Mississippi: Children and Politics
Watters, Pat
The almost esoteric controversy and clamor that have surrounded the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) show in clear perspective some basic facts about America in the time of...
...Don't Teach Children...
...The Mississippi moderates were given an extraordinary, if not unique, boon at the expense of the regular Democratic party right-wingers, a real hunk of patronage...
...The same would seem to hold true for poor whites...
...The panel investigated CDGM and found the charges against it false...
...The staff and the advisory boards were set up on three levels: local, regional, and state...
...Though the strategy was finally given approval there was considerable opposition to sitting down and bargaining with MAP...
...The implications for the years ahead of diminishing jobs and increasing welfarism are clear...
...Out of the CDGM experience, CCAP began building a national complaint center program to try to provide technical aid to similarly beleaguered groups...
...Like the education theory, the organizational framework had the virtue of rational design...
...it seemed to be doing what the poverty program called for in the most straightforward manner...
...The headquarters staff, the young white and Negro intellectuals, like to say that this is only the smallest part of it, that the bigger part is involving the poor people in a high-powered organization and letting them learn its jungle trails and trials by combat so that they can survive and flourish in the new America, change their lives and societies, and even shake the vapid foundations of those big bureaucrat-culture offices up in Washington...
...He said merely that MAP didn't look good to him from the start, and that when they asked for a labor representative, he had enough sense to know it should be a Negro one...
...As one local observer put it, the doctor doesn't establish a relationship with the child and his parent which would mean future treatment and better health...
...However Mr...
...Henry thought he might help out, he would like to hear from him...
...She is on the board of directors of CDGM...
...Many old hands had left and others were working with their bags packed...
...The CDGM staff and board, meanwhile, encouraged by the genuine success of the schools and the program's involvement of poor people, had in July drawn up a request for $41 million to operate a statewide program...
...The reduced proposal was submitted to a public hearing and finally approved by more than 2,000 in attendance with a resolution saying that the full $41 million was needed, and that $29 million was a bare minimum...
...The two of them, in the despairing way of the post-1964 regulars who stayed on in the South, have been eloquent in describing Mississippi's terrible problems of the race and poverty and persistent in seeking solutions...
...Many of the CDGM schools continued to operate during the negotiation fight (as they had during the previous one) , and the willingness of its people to work for the children on a no-pay "volunteer" basis was probably CDGM's chief strength...
...In the political annals, this may eventually turn out to be the most important thing that happened, and to substantiate a claim in a highly regarded piece of lore published in Christianity and Crisis, by Larold K. Schulz (who is Executive Coordinator of the Anti-Poverty Task Force of the National Council of Churches...
...Another large question might well be whether most of those who fought for CDGM in Mississippi would similarly support it in any other state of the union...
...He ended up asserting support of both, saying they were not mutually exclusive...
...ostensibly it was over who should fill one of the administrative jobs, but below the surface was distrust and suspicion centered on patronage and the power involved in all those jobs to give to people...
...In the way of statistics, a CDGM handout proclaimed that 98.9 per cent of the 2,272 employees during the period were local residents, and the vast majority of them poor people...
...how can the people and institutions which in direct and indirect ways are responsible for the existence of poverty be expected to change it...
...Yet another way of looking at it is to say that the middle class of white and Negro Americans are no more in control of the forces that shape their lives (as witness the Vietnam War) than are the poor...
...SNCC and CORE, before they went off on "black power," seemed headed in such a direction...
...But once they get in the regular school system, I don't know if a teacher with 60 kids in her class will know this, will know how to handle them...
...If they had been aware of this situation, CDGM and its allies would have fought for the five counties during negotiations and probably would have refused the refunding—as they seemed ready to do if conditions had been to get rid of director John Mudd, or the Rev...
...the Field Foundation (which provided limited funds to let CDGM limp along...
...But it was a strange victory...
...And one way to begin would be to register and vote and join the PTA...
...In the lore it is varyingly stated that this titanic battle was joined somewhere along the way, if not from the beginning, by the President himself, through the good offices of Harry McPherson, special counsel to President Johnson, and Douglas Wynn, a Greenville, Mississippi, attorney considered a special friend to the President...
...They wouldn't have anything to do with it...
...Instead, the person who got the doctor establishes a relationship of power over the parent and child...
...At any rate, MAP was created and proceeded with difficulty to try to set up standard-model Head Start schools in 24 counties...
...There were people who began as teachers on the local level, moved through the middle level, and served in administrative posts at headquarters...
...At Strike City, a lot of history comes together...
...John Stennis had completed his own investigation of the program and had one made by the Senate Appropriations Committee staff, and concluded that federal money was being used to subsidize civil rights groups and that there was evidence of irregular handling of funds...
