Mississippi CDGM: Head Start and Civil Rights, 1965–67
Professional Reviews of Devil Book
What Experts Were Saying about Devil Has Slippery Shoes in the 1960s When It Was First Published
Jonathan Kozol:
"The Devil Has Slippery Shoes may well stand as something of an ultimate epitaph not only for the War on Poverty itself, but for the entire dream of participatory democracy as many young people have conceived it. Although the scene is Mississippi, the same thing has happened in almost every area of the country. The poor, the black, the young together build up a program charged with fire and energy. In Washington, bureaucrats panic, phones begin ringing, and the money is cut off. The poor are 'exposed' ('bad bookkeeping procedures' is the standard charge) and then are mercifully excluded from their own program. Establishment figures move in to redirect the program in more conventional directions: the poor, the young, the black retire to dreams of hate and vengeance. I hope the book is widely read. It will trouble a lot of people and ought to upset some men in Washington."
Kirkus:
"… all sorts of government agents, educators and professionals will be ready to pay the price for this memoir, which progresses on an altogether different level from … corruption-and-confusion post mortems on Great Society programs … CDGM was the most controversial Head Start project in the South, at intervals threatened with liquidation by OEO, partly because of its aggressive civil-rights, civil-libertarian character. … CDGM continued after 1966, but lost its freshness. … The book rarely does: it is a remarkable record. …"
The Washington Post:
"The account of CDGM's development as a grass-roots organization of poor people and its subsequent castration by bureaucrats and politicians is especially depressing because it could be the story of almost any group that took 'maximum feasible participation' seriously during those first hopeful months of the war on poverty."
Publishers' Weekly:
"Cold description will scarcely suggest the raw power of this gripping book … Polly Greenberg's day-to-day narrative communicates the dangers and dramas — the KKK, the "children's crusade" of Negro kids to plead for funds in Washington, the advent of the Black Panthers that led to the exclusivist attitude of black participants. Her personal analysis of hatred is by itself worth the price of the book."
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The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry:
"… a unique case study—an exciting one—of idealistic professionals vs. federal and state bureaucracy …The book is full of deep educational and psychological insight, and of brilliant, crisp utterance of it."
Boston Herald Traveler:
"The book is a guide for professional workers and citizens who are interested in helping our country; it is complete enough to be a blueprint. It is also more fascinating than most current novels. Every human experience is pictured here—there is suspense, drama, tragedy, fear, joy, despair and hope. …"
The University of Chicago School Review, Vol. 78, No. 1:
"Head Start was initially established to move beyond tested educational methods into the realm of experimentation, feeling its way to radically new kinds of school organization, and ways of meeting community needs. Mrs. Greenberg's book is one of the first total records of its kind to come out of this great social experiment, a vast documentary of the experience of a group of people in Mississippi…with an incredible wealth of devotion, energy, sense of purpose, and awareness of the enormous difficulties surrounding the realization of a truly new concept of education for the poor.
"The ambivalent nature of great public programs such as Head Start is well captured in Mrs. Greenberg's title. 'The devil has slippery shoes' is a black Mississippian's phrase for the deceptive, changeable relation between human good and evil.
"To the author, this theme becomes the key to the Mississippi experience: immense powers of social good malfunctioning, misapplied, and evil to some, and to others, the first chance in generations for economic well-being, independence, and creative work. Mrs. Greenberg has faithfully and objectively rendered every step in the creation of the Mississippi Head Start program, every mistake, every challenge in this task. By painfully working back to an understanding of causes for success and failure, by constantly evaluating and discriminating between motives and attained goals, even in the face of intensive self-criticism, the author has managed to provide the public with a unique 700-page document, not only of the struggle of poor people, or the black people of Mississippi, but of Mississippi as a microcosm of the problems tormenting the body of twentieth-century American education."
Saturday Review:
“…After that summer in 1964 of freedom schools, voter registration, the Freedom Democratic Party, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, the War on Poverty came to Mississippi, principally in the form of the Child Development Group of Mississippi, a state-wide Head Start project that included, at various times over the first two years, 6,000 to 12,000 preschool children and 2,200 adults in a genuinely creative experience.
“CDGM was not what nearly every other Head Start project was: nursery school with breakfast and a dental check-up. CDGM, in the words of one official of the Office of Economic Opportunity, ‘doesn’t seem to be an agency or an organization as much as it’s some kind of damn concept. It’s supposed to be a school for small children; yet it seems to be a community project involving much more than that. That may be great, but we are only funding Head Start here.’
“The quotation is taken from The Devil Has Slippery Shoes by Polly Greenberg. The book is a self-proclaimed but gently ‘biased biography’ of CDGM, and in its own unique, wordy, sometimes confusing way, it is one of the best accounts of the social turmoil that has been going on in America for the past decade. It is more than just a story of missionary WASPs, foggy-minded and spineless bureaucrats, redneck sheriffs, racist politicians, and poor, uneducated blacks who could do no wrong. It is, quite simply, a story of the ambiguities of making change and of despair—not over what’s wrong but over the apparent impossibility of doing right.
“The OEO official was right; CDGM was ‘some kind of damn concept.’ It was based on the simple premise that no changes that could be made in the classroom could make any difference to the children unless there were also substantial changes in the communities in which they grew up.
