the Union address.¹

Shriver developed a task force to give shape and form to the idea Johnson had proposed. The task force also built on public and private local initiatives that had been developed to address poverty. Their proposals drew on the earlier antipoverty efforts of the Kennedy administration. Volunteers in Service to America was for example, a domestic version of the Peace Corps, a flagship program of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Kennedy-era efforts such as Mobilization for Youth pioneered the model of community action adopted by Shriver’s task force. Conceived in 1957 and funded in 1961, Mobilization for Youth served Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It embodied the move from the “elite planning” model characteristic of earlier social programs to the “democratic participation” of low-income residents that would characterize community action programs. The demonstration projects of the Ford Foundation’s Gray Area program likewise focused on community participation by fostering communication between stakeholders, including community activists, administrators, and city officials. As war on poverty planner Daniel Patrick Moynihan later noted, such programs, alongside Kennedy’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, played a significant role in the genesis of the war on poverty. Together these pioneering programs of the early 1960s laid the groundwork for the community-centric nature of the war on poverty, which would become its most powerful, transformative, and enduring feature.²

Shriver’s task force worked for months to develop programs designed to tackle poverty. The group consisted mostly of bureaucrats, economists, and sociologists, but also included those who had sought to enforce desegregation, such as Adam Yarmolinsky and labor activists, such as Jack Conway. The presence of perceived “radicals,” such as Yarmolinsky and Conway, alarmed many politicians—particularly southern conservatives. They were concerned that antipoverty programs would combine the radicalism of Yarmolinsky and Conway with the new civil rights legislation. Their concerns were not unfounded: President Johnson had explicitly linked racism and poverty in his State of the Union address. It was these “radicals” who would shape some of the most controversial aspects of the proposed war on poverty, most notably the concept of community action. Privately, the president was not sold on all features of the proposed war on poverty, particularly community action. Although he initially misunderstood community action, it came to be a target of Johnson’s “outright hostility” as it undermined the political power of Democratic mayors, angering his political allies.³

Whatever his private misgivings or misunderstandings, in public Johnson threw all of his political weight behind ensuring Congressional approval of the Economic Opportunity bill. “It’s the only bill I gotta [sic] have this year—they can take the rest of them, I don’t care,” he told Texas Congressman Olin Teague in early August. When signing the act into law on August 20, 1964, Johnson spoke of his pride in the commitment the nation was making to “this historic course.” His words were not hyperbolic; the Economic Opportunity Act did indeed set the nation on an historic course. Unlike President Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to fight poverty during the New Deal, the war on poverty addressed issues of racism and segregation alongside economic issues. Coming just seven weeks after President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act had the potential to provide African Americans with economic equality.⁴

The Economic Opportunity Act created a new Office for Economic Opportunity (OEO) to coordinate the administration’s antipoverty efforts, with Sargent Shriver at its helm. The new OEO was designed to both coordinate the antipoverty programs of other departments as well as to fund and operate its own programs. OEO began with a sense of energy and excitement. However, its challenging role—coordinating programs operated by other departments while developing and operating other antipoverty efforts—and the lack of experience of its staff meant the agency quickly ran into problems. On top of the confusion and inexperience inside OEO, the agency also faced a barrage of criticism from the left and right of the political spectrum from the moment of its inception. Established government departments responded to the creation of OEO with hostility. Social workers expressed their concern that the rhetoric of the war on poverty was raising unrealistic expectations. Community activists such as Saul Alinsky criticized OEO for not going far enough to empower the poor, while conservatives felt the antipoverty agency represented a dangerous overreach of federal power. Despite the confusion and criticism, Shriver’s OEO moved quickly to implement the dizzying array of antipoverty efforts authorized by the Economic Opportunity Act.⁵

Title I of the Act established work-training and work-study programs, including Job Corps and Neighborhood Youth Corps. The Job Corps was modeled on the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps and provided education, vocational training, and work experience for poor sixteen to twenty-one year olds, “to prepare for the responsibilities of citizenship and to increase the employability of young men and women.” There were a number of programs focused purely on education, such as adult basic education, designed to aid those over the age of eighteen “whose inability to read and write the English language constitutes a substantial impairment of their ability to get or retain employment.” Title II of the Economic Opportunity Act created urban and rural community action programs. Title III focused on rural poverty, establishing programs to coordinate loans to rural families and assistance for migrant agricultural employees. Title IV provided assistance to small businesses, while Title V of the Act funded work experience opportunities. It was Title II’s community action programs that would grow beyond their modest beginnings to stand at the heart of the administration’s war on poverty. Over the first four years of the war on poverty, $3.5 billion funded over one thousand community action agencies spread across the nation. These community action programs provided black Americans with economic opportunity, as they were designed to bypass southern states’ barriers to racial equality by circumventing local authorities.⁶

