Introduction

In the summer of 1965 Tom Levin and Polly Greenberg, two middle-class Northerners, organized a network of preschool programs in Mississippi for impoverished black communities. The momentum that civil rights workers had been building to gain equal representation and participation in economic and political systems for black Americans fed Levin and Greenberg's ambition and vision to work in what was arguably the most racially oppressive state in the South.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a nonviolent, interracial organization that employed ideals of participatory democracy and collective leadership, had shaped Mississippi movement activities during the early 1960s. Tactics included voter education and canvassing, civil disobedience in protest of racial segregation, and network-building among blacks and sympathetic whites inside and outside the state. By 1965, however, leadership in this branch of the civil rights movement began to divide as interracial tensions grew stressful and the Johnson Administration, which had the power to challenge the Mississippi government's racist policies, supported civil rights only hesitantly and inconsistently. Levin and Greenberg left their professional careers in New York City and Washington, D.C., respectively, to give those organizing tactics another chance. They pooled federal funds from the new Head Start preschool initiative and, aligning with existing civil rights networks, sponsored preschool centers that would promote the community organization and indigenous leadership of activated, poor blacks.

This was the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM). Through it, Greenberg and Levin fulfilled the interests and needs of the grassroots movement and the federal administration simultaneously. It modeled SNCC-style participatory democracy and education, as eighty-four communities in rural hamlets across the state appointed committees and staff and prepared for the children. Meanwhile, it was one of the only Head Start programs that fulfilled Johnson's original War on Poverty directive to include the poor people themselves in anti-poverty programming. It showed that a grassroots social movement could be the most effective mechanism for the delivery of social services, traditionally the job of government-hired professionals. CDGM became proof of the government's potential to empower the most marginalized population in the country and increase their democratic representation.

During CDGM's first summer, on a grant of $1.5 million, six thousand young people received healthy meals, medical check-ups, and freedom to play and learn in lively, nurturing spaces. Their parents and other adults in their lives had been doing domestic service, working as in the fields, and-in many cases-spending even more time away from their children because of their dedication to civil rights organizing. Now, adults in the communities were teachers, mentors, and role models to their own youth. Also, 1,100 adults who had received little formal education acquired skills in communication and coordinating materials, budgets, transportation, and activities. These skills were useful not just in gaining blacks greater autonomy to organize and lead their movement, but also in finding employment with better pay and working conditions. Thus, poor black Mississippians gained a political and economic hold that they could exercise in everyday life.

The most remarkable characteristic of CDGM, however, was that it upheld civil rights-based education amidst the white supremacist backlash led by of powerful Mississippi government officials. These reactionaries threatened President Johnson and Sargent Shriver, the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to withdraw their support of the Administration. In turn, OEO responded by demanding that CDGM relinquish its association with civil rights activities and networks for social change. These federal-level power holders controlled CDGM. The organization depended on OEO money and validation. But Levin and Greenberg refused to compromise the movement principles of black empowerment that defined CDGM from the beginning.

Still, the OEO gradually broke down the organization in the midst of the Johnson Administration's relentless attempts to placate Southern politicians and hold on to their allegiance. A few historians have already told the story of the rise and demise of CDGM. CDGM created a direction for the Mississippi civil rights movement. It nurtured black leadership, at least for a while, since each participating community had the decision-making power and responsibility to ensure its own center's accomplishment of individual goals. But this success was short-lived. Johnson and the OEO's fickle support furthered existing movement divisions and discord inside the organization and ultimately political pressure from state government officials pushed the OEO to cut CDGM funds altogether. The outcome of these political pressures-the way the federal government wavered in its promotion of civil rights at the expense of local black people-recalls previous instances in the Mississippi movement. The most foreboding was the Atlantic City Compromise, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an extralegal alternative to the white-only regular Democratic Party in Mississippi, sought publicity and formal recognition at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, but met a disparaging compromise that was intended to appease Johnson's conservative and segregationist constituents.

The oral histories of Levin and Greenberg, which include the founders' reflections on CDGM as it fit into each of their lives, reveal that written narratives of CDGM's history portray just one dimension of the truth. Levin and Greenberg's memories form a new framework for understanding what happened, based on the lived experience and emotion digested through years of hindsight. These oral histories comprise three interviews I conducted: the first with Levin in October 2002, and the second and third with Greenberg in April and July 2003. As the interviewer and historian of CDGM, I asked questions that drew forth each of their life stories and focused on the details of their involvement with this organization.1 The dominant theme in each oral history is the relationship between Levin and Greenberg's founding principles and the strife that the organization faced as OEO intervened during CDGM's first summer program. In this paper, I view that fateful political struggle through the prisms of Levin and Greenberg's consciousness.