“CDGM was originally conceived in early 1965 by Dr. Tom Levin, a New York psychoanalyst who had been active in the civil rights movement in Mississippi the previous summer. Levin knew all the jargon about “ability to control one’s destiny” long before the Coleman report described it as a characteristic attitude felt by black children attending integrated schools and not felt by those in segregated schools. He conceived CDGM to do more than just provide nursery schools for children and menial jobs for parents. CDGM was set up and run deliberately to reduce the hopelessness people feel about their fate.
“By coincidence, the rhetoric behind the War on Poverty proclaimed the same beliefs, but there the coincidence ended. Levin believed that, if the feelings of resignation and hopelessness were to be dealt with effectively, the poor must plan and operate their own programs. They must not just participate; they must have power. They would learn how to run classrooms, how to organize centers, how to administer programs, how to operate budgets, and how to deal with bureaucrats by using power.
“It worked, often painfully, slowly, exasperatingly, but it worked. Mrs. Greenberg, a former OEO official who became CDGM’s director of teacher development and curriculum1 didn’t write this book so much as she wove together hundreds of accounts, stories, narratives, observations, reflections, and analysis about the first two years of CDGM. The book wanders through the back roads of the thirty counties in which CDGM projects operated and records what happened.
“‘Some people keep saying we should have unity. They think the hassling we have now in these communities is awful....I thought we’d have a shooting-do over who will be chairman, where it used to be you couldn’t get no one. But it was quiet then, And “peaceful,” and we sure did have unity. That’s good? Hah! You tell me that lively fighting is bad? Hell, it’s fantastic....Now, they quit the committees and they say, “If things don’t be like I like, I just won’t mess with this mess no more.” We’ve still got a mess as long as we’ve got all this wrassling and tassling, but they’re beginning: asking questions, being inquisitive, fussing, misunderstanding, getting it all wrong, making a big rigmarole: but it’s started, you hear me?’
“Eventually, of course, this ‘damn concept’ was killed. Mrs. Greenberg devotes much of the book to a fascinating description of the project’s relations and difficulties with Washington. OEO had to kill CDGM, because it was there that the rhetoric was reality. Most other Head Start and Community Action Programs made a feint toward “maximum feasible participation” of the poor and then ran in the opposite direction, stacking boards and staff positions with safe, certified members of the middle class.
“CDGM was killed because it was run by a ‘mob of Nigras.’ OEO had to kill CDGM to appease Senator John C. Stennis, who threatened to cut all antipoverty funds unless OEO eliminated what Stennis quite rightly considered to be a potential danger to his political security. The Washington bureaucrats were the villains; the wishy-washy liberals chickened out again: Once more the bankruptcy of the Establishment is proved and the righteousness of the romantics is vindicated. Right? Not quite.
“After CDGM beat back the first OEO attempt to kill the project, Mrs. Greenberg wrote in her dairy:
It’s easy to blame others, as others can always be found somewhat to blame. It’s easy to feel pure, and that others are despicably sinful. But the root of this ruination of CDGM is within us as much as within them. Whatever they did or didn’t do to our project, we would have done it ourselves sooner or later. It’s in our nature to break up as much as we make: to foul up and fail at everything good we set out to do. We would have slaughtered the project anyway, with our overreaching of ability, overspending of passion, and overrating of selves. With egotistical striving and conniving and competitive possessiveness, we would have stabbed it to death and snarled it up past untangling. With energies warped into petty personal antagonisms and hateful bitterness, we would have strangled the good there was in it. It’s comfortable to see ourselves as the virtuous ones, motivated only by the beautiful, but we are so dishonest. On both sides, OEO and CDGM, we’re self-indulgent, self-important, very small people, with a long way to go to be wise.
“CDGM still exists, but by all reports it is a pale shadow of the radiance it was from 1965 to 1967. Repeated battles with OEO over funding left it emasculated; Head Start funds have been cut back and control of the programs has passed into the dungeons of the Office of Education. But CDGM’s death should not be mourned long, for it could not have been otherwise. For one brief moment, the radicals and the poor forged a new species of life in a land known only for death. The species could not survive in that climate, but it has not really died if survival lies in creating, not existing.
“CDGM would probably have been just as dead, in a way, if, instead of hacking it to death, OEO had adopted all of its principles and required every Head Start and Community Action Program in the country to adopt them. Too often the institutionalization of ideas changes them into their very antitheses. On a compulsory, large-scale application, CDGM probably would have become as rigidified and as destructive as the system it was meant to supplement and supplant. Mrs. Greenberg deals with these issues through the Reverend Jimmy Jones, a white Methodist chaplain at 01’ Miss, born and raised in the desolate Delta town of Leland, and later the board chairman of CDGM:
“’History doesn’t just make itself. Somebody gets an idea from the mesh he’s in, and he moves out alone with his idea, and he educates himself and others and forms a model that’s back down in the mesh; but it’s new. The perpetual revolution is what I see as the essence of life. The job will never be done by people who do something and then sit back down and never do anything else—or people who never do anything at all. I call them the living dead. An idea is like any living thing: the minute it’s birthed, it’s on its way to death. We have to keep on with the birthing process—creating, creating, learning, experimenting.
‘They say that freedom is a constant struggle,’ goes the old song. It is. It is also more than that. Freedom is the struggle. It is never achieved except in the effort to reach it.’”