...The opposition from Mississippi's two U. S. Senators and the whites of the state resumed with the second grant to CDGM...
...Such an organization was needed southwide...
...one of its major achievements was keeping it alive in the newspapers, with not much help from the New York Times...
...the middle layer to serve as go-between for the top and bottom...
...Eating and kids...
...Eddy J. Townsend, a large-framed, retired teacher with a no-nonsense face, told how she walked a mile, to work from 9:00 A.M...
...Hodding Carter III, a prime mover in MAP, denies this vehemently...
...MAP was chartered by Gov...
...But generally, there was little attempt to make the obvious connection between CDGM and the rest of the poverty program, to force the issue for the whole program and not simply CDGM in Mississippi...
...Fannie Lou Hamer of Ruleville) with their CDGM and FDP orientation could muster a strong local Negro vote against the usual obstacles—everything from economic and physical intimidation to apathy...
...she sent out the order to open 'em Monday, ready or not...
...They're basic...
...As far along as the period of the third funding, with super-strict regulations from OEO breathing a poison of caution into the superstructure, Mrs...
...Marian Wright said children were an obvious issue...
...But where outside of bad old Mississippi would most liberals concede this—and make a fight for a CDGM...
...Shriver...
...The proposal was based on actual registration of 30,000 children in 44 counties, with local communities not already in the program setting up committees on their own to form schools...
...Shriver...
...The Mudd-Hoffman article makes the point that such a separatist phase is necessary while the poor learn how to cope with high-powered organizational modes and methods...
...One explanation was offered for the "nepotism" in one hamlet: all the Negroes there were related to one another...
...Louis PostDispatch, and it suggested that happily enough, and all by accident and blunder, Mississippi now has two mutually complimentary programs, MAP, which "prepares whites to accept Negroes on equal terms," and CDGM, which "works to bring Negroes to the point where they can deal with whites as equals...
...What invariably impresses visitors is the confident bearing and bright-faced demeanor of the little Head Start children...
...A visit I made in early 1967 to Sunflower City, a hamlet with a majority Negro population, suggested some of the strengths underlying CDGM...
...There were some local whites and many of the Negro middle class who might have been CDGM allies who were among those put off, and there resulted probably the weakest part of the CDGM program...
...It is necessary to wade through the density of detail in the CDGM saga to get the feel of what really happened...
...It is good even to sit for awhile in one of the outer offices of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington, and observe without rancor (because we are all what we are, shaped by culture and accident) the secretaries and tired-looking men busy with all the paper work of big-organization ritual, and listen as a little flurry of excitement runs through them at a hurry-up order to ship a film to a Mr...
...Most of the story is summed up in the fact that the OEO moved from a position of denying them to making them...
...The mainstream modes of high-powered modern America are complicated and mean, and even so pure and simple a plan as the Head Start schools becomes caught up and altered...
...at war, as they are over CDGM," and that though "we weep and we worry at what we fearfully apprehend to be the progressive abdication of Negroes and youth from the general society," there was a strong effort to kill in CDGM probably the most important endeavor in which Negroes and white youth were still working together within the normal framework of the larger society...
...Ramsey's awarenes, however, of CCAP's predelictions (CCAP supported CDGM in the first fund fight) might have had a bearing on his reluctance to be invclved with MAP...
...Certainly the avoidance of such politics is a part of the art of government in the areas of concentration of poor and Negro voters, as poverty leaders in Syracuse discovered, and as Dr...
...a lot of jobs, a lot of power was involved...
...James Eastland which would have been expected as automatic...
...The election, to be held in May, was considered a test of whether movement leaders (including Mrs...
...IV A student of Johnson's off-balancing ways, however, might make sense of the sequence of events...
...One of the awarenesses in CDGM was that to lose out to MAP and the CAP committees or to the mainstream spirit of power-seeking and accommodation did not necessarily mean that poverty in the form of physical and fiscal deprivation would continue, but that alleviation of poverty would be used by the conventional forces to control those who need help...
...Those in Sunflower County (home of Senator Eastland) were in this category, competing successfully for children and local Negro support with well-heeled "regular" Head Starts under the county's Community Action Program (CAP...
...These are the essential charges that were to be repeated in each crisis of CDGM...
...And soon such a community would be in action, even as the poverty program envisioned...
...Not the least of the debilitating effects of the battle royal over CDGM hit the Office of Economic Opportunity itself...
...There ought to be an opportunity to talk things out...
...if a doctor is needed again, they know to whom they must go to get one—if they are desperate enough...
...CCAP also coordinated letters of protest from professional groups, with plans to keep these coming in increasing numbers...
...According to the lore (and it is well to point out that there is a great body of it, and that while the main lines emerge with consistency, no two people or documents tell its details exactly alike), civil rights activists were at the time casting about for a follow-up to the tumultuous 1964 Freedom Summer...