As Levin and Greenberg make sense of CDGM's defeat in spite of their leadership and commitment, they reveal a new dimension of CDGM's history. CDGM was not just a radical grassroots-federal alliance that failed because it threatened conventional power structures. It was the basis and forum for individuals to enact and uphold the empowerment of poor black communities. The organization dissolved, but did so while honoring that principle. Its demise was not only a form of activism in the grassroots civil rights movement, but also a transfer of responsibility to CDGM participants to carry on its ideology continually in their future activities. Mississippi civil rights principles lived on through Levin and Greenberg's visions, actions, and activism of 1965 as well as through their voices today.

1. Confluence of visions: Tom Levin, Polly Greenberg, and the Roots of CDGM

Recording from the office of his renovated brownstone home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York, Tom Levin begins his life history, "I was born in 1924-June 23rd, 1924, at the height of the good times, . . . before the Depression. I was born on the Lower East Side. My parents were immigrants, who came very early to this country. 1903, '04." His parents and grandparents were Russian working-class Jews who lived among other Jews in Manhattan and the Bronx. His father's father had "rolled cigarettes for the Russian nobility. That was his one claim to fame and in this country he continued to roll cigarettes." His mother's family ran a candy store. "They were quite traditional Jewish immigrants. They lived in a tenement, six-floor walk-up." Levin's parents also worked in local businesses. His father was a hat blocker, "a very quiet, gentle man" and his mother, who had only been educated through the seventh grade, but was "very bright, a compulsive reader," and "very ambitious," worked with her parents in the candy store. Both cared about politics. As workers, they were "very pro-union and pro-labor. They worshipped FDR at the time."

The conditions of poverty his family faced during the Great Depression shaped Levin's first memories and ultimately forged his life-long motivations. He remembered that his parents were forced to move back to his grandparent's tenement house in the Bronx and the harsh living conditions they endured there. It was his parents' unhappiness and the humiliation his father faced at not being able to get a job that most moved Levin:

He couldn't support his family. It was very painful. That's a molding memory in my life. And I remember one event that has been a metaphor for everything since then. Remember, I'm a little kid. How old was I? I was six-years-old or seven. I was just learning to read. I said to my father, 'Daddy, why don't you tell the government people we need a job?' [Weeps briefly in interview.]

And he said, "Don't you understand? We don't matter.'

And that's become the single mission of my life. That no one should feel they don't matter.

At age sixteen, in 1940, Levin became a volunteer union organizer at the Local 165 in New York and grew involved in left-wing politics. He was drafted into the Navy and later, with the GI Bill, attended three different institutions to earn sufficient high school credits for college. Experiences in the Navy sparked his interest in health care and medicine, but his professors at Long Island University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts, directed him toward teaching and then psychoanalysis.

Levin did take a teaching job working with emotionally disturbed children in Bedford-Stuyvesant, an urban black ghetto in Brooklyn. This job offered Levin an opportunity to achieve his mission: "They thought they didn't matter to anybody. That's what the ghetto's about-making people think they don't matter. And they need to matter. . . I got the school to make my class the audio-visual class, so we showed them movies. But these kids got some status. They thought they mattered." Taking night classes while teaching Levin earned his master's degree from the National Association of Psychoanalysis and went on to New York University for his Ph.D.

Reflecting on the transformation his education and professional life brought, Levin says, "I began to have a comfortable practician, [sic] moved into the middle class, had a home, a wife and children, four, in Brooklyn Heights, and did very well." He describes how his work intensified his understanding for the impact of socio-economic status on individuals as he treated middle and upper-middle class New Yorkers through his private practice and lower class New Yorkers by working at and founding mental health clinics. "Our experience of classes are our experiences of resources. And if we are low-, working-class, we feel resources are not ours, you know, they're not available, and we don't have any sense of significance in ourselves or in what we do." It was this commitment to organizing and to giving people, and lower class people in particular, a sense they matter that spurred Levin's vision for the poor black children of Mississippi.

I came up with the idea of doing something with the kids. And as I told you, I saw it as the school in which little kids could grow up to be leaders of the Movement. I talked about it as the school to create a cadre for social change for black kids from Mississippi. The summer [of 1964] went by and I started to try to get money together, from the Field Foundation, etcetera, to organize this little project I've said with these kids. I was hoping to start between one and five schools in Mississippi. I was trying to raise money. And I got to meet and talk with somebody in the National Council of Churches who-I revere him. He's dead-- Reverend Arthur Tomas. He was someone who worked with Delta Ministry in Mississippi, who I met down there. . . --Tom Levin

By the mid-1960s, when the reality of poverty and racial inequality had become a nation-wide concern, Mississippi was in the spotlight. It was a center of racist oppression-only six percent of the black population had managed to register to vote-and this correlated with the dire conditions of poverty from which most blacks in the state had little means to escape. However, the Mississippi civil rights movement organizing philosophy of interracial cooperation and non-violence had garnered a diverse coalition in struggle to transform the state power structures. This inspired Levin to see Mississippi as a place of hope and opportunity for its black communities and particularly their children.

