Mississippi CDGM: Head Start and Civil Rights, 1965–67 |
Description of CDGM
The following description of CDGM appears on pages 121-125 of Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) “The Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) was unquestionably the most famous Head Start program in Project Head Start’s early years. It was created in the spring of 1965, the first season of the national Head Start program’s existence, when, in every state and hundreds of localities, centers were being hastily developed. CDGM is still referenced and written about four decades later. It provides an excellent model for those wishing to reach and inspire very low-income parents of young children, particularly in areas here and abroad where there is an extreme shortage of professionals. “R. Sargent Shriver has often said, at the time and ever since, that CDGM was the most important Head Start in the country. Frequently called the Poverty Tsar, Shriver was the Director of the nation’s entire poverty program, which emanated from The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the newly established federal agency called the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). Sargent Shriver proposed Head Start to President Lyndon B. Johnson, although it was not mandated in the law, as one of OEO’s many antipoverty programs. Shriver approved and signed every Head Start grant given in the United States during his tenure (1965-1970), Head Start’s first five years. “CDGM was a visible federal investment because it was the epitome of what Shriver and OEO’s Community Action staff wanted Head Start to be for children and families living in poverty, and because it represented traditional democratic values: human rights, health care, education, opportunity, jobs, and adequate wages for everyone. The segregationist wing of the Democratic Party (the Dixiecrats), which had controlled the state for many decades, did not share these values. For these reasons, CDGM was funded as the second biggest Head Start program in the country. For its first summer alone, 1965, CDGM was given a $1.3 million grant (in 2006 dollars, this equals approximately $5 million) to serve 12,000 children. Shriver considered CDGM so exceptional because it represented “maximum feasible participation of the poor.” Although those not directly involved were proclaiming CDGM dead by the end of its first year, it has survived to the present under names such as Mary Holmes College Community Extension and Friends of the Children of Mississippi. CDGM and its descendents have served hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of children and had, by 1990, already received a billion federal dollars. “CDGM was conceptualized and actualized by founding director Dr. Tom Levin, a New York psychoanalyst; the Reverend Arthur Thomas, who lived in Mississippi as Director of the Delta Ministry; and Polly Greenberg, Shriver’s Senior Program Analyst for Head Start in the Southeast Region. Greenberg knew of Shriver’s dream for the true community action program that Head Start could be and she urged Levin and Thomas to apply for a Head Start grant. The Delta Ministry was the National Council of Churches’ Mississippi ministry and for two years had been doing voter registration; supporting race-related demonstrations; supplying legal advice and bail for jailed rights workers; operating a freedom information service; distributing tons of food, clothing, and books collected by church groups in the North, and other projects. Poor people knew and had faith in Tom and Art. Without the Delta Ministry’s trusted community organizers, CDGM could not have happened. Trusted community organizers are essential to the replication of this Head Start model. “The thousands of children and families who participated in CDGM’s Head Start program were black. Most lived in shacks and shanties in a desolate part of the state known as the Delta; most were the grandchildren or great grandchildren of field slaves. White families were too terrified of Ku Klux Klan reprisals even to talk to CDGM organizers. There are many books about the reign of terror in this regrettable period of Mississippi’s history. The documentary “Emmett Till” and two Hollywood films—“Color Purple” and “Mississippi Burning”—illustrate the context in which CDGM was launched. Historians point out that in 1965 Mississippi was the most racially violent, fiercely segregated, and poorest state in the union; it was a caricature of the South. “The Delta covers more than 7,000 square miles, and includes many counties from which no one had applied for a Head Start grant. The most minimal health care, such as immunizations, was not available within sixty miles of many families, most of whom had no transportation. At that time, there were no public kindergartens in the state, not to mention in the Delta. Many families lived in Delta communities of ten or fifteen cabins (without plumbing). Obviously, there were no preschools, day-care centers, or early childhood professionals! Most CDGM children were destined to attend some of the worst public schools in the United States, where many of their future elementary teachers could read only at the third-grade level and there was sometimes only one copy of one book in the classroom—a basal reader. Facts about this widely