...remnants of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) that largely SNCC-dominated civil rights alliance which had run the Freedom Summer...
...Dr...
...In this article, CDGM was linked with the "militant black power wing of the civil rights movement," a charge that was later to figure in leaks to such journalistic reflections of the Johnsonian spirit in Washington as the Evans-Novak column...
...The irony of this coming from Mr...
...some of them got up a petition protesting it and were treated to a long, fatherly interview with Mr...
...Local Negroes had built the building six months before on land owned by a Negro woman next door, Mrs...
...it asked fiscal purity far beyond its usual norms, according to much competent testimony...
...They were persuaded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to undertake the job of setting up Head Start schools across the state...
...This was sent back as fiscally out of the question, and a new request for $21 million was submitted in what the CDGM headquarters people declare was complete good faith...
...Its board was headed by wealthy industrialist Owen Cooper, a chemical plant owner of Yazoo City...
...King learned in Chicago...
...otherwise all that money and those jobs would be in the hands of the nefarious civil rights "agitators...
...I1 The new grant meant that CDGM was pumping nearly a million dollars a month into the poorest part of the economy of the nation's poorest state...
...In CDGM's corner, in addition to Mr...
...In this, as in education, CDGM was a startlingly successful operation...
...Senator Stennis was quoted as saying he had been working toward just such an end...
...The answers include everything from awareness that OEO itself was about to be dismantled to discouragement over the Vietnam War, to acknowledgment of the "mood of the nation" which was no longer thought to be liberal...
...He said it wasn't really a question of taking sides between CDGM and the whites in power...
...Robert Spike, professor of theology at the University of Chicago (later mysteriously slain, to add a somber note) and A. Philip Randolph...
...Publicity was lavished on them and their largely white college-student staffs...
...The organization was hamstrung with probably the strictest regulations and surveillance in the poverty program...
...Cooper and his labor relations...
...One about Aaron Henry and Owen Cooper is that they met at a Human Relations Council banquet at which Mr...
...The first CDGM grant was for $1.4 million...
...Inside, and spilling out into the yard, about 30 children were enjoying a play period—pushing each other in home-made wagons, laughing and horsing around (in that way of gentleness notable in Southern Negro children), taking turns sliding down a home-made sliding board— a "usual scene" in the schools...
...It was in a series on CDGM by James C. Millstone in the St...
...Martinez and whatever his poverty program effort and reality of hungry children might be, as a secretary makes her harmless, unintentionally offensive little joke in old-movie mock Mexican-English, and to remember the little girl in Mississippi at Strike City...
...Why wasn't the battle fought over the issue of basic policy, or why was the issue of basic policy not pressed after the victory...
...This bit of journalistic enterprise inadvertently gave CDGM a month's early warning of impending disaster, embarrassed the OEO with the disclosure that it had been setting up a new Head Start agency before ever notifying the old one that it was to be ended, and moved powerful liberal forces in the nation to the defense of CDGM...
...For they would see the fine effect on their little pre-schoolers and they would inevitably ask, "But what happens when they get in those regular schools...
...It's got to not be race," he said...
...Mrs...
...And no one would have to answer...
...The charge that "black power" permeated CDGM was demonstrably untrue if it meant to say the organization was under the sway of the exhibitionist sloganeers of what is left of SNCC and CORE...
...It is to some extent a class split, with the middle-class Negro approach embodied in the NAACP and MAP...
...What has happened in Mississippi will in probably quieter ways be a continuing struggle across the South in the immediate future...
...It is not clear, for example, whether the plot to scrap CDGM and replace it with Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP) , originated in Washington or Mississippi...
...It would not be proper to call them the brains of CDGM, but their influence has been considerable...
...Specialists read it piecemeal...
...To much of this, as to a full-page ad in the New York Times, Mr...
...A strategy was devised for bargaining with MAP—and, if MAP refused, with OEO...
...Offered such an opportunity for power and patronage, he took it...
...That was what was going on, and to an extent continued under the last funding, though John Mudd at its outset spoke of his pessimism about being able to achieve the "real goals...
...Cooper had appeared, perhaps reluctantly, to introduce the liberal former Congressman Brooks Hayes...
...without them they don't have the votes even to be interesting—and the Negro poor have, at least yet for awhile, a new vision in Mississippi...
...On this level, the Head Start, the children were an issue around which the poor people might organize...
...The victory of the liberals then was to preserve one deviant program, the exception that proved the rule of the general failure of the poverty program...
...The main thing was to get to share in the Head Start program, but not in the old way of charity, with the whites giving orders...
...Here are leaders, their leaders, two of them talking on the main achievements of CDGM...