Community action programs embodied the crucial connection between federal antipoverty funds and the civil rights movement. The president made the connection between economic opportunity and equality clear in his June 1965 commencement address at Howard University. Here Johnson pronounced that “we seek not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Community action programs—new incorporated nonprofit entities—were designed to do just that by channeling funds directly to local communities in order to address poverty at the grassroots. The programs themselves were diverse: they could be unique projects tailor-made to address local poverty conditions or single-purpose programs based on an OEO template. This flexibility was an important factor in their early successes, but the most significant aspect of these programs was their mandate to achieve the “maximum feasible participation of the poor.” This mandate definitively entwined the war on poverty with grassroots civil rights activism. It ensured the empowerment of “literally hundreds and thousands of people who had been out of it before,” one war on poverty architect recalled. This maximum feasible participation requirement combined with the way program funding bypassed local power structures solidified the programs’ revolutionary potential. This revolutionary potential made community action an attractive prospect to civil rights activists.⁷

Mississippi was home to the nation’s earliest and most high-profile antipoverty efforts. But across the nation federal funds began to flow into local communities with transformative and often inflammatory consequences. The nature of community action programs—not only their potential to set poor, mostly powerless people against local and state political structures but also their diverse and locally developed design—meant that there was no common experience of community action. Intensely local battles were shaped by the nature of the program, the constituency of the poor community, and the broader political, economic, racial, and social context. For example, in Alabama civil rights activists, in their efforts to “remake their region,” utilized federal antipoverty funds to find ways around the “intransigence of their state and local lawmakers.” In North Carolina antipoverty efforts predated the war on poverty. Governor Terry Sanford created a fund in 1963 to tackle discrimination and economic deprivation, which later served as a “laboratory for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society,” but retained a combination of private and federal funds that ensured its independence. In Texas antipoverty programs began a battleground between poor Mexican American and African American activists, conflict that was encouraged by the state’s white political structure. Outside the South minority groups utilized the potential of antipoverty programs in different ways. In Los Angeles, for example, conflicts occurred between marginalized groups. In Appalachia activists seeking to address some of the most entrenched poverty in the nation were undermined by the local establishment who accused the Appalachian Volunteers of being communists.⁸

In Mississippi’s community action programs, some of these features were evident. As in Alabama and North Carolina, Mississippi’s poverty warriors faced an intensely racially hostile environment that hampered their activism. In common with community activists in Chicago, Illinois activists in Jackson, Mississippi, faced an intransigent and obstructive political structure. Black Head Start teachers in Mississippi were accused of being communists, as were the Appalachia Volunteers. However, Mississippi’s war on poverty was also distinctive in a number of significant ways. As the site of the nation’s earliest antipoverty program, Mississippi’s war on poverty broke new ground and thus faced a particularly intense backlash. However, the early establishment of the program meant antipoverty activists had many more months in Mississippi than elsewhere in the nation to embed in networks of activism even as their opponents gained traction and funding began to diminish. The early start to Mississippi’s antipoverty programs also meant the state received a high proportion of federal funds. Perhaps even more importantly, antipoverty programs connected quickly and successfully with the vibrant grassroots network of activism created in the early years of the 1960s, and which reached their zenith during Freedom Summer. There was one other distinctive feature of Mississippi’s war on poverty: the nature of the opposition it generated. Just as poverty warriors tapped into the state’s civil rights networks, the opponents of the war on poverty built on the structure of white supremacy that had been in place for generations. As these implacable and enduring structures of white power adapted to the challenge presented by the state’s war on poverty, the evolving template of white resistance fed into the development of a new conservatism.

Head Start quickly became one of the most popular OEO template community action programs. The idea behind Head Start was a simple one: give poor prekindergarten children a “head start” to help them overcome the challenges they faced when they began school. Head Start programs offered basic literacy and numeracy lessons, and more importantly, they became the conduit for the provision of much-needed healthcare. It was a Head Start program that was the first, and most prominent and controversial, antipoverty program in Mississippi: the Child Development Group. In the poorest parts of Mississippi—which were indeed some of the poorest parts of the nation—the Child Development Group provided something even more basic than healthcare. Child Development Group centers provided poor children with the hot meal they would not receive at home and often their first experience of indoor plumbing. The impact on the children was profound, and CDGM proved equally transformative for its staff. The wages offered were considerably more than those paid for working in the fields or cleaning houses. One staff member previously earned three dollars per day for field work but was able to earn seventy-five dollars per week working for the Child Development Group. Significantly, these wages represented a step toward the dissolution of white economic power, as pay was not dependent on workers refraining from civil rights activism.⁹

The Child Development Group was initially funded in May 1965 with a $1.4 million OEO grant for a summer Head Start program. It quickly expanded to operate 121 centers across twenty-eight Mississippi counties, for over 12,000 poor African American preschool children. By July 1966 the CDGM employed 2,272 people, 98.9 percent of whom were local Mississippians. The program combined the potent activism of the Freedom Summer of 1964 with the federal funds of the war on poverty. Rosie Head, an assistant teacher with the Child Development Group, recalled that while children had been taught in Freedom Schools “even before we had the money,” the federal funds provided the chance to expand. This expansion enabled activists to reach many more children and provide them with invaluable care and support. For many pupils, attending CDGM centers was the first time seeing an indoor toilet or taking a shower. “We taught them how to use a toilet, how to bathe themselves,” Rosie Head recalled. “We taught them how to just share with other children, just everything. We taught them how to speak.”¹⁰