reported phase of the state’s history can be obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, numerous articles, books, and documentary films. National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting System websites are also good sources. “Those who became CDGM families lacked just about everything except generosity and courage. Their level of poverty was extreme—many families’ incomes averaged $400 annually. Yet they organized sixty-four CDGM Head Start centers and opened the doors to 12,000 children in dozens of counties, all in eight weeks. To underscore the dangerous context of this astonishing feat, it took place one year after three young people who were helping black residents in Philadelphia, Mississippi register to vote were beaten to death with chains. “In most ways, CDGM centers were like all other Head Start centers in Head Start’s earliest years. As guidelines explained, the focus was on children learning to play together, eating nutritious food, and enjoying broadly educational experiences at “school.” Health care, social services, and parent participation were as valued as was early childhood education. However, in what many regard as the most important ways, CDGM was eye-openingly different. The chief difference was CDGM’s three originators’ philosophy and the confluence of resources they brought together to implement it. “First, Tom Levin understood how psychologically and permanently crippling disempowerment is to parents and their children. CDGM’s three architects further believed that what happens in the classroom in a brief preschool program, regardless of how good the curriculum, has far less impact upon a child’s lifelong trajectory than does what happens in his spirit and sense of possibilities when he watches the enormously disempowered parents with whom he is profoundly identified become competent and confident in bringing him happy days, and in initiating fundamental change in the community and greater society in which he is growing up. They knew that a livable income helps parents do better by their children—jobs would be at the core of this project. Crucial in CDGM’s creation and character was that literally thousands of local, very low-income black leaders and parents in Mississippi, such as the famed freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, passionately shared the philosophy, and quickly became forceful CDGM advocates. Dr. Levin, a specialist in psychological dynamics, considered a major role for poor parents such an overwhelming priority in helping their children that he structured the entire project to implement this principle. “As a result of this fundamental orientation to parents, there were no centers unless parents and their peers organized them. Through Delta Ministry and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteers, most of the latter local black Mississippians, the word was spread across dozens of counties. They explained Head Start guidelines, and that each group of extremely poor residents would need to form a committee to act as the tiny cross-roads community’s “school board,” find and fix a facility, sign up eligible children by name and address, and hire potential staff if the locality chose to be part of CDGM’s grant application. No grant was guaranteed. As just stated, the people’s response was immediate and overwhelming. Even the overall Governing Board was two-thirds very poor people. There were four other members, one of whom was CDGM’s eloquent spokeswoman and lawyer, the remarkable Marian Wright (Edelman), who had been living in the state in considerable jeopardy for several years handling school desegregation cases for NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund.
“Secondly, CDGM differed from other Head Start programs because, at great personal risk, participants attempted to implement one of the early national Head Start program’s greatest emphases—motivating communities to activate local public health and social services departments and public schools; and to energize volunteers from the most and least powerful sectors, certainly from among the poor themselves, on behalf of low-income families and their children. This was Sargent Shriver’s definition of “community action.” His mantra was, “What if all segments of each community mobilized to reduce poverty?” “Three weeks after CDGM Head Start centers opened, the white power structure at Mississippi’s highest levels attacked it as “Communist” and “fiscally irresponsible.” In response, poor people and the handful of professionals employed (at $50 a week) on their central staff and Governing Board members lobbied national leaders of the freedom movement such as Martin Luther King, the National Council of Churches, and the AFL-CIO’s Citizen’s Crusade Against Poverty. They also sought support from liberal politicians and leading early childhood educators from many states, the northern press, and sympathetic OEO officials. They advocated so successfully that CDGM received many more Head Start grants. This was the kind of mobilization of middle class and professional communities that Shriver sought. “A third difference between CDGM and other Head Start programs was that it pushed to the limit the emphasis on “new careers for the poor” (especially for mothers) always one of Head Start’s extraordinary