...They talk, sing...
...that various people had been betrayed, and yet some impressive authorities hint that the Vice President acted not with Presidential disfavor...
...These people had a profound distrust of the basics of American practical political procedure, and CDGM's achievement of having built in them real trust in a federally financed (power-structure oriented) program became fully clear...
...Another offshoot is Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE), which hoped to get private funding, to provide technical assistance and training to community organizations for any kind of action, from poverty program to boycotts, they might want to take...
...Lula Mae Brooks, who was fired from her job as a maid because of her 1964 involvement in the movement, and, vowing she would rather die than be a maid again, has been a local leader since...
...There are those, however, on the CDGM side who see the NAACP as a prime mover in the plot...
...The danger of spawning such short-sighted poverty programs lies in the unwitting creation of a "low-level equilibrium trap" in which the human basis for continued growth is throttled rather than liberated...
...Teachers said they were ignorant...
...The most influential Negro member was Aaron Henry, stalwart of the civil rights movement, the Clarksdale druggist who kept a precarious balance between the NAACP and the COFO radicals through 1964...
...Establishing this least controversial of poverty programs was a formidable job in Mississippi...
...Under the second funding, after Sargent Shriver, director of the OEO had defended the program generally—while acknowledging some irregularities—CDGM received $5.6 million in February, 1966, to administer 121 centers in 28 counties for a six-month period...
...The tone of :the first funded period of CDGM seems to have been largely that of the previous year's Freedom Summer when local propriety was affronted by beards and bohemianism never to be forgiven (while murder by local whites went unexpiated) . This early CDGM tone was understandable, but created perhaps a needless handicap...
...His reaction is not recorded...
...They are told what to do, and what not to do...
...More on the mark of truth are points made by Leslie W. Dunbar, director of the Field Foundation, in a lecture at the Ezra Stiles College at Yale—that it is "especially saddening to see Negro and white liberal Southerners...
...and she had answered: "To the CDGM...
...Also important was the work of a blue-ribbon panel of liberals headed by Dr...
...The building and a second-hand bus used to haul children represented a $500 investment of money raised by a "newsletter" (typed with carbons) sent to Northern patrons...
...The liberals who put together their remarkable coalition to save CDGM congratulated themselves justifiably on having won the first major victory for justice in the South since Selma...
...Only after the poor learn to cope can they deal effectively with the sophisticated forces they find on a conventional CAP board...
...But meanwhile, Mississippi's better people, its few white liberals and moderates, its Negroes, were split asunder in the aftermath of the CDGM battle's bitterness...
...Phone calls are made for plane schedules, a messenger is sent for, effort is made to get the right name and address on the label...
...The problem in such a state as Mississippi, however, is that those who normally manage such resources do it in such a way as to demean the recipient...
...Cooper, when the MAP proposition was offered...
...Amzie Moore of Cleveland, Mississippi: "The kids in CDGM are not put in a bind...
...Indeed, as we keep learning, so many of the poor are passed over by the controlling forces of conventional welfare that they do have the kind of potential for free action and independence of thought that sprang up so quickly in Mississippi and other parts of the South in the Negro movement and such efforts as CDGM...
...Glory, glory, hallelujah, we want our Head Start School," a "romper lobby" of 48 five-year-olds from Mississippi sang to Congress at one of a number of demonstrations for refunding...
...It served as an agent of fear to force the power structures and normal channels to involve themselves in the poverty pro gram...
...He said that the first call came in August from an OEO source in the Atlanta regional office, saying that CDGM could not be refunded, and who in Mississippi might set up a more acceptable group to run Head Start...
...It took until February, 1966, that first time, for CDGM to get refunded...
...they were precious, and whites wouldn't be too worried, wouldn't harass them...
...In fact, a traditional authoritarian pattern, which at best approaches humanitarian paternalism, is reinforced...
...That has been the chief accomplishment, the most complete one...
...Otis Brown, the young Negro man who is director of the school, told how it was sort of a continuation of one that was started as a freedom school in nearby Indianola, and was "burned out" by whites...
...The light and the space make things plainer to see in Mississippi, or maybe it is the plain talk of the poor Negroes whose earnestness and honest values fed the civil rights movement and was the real strength of CDGM...
...To know the norm of such a family in the South is to know the achievement of such a scene, and the hope...
...Mudd described one of the more subtle terrors of the trade he has found himself in: the second proposal, a document of some 115 pages of text and numerous appendices of facts and figures, setting out with some eloquence the rationale and philosophy of CDGM, was prepared in an incredibly short time by people going nights without sleep...
...Looking about him at the children and the well-kept "center," Mr...
...Paul Johnson on September 13, and received a $3 million grant on October 11...