During 1963 and 1964, Tom Levin linked his professional skills with his affinity to the civil rights movement, and founded the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), a network of physicians, psychologists, and nurses who volunteered their services to the Mississippi movement. This group worked in conjunction with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the summer of 1964, when hundreds of volunteers, many of whom were middle-class, white students from universities like Yale, Harvard and Stanford, participated in state-wide voter registration drives and community education programs coordinated by an umbrella organization, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO).i During two of the weeks that Levin coordinated MCHR, he left New York and worked in McComb, Mississippi, where violence and intimidation by white supremacist groups against blacks and other civil rights workers were particularly harsh. During his visit, Levin forged ties with local leaders like Bob Moses, the coordinator of Freedom Summer and co-founder of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Robert Smith, a black Mississippi doctor who risked his career and his personal safety by participating in MCHR. The ideology that Moses brought to the grassroots civil rights organization, SNCC, would inspire Levin's subsequent organizing approach with CDGM.

The experience revealed to Levin a paradox that, with his background in psychoanalysis, education, and organizing, he was inspired to solve. The civil rights movement influenced poor black adults with uplifting emotional strength and resourceful organizing skills, while the young children were left to their own devices. During Freedom Summer, Freedom Schools addressed this paradox to an extent. Freedom Summer volunteers organized Freedom Schools as casual classes for black Mississippi youth to learn citizens' rights and African American history and literature.ii Levin believed that local people who were activated by Freedom Summer could integrate the organizing and learning approaches that they had found personally mobilizing into the lives of their children.

There were a lot of kids hanging around Freedom Houses-little kids. Many of them did not have stable families and they became like SNCC kids, you know like orphans of the movement. And I decided that we ought to start programs for them. That SNCC workers were doing it sort of spontaneously and one of the things Bob Moses thought I might do is help get these schools going, for young kids, Freedom Schools. I'll have to show you something downstairs I've got.

And that's what I started to do. And I had very strong ideas about what that would be about. I remember talking about it not always to everyone's appreciation. I said we need to start schools where these little kids, who have no formative value system, in which they feel they matter, where they would be trained to be the leaders of the Movement.

I used to say, 'The Movement will be their ego. The Movement will be their superego. The Movement will be who they are. They will spend their growing up using themselves to make the Movement work.' And I'd seen some of that kind of idea in the Russian Revolution. The orphan kids organized there as well to help bring social change about. And I saw these kids as they would grow up to be the leaders of social change. We would provide them in the Movement, within SNCC, schools that taught them what their history was and where to go. It was a very ambitious idea.

According to his description of his early intentions for what would later become CDGM, Levin aimed to fulfill several purposes by creating this series of schools. His program would help to sustain the Mississippi civil rights movement by passing down SNCC principles and values to the children of the Movement. It would provide these children with strong identities and self-esteem, within a social system that relentlessly tried to suppress their voices. Finally, it would allow social scientists like himself the chance to "develop programs for children, youth programs, family programs because then they would offer something to the community, because then just political aspiration, but something concrete. It would establish that we're serious."

Thus, beyond his altruistic goals was his interest in demonstrating the commitment of outsiders like himself. It is likely that he was responding in part to SNCC's growing ambivalence toward its original guiding principles based on a doctrine of interracial cooperation and nonviolence. Indigenous leadership and community participation in decision-making were valued above all. However, during 1964 Freedom Summer, middle-class white involvement challenged black civil rights workers' autonomy and self-worth. Moreover, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an offshoot of SNCC that built an enormous constituency for black political representation, faced defeat at the end of the summer. At the August, 1964, National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, MFDP sought national recognition for the political exclusion of black Mississippians and to fill half of Mississippi's seats at the convention. Johnson's attempt to mute their grievances and compromise their mission led MFDP to reject his offer and return to Mississippi more disillusioned than ever and doubting that the President might be their ally. At a loss, SNCC had begun to take a turn toward racial separatism, advocating a more aggressive and militant approach.