features nationwide. In most Head Start centers some people learn their jobs as they go along, but key positions in each staff—teachers and directors—are held by individuals with some degree of postsecondary education and/or specialized training. There was no dispute about the value of training, but in CDGM it was believed to be of utmost importance for all children to participate in Head Start along with parents, relatives, and neighbors who were also learning. With only two exceptions statewide, no center staff members, including teachers, started out trained. The week before centers opened, Polly Greenberg left the federal government to work for CDGM in Mississippi. She designed a teacher development and training of trainers program, which she conducted across the state for two years to ensure that the program for children met Head Start requirements. “As a result of this emphasis on careers for the poor, every child saw one or more of her close relatives and well-known neighbors becoming cooks, drivers, social service workers, health workers, teachers, administrators, or members of a hiring and firing committee. They had seen nothing like this before! Children were not the only ones who were motivated. Several times during its first two years when between grants, poor people continued to operate their full scale Head Start programs for as much as six months without any funding. Within national guidelines, Head Start centers are almost always controlled by members of the middleclass and professionals. Within national guidelines, CDGM centers were controlled by the poor. This distinction was missed by no parent, although it has proven difficult for those lacking direct experience with CDGM to grasp. “The fourth difference between CDGM and most Head Starts was the role of professionals. There were none working directly within the centers. Instead, the handful of central staff professionals in each dimension of the program (administration, health services, early childhood education) provided technical assistance through an each-one-teach-one approach, aiming at enabling indigenous people to replace them within a year or less. Typically, CDGM had two or three professionals per 1,100 job holders and 12,000 children. The role of professionals included helping poor people organize, discuss, discover, and connect to sources and resources of all kinds, from learning to write grant applications to contacting influential people. It included being allies and advocates to the people’s grassroots “movement” for children. “CDGM represents one of two very different streams of thought about the purposes of Head Start, the role of parents, and the role of professionals. For CDGM, the focus was not on every “student’s” academic progress, or even on the child’s social development, though certainly no one would have assailed these goals. CDGM’s focus was on actualizing the belief that every human being, including children’s parents, matters; not just during the Head Start year, but throughout their lives. CDGM advocates and other like-minded people believe that substantial social change is required if our wish to help poor children “succeed” is authentic. They believe, further, that if activists don’t work for it while developing educational programs, their motives can be considered disingenuous at best and possibly unconsciously protective of class privilege. CDGM’s greatest lesson is that poor people, with allies, have great potential to press for change so that they find fewer obstacles and more opportunities to help themselves and their children move out of poverty. ….”
Frequently Asked Questions about CDGM Q. Was the national or state SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) leadership involved in originating or operating CDGM? A. No. Earlier, SNCC had engaged in critically important freedom movement work, but as people familiar with the organization know, after the famous Summer of ’64—Freedom Summer—it was in disarray. A little background for those not well acquainted with SNCC. It was founded on a North Carolina college campus in April, 1960 to coordinate the freedom rides, sit-ins, and other protests springing up all over the South. SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference), CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and other civil rights groups attended the founding meeting. Many of today’s African American leaders became known as a result of their civil rights activities in and subsequent to their active participation in SNCC. Among them are Julian Bond (NAACP director), Marion Barry (former Washington DC mayor); and John Lewis (a SNCC founder and current United States congressman). There are many more. SNCC played a leading role in the 1963 March on Washington, and the next year in Mississippi’s famous Freedom Summer, including organizing the historic Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. One of SNCC’s greatest accomplishments was registering large numbers of black people to vote. Without a vote, blacks couldn’t cause change in the state’s leadership, so couldn’t create change in segregated white power system. At the end of the summer of 1964, SNCC activists were struggling to decide what direction to take—Martin Luther King’s well-known racially inclusive nonviolent approach? Or the Black Panthers’ newly-materializing virulently anti-white approach? Within SNCC turmoil reigned and in its midst no plans were formed for the following summer, 1965. There was talk (mainly on the part of Tom Levin and Art Thomas with SNCC leaders) of organizing a handful of freedom schools similar to those created the summer before, but specific plans had not been made—partially because many SNCC people were no longer willing to work with whites. Tom and Art were white. Anti-white sentiment was rampant even against non-black SNCC workers. Things were taking a decidedly sharp turn toward black power. In 1966, John Lewis, son of an Alabama sharecropper who had been SNCC’s chairman since 1963, was replaced by Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the swelling black power movement. Lewis was one of Martin Luther King’s right hand men. John Lewis had been centrally involved in freedom rides (and had been a victim of the resulting brutal beatings), and all the other dangerous early 1960s civil rights demonstrations. He had coordinated Mississippi’s Freedom Summer, and had gone on participate in the shocking Selma, Alabama march (and again had been a victim of the resulting brutal beatings.) Yet Lewis remained—and remains to this day—a believer in nonviolence. He also believes in all races working together for social justice. By the time CDGM was being conceptualized and organized Stokely Carmichael had come to believe that SNCC should rid itself of all white members, who should organize in white communities, while blacks and only blacks worked in black communities. Rage against white people, even those deeply involved in seeking justice for black people, was rampant. Tom Levin met with SNCC leaders in Mississippi as he and the Delta Ministry were organizing CDGM to urge them to participate. SNCC leaders were strongly against taking federal funds, “white man’s money”, and did not officially support CDGM, although they agreed not to torpedo it, and many individuals who identified as affiliated with SNCC worked with CDGM. The federal government does not give funds to political groups or to any highly controversial group (if it’s known in advance that the group is controversial). Anyone who has worked in a federally funded project knows how sensitive an issue this is, and is very careful not to cross the line between activities for which the project was funded and “political” activity. Hence it’s absurd to believe that OEO would give a grant to SNCC or to an organization fronting for SNCC. In the 1960s and 1970s, the term “civil rights” was equivalent to the word “communist;” two concepts that were anathema to the white supremacist majority in the deep South, and which it therefore constantly tossed about. The major nightmare OEO struggled with regarding CDGM was Mississippi segregationists’ politically brilliant, inflammatory allegation that CDGM and SNCC were synonymous. However, as civil rights—equal treatment under the law and so on—are human rights guaranteed to all US citizens by our most precious guiding documents—it’s certainly true that CDGM and all of the groups working to secure equal rights for African Americans in Mississippi had many similar goals and adherents. ****************************** Q: Did Sargent Shriver send OEO staff member Greenberg to Mississippi to help organize CDGM? A: No. Greenberg helped CDGM organizers no more than she helped other people organizing Head Start programs in the seven Southern states. She then resigned from the federal government and took her four children to Mississippi where they lived for two years so she could arrange to stock each of sixty-four centers with early childhood classroom equipment and materials, develop a system for helping parents become early childhood teachers, and ensure that CDGM met Head Start requirements for the children’s program. Because Polly had been in on the origins of the national Head Start program and was known by many key OEO people to have a thorough understanding of the program, to be dedicated to helping it become a reality operating all over America at the highest level of excellence with regard to each of the fundamental ideas behind it, OEO officials trusted her and her word that CDGM workers were not engaged in direct political activity, with SNCC or any other political group. Greenberg’s presence in the project somewhat reassured scared OEO officials, but Sargent Shriver did not send her to Mississippi to help originate CDGM. Shriver did send Sandy Kravitz (Dr. Sanford Kravitz, Director of OEO’s Community Action Research, Demonstration and Training program) to Clarksdale in Coahoma County Mississippi to work with Aaron Henry—son of a sharecropper, pharmacist, and state president of NAACP—to establish a Head Start program there. For fifty years, Aaron Henry had been an influential crusader in every aspect of the fight for the freedoms and opportunities other Americans take for granted. Although neither he personally, nor the NAACP were involved in CDGM, both informally endorsed it, of course. Sargent Shriver sent Dr. Kravitz—who had a background that included a doctorate in social policy, leadership roles in the American Friends Service Committee, and serving as program director of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency where he was one of the designers of the