The program faced innumerable challenges, though. It entered into a violent racial landscape with bleak economic conditions. Compounding these challenges were divisions within the movement in Mississippi. COFO, created to unite the “big four” civil right organizations, broke down in 1965, reflecting the deepening discord between activists. SNCC activists rejected involvement in projects funded by the federal government, seeing the war on poverty as an attempt to coopt the civil rights movement. The NAACP meanwhile was largely excluded from the operation of the Child Development Group, as it drew on grassroots activists—mostly women. It had been COFO that had empowered these activists who, unlike NAACP members, were mostly sharecroppers, farmers, and domestic workers. As COFO’s remaining resources were funneled into the MFDP and SNCC diminished, grassroots activists like Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell channeled their energies into antipoverty centers that embraced the “maximum feasible participation” mandate of community action programs.¹¹

Staff encouraged parents to become involved in the program. A total of 1,006 people, virtually all of them poor, were accorded opportunities to make decisions directly affecting their own lives and the operation of CDGM centers. Willie Burns, a community organizer and CDGM employee in Holmes County believed that the group’s impact on the community was as important as the work it was doing for poor children. “Now we in Holmes County have some idea of what is meant by self-respect and first-class citizenship,” Burns believed, “because we are learning to do for ourselves.” Federal antipoverty funds provided the opportunity, but it was the long tradition of community organizing in Mississippi that enabled CDGM to expand across the state so quickly. While some SNCC activists rejected the federally funded program, many embraced the opportunities CDGM provided. CDGM embodied the critical connection between the federal war on poverty and civil rights legislation. Using the organizing strategies of local activists along with funding and expertise from the federal antipoverty program, the Child Development Group made “tangible gains in the fight against poverty.”¹²

However, the activists and poverty warriors of the Child Development Group faced formidable opponents. Just as black activists in the state were quick to recognize the potential of federal antipoverty funds, so Mississippi’s white power structure was swift to see the threat the war on poverty posed to white supremacy. Mississippi’s politicians were united in their disapproval of the Economic Opportunity Act. It was widely perceived as an unwelcome expansion of the federal government into the state, intent on enforcing integration. Local reporters portrayed antipoverty programs as a plot to “mongrelize” the nation. The Child Development Group was, according to one Mississippi newspaper, “one of the most subtle mediums for instilling the acceptance of racial integration and ultimate mongrelization ever perpetuated in this country.” Soon after the Child Development Group secured its funding, segregationists sought to destroy the program. Politicians and reporters, landowners and Klansmen all worked to undermine the group, from the grassroots to the national level. Segregationist senator John C. Stennis, fresh from his fight against the civil rights bill, wielded his considerable political power in Washington to defund CDGM. Stennis’s seniority in the Senate Appropriations Committee enabled him to pose a threat to Vietnam War funding and to secure an investigation of the Child Development Group independent of the Office of Economic Opportunity.¹³

In Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson took every opportunity to malign both OEO and CDGM, in correspondence with the president and Shriver, and in his public statements. Governor Johnson was proud of his history of opposition to federal intervention in his state. In 1962 as lieutenant governor, he stood beside Governor Ross Barnett to block the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. The following year he used this incident in his campaign to become governor with the slogan “Stand tall with Paul.” Johnson avoided the starkly racist demagoguery of his predecessor, attempting to walk a line between the demands of the still powerful Citizens’ Councils and those of the rapidly changing racial context. In his inaugural address, on January 21, 1964, he declared that “hate or prejudice or ignorance will not lead Mississippi while I sit on the governor’s chair.” He would not fight, he said, a “rearguard defense of yesterday.” If he must fight, Governor Johnson declared that he would fight an “all-out assault for our share of tomorrow.” Although he adopted more moderate policies than Barnett, Johnson remained trenchantly opposed to federally funded civil rights activism. In his part in fighting the war on poverty, Johnson did indeed seek to secure “our share of tomorrow” by preserving white supremacy in as many ways as he could without directly contravening the new civil rights legislation.¹⁴

The Child Development Group did not just face opposition from politicians such as Stennis and Johnson. In centers across the state, staff members were the targets of violent attacks. Shots were fired into the Head Start classrooms and crosses were burned outside CDGM’s Mou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Antipoverty Programs in Mississippi
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• Chapter One: From Civil Rights to Economic Empowerment
• Chapter Two: Marjorie Baroni, Adult Education, and the Mississippi Catholic Church
• Chapter Three: The Ku Klux Klan and the War on Poverty
• Chapter Four: Black Empowerment in Jackson
• Chapter Five: Helen Bass Williams and Mississippi Action for Progress
• Chapter Six: Mississippi Republicans and the Politics of Poverty
• Chapter Seven: Star, The Afl-Cio, and the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson
• Chapter Eight: The Demise of the War on Poverty
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author