...Ramsey, a shrewd survivor in a state whose white people hate labor almost as much as desegregation, demurs from this view, though making no bones of his distaste for Mr...
...On August 22, 1966, the Jackson Daily News (long a leading voice of Mississippi racism) , announced a three-way investigation underway by not only the General Accounting Office and the Senate Appropriations Committee, but the Office of Economic Opportunity as well...
...Levin's main contribution was the unique spirit of the schools, no small matter of significance in the CDGM saga...
...Henry, something of a folk hero in his time, seems to have been doing merely what comes naturally for a tough-minded politician and state NAACP president...
...If Friends Of The Children falls through, if those people lose their schools," said one of Mississippi's toughest pragmatists, "How will they ever again believe in anything...
...Others tell the same story, but suggest the groundwork was being laid as early as May...
...They're not bashful...
...It is good to sit there and try to picture Mr...
...But when they came to CDGM, they said it feels good to know they had something to give, to help run things...
...They can't go without the poor...
...and a battery of high-powered attorneys, including Joseph Rauh, the ADA and Civil Rights Leadership Conference leader, and the prestigious law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell...
...this miracle seems to have been wrought by no more than the application of undiluted "progressive education" on them, a commentary on mediocre norms of most Southern education, Dr...
...Miss Marian Wright, who is Negro, of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., is said to have suggested him for the job...
...You had to work on them to get them to come to CDGM parents' meetings...
...But there were no full-page pictures in the Saturday Evening Post and Look of the Negro staffs in the CDGM schools nor of their larger accomplishments...
...There has been some sporadic white violence, but far less to CDGM than to the old civil rights efforts, and even less than to MAP which stirs the violent racists because of its white employees and strained efforts to enroll a few white children...
...If all the accounts are to be followed and believed, the highest power in the land at first acquiesced in the MAP plot, but then turned about and allowed (if not directed) the Vice President to step in and save CD GM—which in effect betrayed those like Aaron Henry who had put considerable political and personal prestige into following the first signals, not to mention the unhappy Mr...
...Stennis and Eastland were given the pleasure of seeing CDGM almost destroyed...
...The percentage of registered Negroes is higher in most other Southern states, but, not having experienced a Mississippi summer like that of 1964, and for other reasons, none of the other Southern states have as mature a Negro movement...
...Miss Wright was asked if there were other such obvious issues...
...Stennis is adjudged a more rational Southern racist, and more importantly, was on the very committee from which the poverty program had to get its money...
...Dunbar in his Yale speech cites as a major political miscalculation the belief that a loyalist Democratic party can be built in Mississippi (or any other Deep South state) without the poor Negroes— as the forces behind MAP seemed to be trying to do...
...Part of the lore is the August 21, 1955, New Republic article by Andrew Kopkind which claims that Rep...
...There, the desperately poor people of the cotton plantations who attempted in 1965 to strike against the law of labor supply and demand lived in tents until Frank Smith, one of the old SNCCs who ran a voter registration effort with style in Holly Springs, came and single-handedly built fine concrete block and wood housing units and a community center...
...It was dirty pool on the part of OEO, like agreeing to a strike settlement and then, after the workers have returned to the job, changing the terms of the agreement...
...As late as mid-March, 1967, Friends Of The Children was operating 28 centers with 1,912 children —more than MAP was handling in these areas...
...During the interim, before the new grant was signed, they were to stay with MAP and that's where they still are...
...There was some sentiment in CDGM for a fight when the five counties were taken away...
...OEO seems to have fought dirtiest (it accused, found guilty, and sentenced CDGM without bothering to notify its staff, let alone allow it to defend itself, a disregard for due process seriously being considered for court or legislative remedy in pro-CDGM circles...
...the Freedom Democratic party people...
...But the coalition against OEO—including all those churchmen—fought the fire with its own white-hot flame...
...One answer is that anyone setting out to kill CDGM and replace it with a moderately controlled program would be helping the regular party rightists, because they would prefer to cope with conventional deal-making politicians than with the kind of uncompromising force CDGM seemed capable of producing—people capable of giving up all, rather than make a deal...
...A private organization called Friends Of The Children Of Mississippi, an offshoot (in terms of personnel and approach) of CDGM, administered (with some foundation support) the volunteer units in the five counties and in one other...
...to 2:00 P.M., and a mile home—for nothing...
...others, including free-lance community organizers...
...there was real mobility from bottom to top, as well as communication...
...Earlier when she first came up and looked the visitors in the eye and told her name without shyness and stuck out her black little hand to the white ones, one of the visitors had asked, "Do you go to school...
...All three men in the unit's civil rights division quit, two of them over CDGM alone...
...Here again, the lore is hazy...
...Teach a Child," said a sign on the wall...
