Mississippi: Children and Politics

The almost esoteric controversy and clamor that have surrounded the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) show in clear perspective some basic facts about America in the time of the Johnson Administration: what’s happening to the poverty program, convolutions of national (and the new Southern) politics, “black power,” effectiveness and dilemmas of the nation’s liberals, and the way it is with the poor themselves who have so much to gain—and even more to lose.

CDGM was established as a Head Start program in the days of the poverty program in the summer of 1965. According to the lore (and it is well to point out that there is a great body of it, and that while the main lines emerge with consistency, no two people or documents tell its details exactly alike), civil rights activists were at the time casting about for a follow-up to the tumultuous 1964 Freedom Summer. These included the tough, grass-roots oriented Delta Ministry of the National Co...