Levin explains that Bob Moses was dismayed that SNCC had begun to lose faith in its guiding principles and encouraged him to preserve and strengthen these foundations for grassroots civil rights organizing by working with the Freedom School framework. Despite the tensions, Freedom Summer volunteers had mobilized poor black communities in towns and rural hamlets throughout the state to transform racially exclusive social structures into egalitarian, democratic ones. Levin believed that involving the children of the movement's newfound activists would be a next step in advancing the movement and regaining hope for the work of outsiders like himself.

Though her background experiences and career differed from Levin's, Polly Greenberg had a complementary vision. She was also born a Jewish New Yorker in 1924 in a family of "progressive social activists."2 But, her family members were better off economically than Levin's and many of them were highly educated. This in combination with their political perspectives led them to advocate economic and racial equality and guided their work in the social services. Greenberg's father's father was one of the first to study sociology at the University of Chicago, founded a crime-prevention neighborhood youth center, and helped form the juvenile justice system to afford children special protections and rehabilitation. He had worked with Jane Addams at Hull House, was a Baptist Minister, and became the president of Kalamazoo College. Greenberg's father was a newspaper editor for the Milwaukee Journal, which stood fast against attacks by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare. He was more conservative than her mother, but quite progressive for his time and place.

Greenberg described herself as more closely resembling her mother. The daughter of a settlement house worker and suffragette whose family helped found the Ethical Culture Society and School in New York City, Greenberg's mother was born in 1894, attended the Ethical Culture School and later co-directed the similarly progressive Walden School. Greenberg highlights her mother's fierce commitment to shaping a more egalitarian society through education and settlement-type work. She lent her support to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Freedom Highlander School, which was promoting grassroots education in labor organizing in Tennessee, and to sharecroppers' organizations in the South. Greenberg connects her mother's pioneering in these areas to her own political perspective and pursuits:

It's logical that I would be following in her footsteps in different forms and current projects. Not reliving her life, but things that have to do with psychological development of young children, parenting, democratic education related to social change.

The reason you want democratic education in democratic classrooms is so you can help people prepare for being a citizen in a democratic country. And you know groups that are very unfairly treated. If we believe in equal opportunity, than we all ought to be allowed to go out and vote and go to school and stuff, which was certainly not the case in the South for black people and isn't in the present time for most minority groups and most low-income people.

At the time it was widely considered inappropriate for a woman to have a career and a family. Greenberg's mother decided to marry and have children at the expense of much of her public work. Still, her involvement with the Walden School and social services continued despite her obligation to limit her visibility in the public sphere, and she focused on the progressive education of her own children.

She sent Greenberg to the Cambridge School for boarding school and on to Sarah Lawrence College. Her influences as well as Greenberg's own experience teaching low-income black children in Milwaukee prompted Greenberg to study the black family in American, psychology, and early childhood education. During college she met her future husband, whose brother was Jack Greenberg, at the time a lawyer for the Legal Defense Fund of NAACP in New York. When Greenberg visited New York to see her boyfriend and do fieldwork, she also babysat for Jack Greenberg's children and spent "a giant amount of time in their living room. . . You know? Thurgood Marshall? All these people? They were all there." This wove into Greenberg's intellectual interests and brought to life the civil rights struggle in the South.

By senior year at Sarah Lawrence, Polly Greenberg married and later moved with her husband to Maryland, working as an elementary school teacher for two years. As her husband pursued his journalism career, Greenberg sculpted a career of her own, balancing child-rearing with professional pursuits, much as her mother had done. She earned her master's degree in elementary education at the University of Delaware and later her doctorate in education at George Washington University, meanwhile working at a day care center, at the Crittenden Home, a hospice for unmarried mothers, and raising the four girls she birthed over a four-year time span. She worked closely with the Georgetown nursery school cooperative and the National Child Research Center, which her children attended. Mothering toddlers intertwined into Greenberg's development as an early childhood specialist and a proponent of progressive education for all. Soon after, as staff member for the nation's new preschool education initiative, Head Start, she used these experiences and the ideals adopted from her long line of progressive activist relatives to guide her actions on behalf of Mississippi's poor children. The hostility of segregationist political authorities challenged Greenberg to seek applicants that countered the political and economic racial hierarchy in the state.

I had this huge problem that only bad guys were wanting to start Head Start in Mississippi, following the fact that the governor said, 'The poverty program is not coming into our state.'

And that's where it officially was: no poverty program is coming into our state. But then some of the good guys in the context they were in wanted to start Head Start anyway. So I don't know if they were friends of the governor's or how they got around it, whether it was big dollars. . . The Democrats were working extremely hard to get the poverty program into Mississippi because they wanted-you know it always had been a Democratic state, but the kind of Democrats that were segregationist. They wanted to win it over to the new moderate Democratic Party. It was all political, strictly political.

