Preschool Politics: The Child Development Group of Mississippi and Southern Opposition to the War on Poverty

Between 1965 and 1968, over 2,000 black working-class women in Mississippi collaborated with the federal government to seek bottom-up change in the most repressive state in the country through employment in the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) Head Start program.  These women, former sharecroppers and domestics, leveraged their work in the classroom to challenge the state’s closed political system and white supremacist ideology.  Their challenge antagonized a white power structure, at local and state levels, that was unaccustomed to financially independent and assertive blacks.  The state’s white power structure recognized that if former sharecroppers could teach and run centers, they could also run towns and make decisions for themselves. Led by United States Senator John C. Stennis (D-MS), segregationists pressured Head Start’s sponsoring agency, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), to defund CDGM in 1968.

Despite CDGM’s brief life, its successes complicate the oft-told narrative that the War on Poverty’s Community Action Program was a failure.  If anything, CDGM ended because its opponents saw how the program successfully shifted power away from those who kept others in poverty and toward the poor. The Head Start program gave a significant proportion of rural black Mississippians the money, confidence, and know-how to demand service in a previously white establishment.  The preschool program also ensured that if segregationists worked to dilute black voting power after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which they would, white control of all forms of government in the state was no longer possible. CDGM and its requirement of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor ensured black representation on community action governing boards. CDGM women would use the institutional savvy gained from sitting on these boards to incorporate their townships, bring water and sewage lines to their neighborhoods, and successfully run for office.