...As MAP had the money and Friends Of The Children had the children, the proposal was that Friends Of The Children be allowed to operate the schools on CDGM principles, with MAP money...
...In the first refunding crisis, the program's first director, Dr...
...Martinez way off somewhere in unreality...
...Whichever and whenever, MAP was set up to replace CDGM...
...III At this point, the CDGM lore begins to lack definitiveness...
...Pearl Draine, associate director of the program for children, could reassert the old spirit by becoming fed-up with weeks of wheel-spinning to get the schools ready to open under the new regulations...
...This seems to have been a concession to Mississippi reality by the better half of OEO when it was thought CDGM really would be killed, and suggests one hopeful fate of the remaining CDGM schools if the program finally is killed...
...Reuther and CCAP, were the Board of National Missions of the Presbyterian Church (by virtue of their sponsorship of CDGM through Mary Holmes Junior College, a stratagem which originally prevented veto of the program by Governor Johnson) ; functionaries of the Congregational Church and the National Council of Churches...
...Such, too, was the advice of important elements among liberal CDGM supporters who were still unwilling to face the fact that the treatment of the five counties had diminished that victory considerably...
...These counties were placed under MAP when it was set up, but on December 17, the OEO announced it would refund CDGM and place the five counties back under CDGM...
...CCAP coordinated the attack...
...Shriver, this culminating in the mobilization of Vice President Humphrey, an ace card which, if not the deciding factor, was certainly one that hurried along Mr...
...A meeting was held on April 1, 1967, to discuss this and alternate strategies (including that of just struggling along without support) by the people, mainly Negro women, who had done all the work and lavished all their hope on the schools...
...Some on the CDGM side suspect that the group of white moderates and liberals and mainly middle-class Negroes who have sought to build a loyalist Democratic party in Mississippi, sold the idea to Washington...
...It was praised by educators as a remarkable social document—but from OEO in Washington it soon became evident that no one had read it in its entirety...
...The truth seems to be that the moderates (even as Aaron Henry of old) keep a precarious perch with a foot in each of these volatile party camps...
...The Negro vote is large enough at 32.9 per cent of its potential in Mississippi to be worth a major struggle on the national level, from most accounts involving even the President...
...She said to him, "You go ride," and to the three, "Y'all share," and the accommodation was made...
...Staffers were split in their reaction to the way the situation was handled...
...The move was one of sheer practicality, beyond pragmatism—born out of past sad experience, out of the feeling that you can't out-fox the fox...
...The fate of the five counties was not a pretty part of the funding fight...
...they would know that something had to be done about the regular schools...
...On the national level, Roy Wilkins was caught in a terrible squeeze—under pressure to support his Mississippi people in MAP (including state NAACP director Charles Evers) and threatened with loss of funds from Northern liberal sources unless he got behind CDGM...
...The battle was marked by that deadly coldness and ruthlessness we have come somehow not to take as frightening in our national (not to mention international) affairs...
...Funds to CDGM were ended on October 3. From that date until December 17, when Sargent Shriver capitulated to the liberal pressures, and until January 30 when after what seemed churlish delay, he finally signed a new $5 million funding, a big-time battle was joined on the national level over little old CDGM...
...Beyond this, another 49 centers in counties not covered by CDGM were being operated by volunteers and on whatever money they could raise, serving some 4,000 children...
...Also growing out of the final funding crisis was a dispute over five of Mississippi's counties which originally had CDGM schools, but were assigned to MAP...
...Carter complains eloquently (while disclaiming that MAP has an iota of political content) that the Administration has done nothing for the moderates but double-cross them, or why else would they have turned to a Bobby Kennedy cocktail party for funds...
...The bitterness of the CDGM-MAP split, with much of the Negro CDGM wrath falling on Mr...
...the count was closer to 12,000 because none was refused...
...Similar schools are operated by CAP boards in the state...
...The nation needs to realize better what the stakes are, and how liberals in their Democratic-party politics need to do more than save CDGM for one more funding, if there is to be real progress against racism and poverty, and for freedom for all Americans...
...Brown hoped to be elected mayor of Sunflower City in an election-ordered re-run by a federal court so that Negro candidates might be placed on the ballot...
...They were discouraged...
...He demurs, too, from the theory that the anti-union flavor of MAP helped induce Walter Reuther and his Citizens Crusade Against Poverty (CCAP) to throw formidable weight behind efforts to save CDGM...
...Poor people, less than well educated, including teachers, filled the jobs...
...Shriver's defeat...
...The most important demonstration, however, was the fact that 50 of the 84 centers remained open, the staffs working for no pay, during the months of delay...
...The center, built of corrugated metal, was on a row of small, neat Negro homes fronting the usual rutted dirt road...
...They are the children's," said the mother who came from the plantations and had no opportunity for education...
