Mississippi CDGM: Head Start and Civil Rights, 1965–67

How Did CDGM Come About?

CDGM was conceptualized and actualized by founding director Dr. Tom Levin, a New York psychoanalyst; the Reverend Arthur Thomas, a North Carolinian living in Mississippi as Director of the Delta Ministry; and Polly Greenberg, author of this book.

Sargent Shriver, frequently called the Poverty Tsar, was Director of the nation's entire poverty program, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), a newly established federal agency emanating from the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Greenberg was a staff person at OEO's Washington D.C. headquarters. She was Sargent Shriver's Senior Program Analyst for Head Start's Southeast Region. She was responsible for soliciting and helping officials in as many counties as possible within the region's seven states develop applications for Head Start grants so as to launch the newly announced program.

Greenberg knew Shriver's dream for the true community action program that Head Start could be. He sought maximum feasible participation of both poor and middleclass communities working together. Greenberg worked with a number of potential Head Start grantees in Mississippi. Although some of them did apply for grants, none represented the exceptionally poor, courageous black people who, often in a reign of bullets, had been active in voter registration during the previous summer.

Greenberg, a child development specialist, hadn't been involved in civil rights activism in the South. But she knew many of the leaders—and knew how to reach others—through her mother, a long time supporter of organizations seeking social justice for minorities and poor people; and her brother-in-law, Jack Greenberg, Director-Counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Polly engaged in a telephone search for a bold group willing to apply for a Head Start grant that would not be run by "establishment" Mississippi, and would, in contrast, be run by people who believed in equal rights and opportunities for all citizens.

The grapevine connected Greenberg with Dr. Tom Levin. Tom had organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights, and had worked in Mississippi the previous year during Freedom Summer. He was considered a friend by the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Levin had been organizing people since he was a teenager from a very poor New York Jewish immigrant family. He had been a union organizer. He believed that helping people organize around issues of great concern to them was the way to help them gain, realize, and use power to make their lives better. He believed in the power of the vote.

The Reverend Arthur Thomas, who was also well respected by SNCC activists, believed that working for human rights, a traditional goal of the Church is only meaningful when new concepts of ministry and new action methods responsive to the real issues in individuals' lives are invented. He, too, believed in the power of the vote. The Delta Ministry was the National Council of Churches' Mississippi ministry. For two years it 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; it had provided significant financial support to the Medical Committee for Human Rights the previous summer.

Greenberg urged Levin, who in turn urged Thomas—neither of whom had yet heard of the new federal Head Start program—to apply for a Head Start grant. Tom Levin and Art Thomas were planning a new project for the summer of '65: five to ten "freedom school"-style day care centers for civil rights workers' children. Polly insisted that this could be done many times multiplied, and poor parents could be paid as staff, if all concerned wanted to apply for and comply with a Head Start grant. She also knew of a loophole in the law that required each governor to sign off on Head Start grants to be given within the state. (The governor of Mississippi had told her that he wasn't going to permit any program for "darkies" in the state.) Art Thomas convinced the National Council of Churches to sponsor CDGM, through an unaccredited junior college in Mississippi that was affiliated with it (Mary Holmes), if poor black Mississippians decided they wanted to go for it.

Psychoanalyst Dr. Tom Levin understood how psychologically and permanently crippling disempowerment is to people and their children. If there was to be a Child Development Group of Mississippi, it would have to focus on that. CDGM's founding trio was united in believing that what happens in the classroom in a brief preschool program, regardless of how good the curriculum and comprehensive services are, 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, confident, and active in bringing him happy days, and in initiating constructive and fundamental change to the community and greater society in which he is growing up.

Therefore, crucial in CDGM's creation and character was that literally thousands of local, very low-income black leaders and parents in Mississippi—most of them maids or field workers—such as the famed freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, passionately shared the philosophy. They instantly became forceful CDGM actualizers or advocates. Tom Levin considered this such an overwhelming priority that he structured the entire project to implement the principle. He required the poorest of the poor—not middle-class, "representatives" of the black race selected by well-meaning liberals in the white world—to organize themselves 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.

Poor people knew and had faith in Tom and Art. They knew and trusted the Delta Ministry's community organizers. Without them CDGM could not have happened.

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