Community Action Program)—to assist predominantly middle-class black people (teachers, small businessmen, etc.), NAACP-affiliated people, create a Head Start program. (CDGM did not have centers in Coahoma County.) Greenberg’s job at OEO was to work with any and all applicants in the Southeast region (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi) to help them develop Head Start grant applications that met all aspects of the federal guidelines. (She did not work with Aaron Henry because Sandy Kravitz had been assigned by Shriver to do that; the Coahoma Head Start application was on a different track than the others.) When Greenberg realized that the applications she was getting from Mississippi were all from the state’s “establishment,” albeit groups considered moderate in the Mississippi context, and that none of the applicants represented the black people who had been deeply involved, year after year, in life-threatening actions such as registering to vote, sending their children to “white” schools, and so on, she began contacting national organizations that led the freedom movement in the South. Twelve Head Start grants were ultimately given by Sargent Shriver to Mississippi applicants, Aaron Henry’s Coahoma project being one of them. Ten other Head Start grantees were school systems, Community Action Agencies, and other agencies, all of which were controlled by white supremacists. (For example, Greenberg worked with the Sunflower County CAP controlled by Senator James Eastland, nicknamed “the voice of the white South,” a man whose plantation included 6,000 acres and who had denounced Brown v Board of Education, telling his constituents that they didn’t have to obey such a “fraudulent” law). The twelfth Head Start application was from CDGM. CDGM was organized by Delta Ministry Director Art Thomas, his Northern volunteers working in Mississippi communities, local SNCC volunteers, and “unaffiliated” local activists—black poor people—all with the guidance of Tom Levin, who was in New York but constantly on the phone with Art and others. Although Greenberg went to Mississippi for one meeting, sent a representative to a second, and worked closely with Tom Levin, she was an OEO staff member in Washington, helping all Head Start applicants in the Southeast Region, until June, 1965, when she left the government and went to work on CDGM’s central staff. ****************************** Q. What was Mary Holmes Junior College, which is occasionally mentioned in connection with CDGM, and what was its connection to CDGM? Was it an important influence in CDGM? A. No. Head Start grants could only be given with a state’s governor’s approval unless the grant was given to an institution of higher education. All OEO staff people helping localities prepare grant applications, including Polly Greenberg, knew this rule. Mississippi’s governor had said that he would not allow Head Start in his state (although he eventually did; but he would never have signed off on CDGM because Senators Stennis and Eastland would not have it). Of course no publicly funded institution of higher education in Mississippi would dare violate the sacrosanct white power establishment’s wishes. Therefore, Art Thomas asked the National Council of Churches if it had a college in the state that could be asked to apply as the grantee. The NCC said yes, Mary Holmes Junior College in a part of the state quite distant from where CDGM headquarters was to be located. NCC pressured the reluctant, because terrified of reprisals, president, who virtually had to capitulate. Mary Holmes was not accredited and was able to offer an education not even equivalent to that available at an inner city middle school. It was a better than nothing opportunity for Mississippi’s better black students living in that corner of the state. The question at OEO was: does MHJC qualify as an institution of higher education? Dr. Julius Richmond, director of the national Head Start program, phoned the legal staff at the US Department of Education. A lawyer there worked with Dr. Richmond and decided that if any student who graduated from an institution was accepted at a graduate school, the institution from which he graduated could be considered an institution of higher education. One such student existed. OEO gave the grant for CDGM to MHJC as a figure head so funding CDGM would be possible. ****************************** Q. Is it true that in 1965 there were no public kindergartens in the state of Mississippi, and no early childhood professionals? A. It’s almost true. In a few cities there were public kindergartens and in most cities there were some private kindergartens, typically run by churches. There were no public kindergartens in many smaller cities or in any rural county. Mississippi was a predominantly rural state. Most kindergartens were for white children. There were early childhood professionals at several of the white universities, in the few city kindergartens for white children, and in some of the private kindergartens (although most were staffed by people without relevant professional training). Mississippi was rigidly racially segregated. White professionals would be risking their lives and homes (bombing the homes of those who threatened the segregated system was common) if they violated “the Southern way of life.” |