...She said she had taught 23 years in public schools, and had decided to work with the Sunflower City Center, "as long as the children come...
...Shriver's office did not go unnoted...
...One who was intimately and conscientiously involved in this effort recalled that the pressure from OEO was for quick action, not quality of board membership...
...But the struggle for survival (as with the black-belt farmers trying desperately to assert their right to live on the land—a kind of right the middle class so far seems to be not even aware of) consumes the energy and efforts of the poor...
...The CDGM schools in the five counties continued this volunteer operation for months after the grant was signed...
...MACE, with its roots in the CDGM experience, might be the beginning or the model of something big in the continuing transition from demonstration to implementation in the South...
...Welfare," she answered...
...V The riddle of Mississippi remains unanswered, but it seems clear that the kind of creative and purposeful direction in the lives of the poor that CDGM set in motion is not going to be set in motion under the forces which, like the big offices in Washington, are so far from any comprehension of the reality of poverty that they cannot act meaningfully...
...So—in the end, everybody got a little and lost a little, and that is the way with it in a consensus, isn't it, no matter how it collapses...
...Another new charge was that nepotism figured in some CDGM hiring...
...The story is that Mr...
...The little girl went and took down a book and brought it to the adult visitor and, like any little five-year-old who has grown up with books, she turned the pages and pointed to the pictures and told what they were: fish and monkey and cow and clown...
...half were out because of "flu...
...Shriver's response can be most charitably described as overly defensive...
...A major policy dispute developed between the staff and the board...
...In early 1967, a staff member in Washington said morale was at an all-time low over CDGM, over the inability to get programs of merit through political opposition in Northern cities and bad CAP boards in the South, and over the rumors that the department would have its functions and whatever was left of its spirit of innovation turned over to the mercies of the regular bureaucracies...
...But they are let to develop as they are...
...John Bell Williams, the Goldwater Democrat, persuaded Sen...
...Both are well-educated, sophisticated, and movement-seasoned young people of that extraordinary kind who have persistently held to the old goals of the civil rights movement and the old dream of a fundamental change in American society—against virtually nothing but disappointment and, of late, a desertion and giving-up on both the goals and the dream by the vast majority of those, both white and Negro, who felt the same in the early sixties...
...Whether deliberately or not, CDGM played a role which became cru cial in later controversy...
...Cooper got into it (and some see him there to further a long-range desire for the governor's chair), his presence is attributed by many to the absence of one of the key members of the moderate political coalition, Claude Ramsey, state director of the AFL—CIO...
...John Mudd, a white graduate student who came to Mississippi during the Freedom Summer to direct a summer seminar project at Tougaloo College, emerged as the new director...
...The middle-class of the nation stands ready for whatever new halter is being prepared...
...Some 40 of these were set up during the second funding negotiations, with a special task force from OEO working to convert CDGM schools to what is called delegate agencies, which means they have their own board and virtual autonomy...
...By July, Sen...
...A copy of the resolution, beginning, "We, the poor people of Mississippi, assembled at this CDGM public hearing, August 13, 1966, declare our full support of the CDGM Head Start program," was sent to the President...
...It was in this action by the "poor," the "uneducated," who had found not only the rarity of regular-paying work in CDGM, but a sense of achievement and vision about the children, that the real meaning of CDGM (with implications beyond the yet Neanderthal stratagems of Mississippi politics) began to emerge...
...There followed frantic (and from all reports fairly typical) organization of Community Action Programs (CAP) across the state, peopled by respectable whites (in a state not too long past the days when the ultimate in respectability was membership in the Citizens' Council) and middle-class Negroes...
...Tom Levin, a New York lay psychoanalyst, was quietly eased out, and the headquarters was moved from the Delta Ministry's Mount Beulah Con ference Center near Edwards, Mississippi (with its movement tone and people), to a proper office building in downtown Jackson...
...Also involved perhaps is the subterranean feuding between the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund, a national phenomenon...
...On September 30, the Jackson Daily News broke an exclusive story gleefully saying that "the controversial" CDGM would not be refunded, and that it would be replaced by a 12-man board of white and Negro leaders set up under the "personal supervision" of Mr...
...The almost esoteric controversy and clamor that have surrounded the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) show in clear perspective some basic facts about America in the time of the Johnson Administration: what's happening to the poverty program, convolutions of national (and the new Southern) politics, "black power," effectiveness and dilemmas of the nation's liberals, and the way it is with the poor themselves who have so much to gain—and even more to lose...
...Henry that he felt he had done his Christian duty in most civic affairs, but not by the Negro poor (he is much given to saying this), and that if a chance came where Mr...
...The hope was that the people in CDGM would be able to continue its spirit and its aims in the other poverty programs, in privately financed programs or in community organizations after it is gone...
