After the Marching Stopped: Mississippi Black Women and Head Start

After the ink dried on the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, citizens across America—in rural and urban areas—shifted their quest for full civil rights to the battle for economic justice. Leaving the cotton fields of Mississippi, black women created the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), a nonprofit entity that operated 84 Head Start centers in 24 counties in 1965.  CDGM exemplified Project Head Start’s potential for creating employment opportunities and empowering the poor economically and socially. Black women who had previously worked as farm laborers or domestics earning $3 per day began earning $100 per week as Head Start teachers.

This paper considers how CDGM, a federal program for low-income preschoolers, produced a political battle between poor black mothers and grandmothers and white southern Congressmen. Preschool education became controversial as Mississippi’s black working class participants collaborated with the federal government and moved beyond teaching shapes and colors to challenge the state’s racially exploitative social practices, repressive political policies, and white supremacy ideology.  Their challenge antagonized the local white power structure and provoked opposition that significantly diminished the transformative possibilities of Head Start and other War on Poverty programs.

This paper suggests that it was because the poor had a newfound sense of determination to improve their lot and the financial means to do so that CDGM lost funding two and half years after its inception.  The conservatives who controlled state politics saw that CDGM fostered changes in the social structure of the region and provided economic relief that could enable political participation, and sought to stop it.