...The issue was clearly, as John Mudd and Marvin Hoffman stated it in The Nation, October 24, 1966, the flaws built into "community action" programs of OEO whereby the whole community, rich and poor, theoretically work together to solve problems of poverty...
...Certainly, when the Vice President came in on the funding negotiations, on the side of the angels, there was the sense...
...Unita Blackwell of Isaquena County: "The people had given up on PTA, schools, etc., teachers, etc...
...Some put it more harshly...
...the New World Foundation...
...Henry, reflects continuing animosity that started with the 19434 Freedom I, Summer and a split between the NAACP and SNCC, and continued between NAACP and the Freedom Democratic Party (FDP...
...Here, in part, was the source of the spirit of CDGM which, far better than most big organizational structures, maintained a connection between action-taking power and the reality with which the action was supposed to deal...
...James McCree of Canton, a Negro and chairman of the board...
...Brown struggled for the words that would describe what the effort there represented to the people...
...60 children were on the rolls...
...A little boy was holding on to her, quietly protesting because three others on a tricycle wouldn't let him ride...
...Shriver has denied ever making such a charge, but the leaks were generally attributed to OEO and they cited the "black power" complaint as the real reason for the impending end of CDGM funding...
...They have become individuals...
...But if any understanding was to be had of the meaning of CDGM it had to include the knowledge that the kind of stirring among poor Negroes that it achieved had to be done by the poor Negroes themselves...
...But the polluted waters of the mainstream were seeping in early in that last funding period...
...Levin seems also to have been of that variety of Northern missionary familiar through the history of the South whose revulsion from the grosser evils of the Southern way of life allowed no rapprochement with its smaller charms and its perhaps smaller opportunities for encouraging local reform...
...Shriver's office, after the dust settled, was citing a news article that pleased it, and this was a rarity...
...Shriver...
...CDGM was established as a Head Start program in the days of the poverty program in the summer of 1965...
...There were the usual charges and a flurry of concern, in a state notable for unconcern about education, over a textbook prepared by CDGM in ungrammatical language—that is, the language spoken in the homes of most of the Head Starters...
...His contention was that the real aim of the President in the affair was to help out the moderates...
...There were supposed to be 9,000 children in the centers under the second grant...
...This is the inability to get the kind of local support required for health examinations and the like, including in some cases even food supplies needed in Head Start centers...
...Their little spirits have been lifted...
...The nation had in the previous summer learned to be properly choked up by the valiant little freedom schools in Mississippi...
...Stennis to use his influence against CDGM for the obvious Realpolitik reasons...
...its staff and grass-roots followers worked in the belief that this would be the last funding...
...Few in the nation knew that it had been won, let alone what was at stake...
...This meant more than the opposition of Sen...
...The poor are again deprived of control of factors which most directly affect their own lives, and, as a result, lose the opportunity to acquire the competence which would allow them to sit as equals, able to represent effectively the claims of their group...
...it financed 84 Head Start centers for 6,000 children from May to August, 1965...
...This is a sorest of sore spots, with many of the old CDGM people refusing or being refused the opportunity to cooperate with MAP...
...Mrs...
...Henry immediately thought of his new friend, Mr...
...Some say it was the gravest mistake he has ever made...
...The little girl and her family lived in one of the units, and she and her mother came out to greet visitors, and took them inside to see the nice interior with the modern kitchen and the walls all blackened with kerosene oil from a faulty stove and against one wall in the living room, a bookcase, filled with books...
...This analysis is given credence in some Washington circles, but is viewed with more skepticism in Mississippi—where the question is asked, why should he when the real power is still in the hands of the rightist regulars...
...The few immediate beneficiaries of the programs among the poor will receive a short-term boost to their incomes through their dole as "aides," but even these gains are contingent on the acceptance of whatever strings of dependency may be implicit...
...But there was also some feeling (including that of some Negro grass-roots leaders) to be more pragmatic, to take what was still a victory, and not to jeopardize the greater good for the sake of a few...
...This seemed to be the deepest political meaning in the CDGM battle...
...the people and agencies (in the terms of demonology, the power structures and normal channels) who ordinarily would have been given the task wouldn't touch it...
...Not the smallest of its tactics was to set old friends (including even his former legal counsel) upon Mr...
...Cooper said during dinner to Mr...
...There are many stories of Mississippi politics which make the state seem like one spread-out, gossipy small town...
...Moreover, a man like Mr...
...These included the tough, grass-roots oriented Delta Ministry of the National Council of Churches...
...the old Marxist hope that the poor might be a revolutionary force breathes anew in an ironic way in the notion that they might form a political force to fight for freedom and individualism, for control of institutions instead of viceversa...
Vol. 14 • May 1967 • No. 3