But, however it happened, I did begin to get some applications from Mississippi. And I kept running up and down and talking to people. But none of them were what seemed to me-coming from where I was, with the Jack Greenbergs and the Lou Pollacks and all these people, I mean-this has nothing to do with forwarding racial integration or empowerment of black people or money for black people or job opportunities for black people. What is this? I mean they're trying to start a six-week summer program for the darkies. It's not what we had in mind in the poverty program. So I was wildly searching for groups. --Polly Greenberg

While Levin was lending his expertise, connections, and organizing skills to the grassroots civil rights movement, Polly Greenberg worked for the one institution that had the political, economic, and physical resources to bring white supremacist groups to justice and enforce constitutional rights in Mississippi: the federal government. A main tactic of the Mississippi civil rights movement had been to attract the attention of the President by exposing the under-representation and routine mistreatment of black Mississippians. COFO's Freedom Summer represented a culmination of such attempts that revealed how even the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, which had stepped up their commitment to supporting civil rights legislation, were unwilling to unseat the white supremacist stronghold in Mississippi directly.

Meanwhile, national awareness and concern for poverty, and race-based poverty in particular, had heightened. During the early 1960s, while the majority of Americans experienced a period of relative prosperity, scholars and activists revealed the "other America"-the twenty percent of American citizens who lived under conditions of poverty.3 iii When Johnson declared the War on Poverty and created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer anti-poverty programs, OEO's director, Sargent Shriver ruled that grantees must not exercise racially-segregating policy and, as Community Action Programs, must involve "the maximum feasible participation of the poor."

Head Start was one such program. It would use part of the new $96,400,000 Congressional appropriation for applicants-local institutions, organizations, and agencies- across the country that promised to provide children living below the poverty line with adequate preschool training, medical care, and two hot meals. It specifically required that the applicants it would sponsor promote parent participation and racial integration of their preschool centers. Head Start's first trial, an 8-week summer program starting in June of 1965, ended up serving 561,000 youngsters.iv As Greenberg explains, this was a political strategy to gain regular Democraticvotes without blatantly offending more conservative politicians, like Southern Dixiecrats who ran Mississippi.

A Head Start senior program analyst who worked specifically to find applicants in the southeastern states, Greenberg would determine black involvement in the program. In Mississippi in particular, where local politicians and bureaucrats initially refused to host Head Start programs at all, most applicants aimed to include black staff or serve black children for their own political gain, on the presumption of black inferiority, or simply to gain control over Head Start money for their community. If Head Start funds- government funds-were to really penetrate the dire conditions of poverty faced by blacks in places like Mississippi, Greenberg would have to seek socially progressive applicants who firmly stood by Head Start and OEO requirements.

As her personal and professional history predicts, this is just what she did. From the way she describes it, Greenberg found her way to Head Start by pursuing her own intellectual interests, her connections, and her need for a job in the first place. She had recently gotten a divorce and needed to support her four daughters when a White House science advisor friend of her former husband told her about an assistant position in the Office of Education. Certainly her credentials as a specialist in early childhood education as well as her long-term commitment to democratic education brought her to the position. The next thing she knew, she was staffing Robert Kennedy's new President's Task Force Against Poverty as a representative from the Office of Education. In 1964, after Johnson succeeded Kennedy and the War on Poverty began, Greenberg was moved from the Office of Education to the OEO, which Johnson set up subsequent to the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act. The first staff person for OEO's new Head Start initiative, she "naturally chose the Southeast as [her] region" and she got to work, spreading the word and seeking applicants who had genuine intentions to fulfill OEO guidelines.

Her commitment to Head Start's original mission, which paralleled her own sensibilities regarding community cooperation in child development and education, bolstered her resistance to Mississippi's white-supremacist pressures. She worked with well-meaning racists to some extent, for even though they had a patronizing approach, they would bring money to very poor black communities. Also, they at least enabled Head Start to enter Mississippi, a step forward with consideration for the original refusal of state government to allow Head Start at all.

But Greenberg would not stop her recruitment efforts until she could ensure that some Head Start program for black Mississippians was controlled by poor black families and communities. Under time constraints to fulfill this moral obligation, she referred to her mother for connections to the "more radical, poor progressive groups in the South." In her interviews, she describes her sense of desperation and personal commitment to put Head Start funds in these people's hands and the challenge to find the right person or group in a state that structurally maintained the existing race-based hierarchy. She conveys the feeling of urgency and duty by speaking in the present, as though she was explaining her goals to one of her mother's point people during her search:

We need somebody to file an application and I'll write it if necessary, but we need somebody to be a sponsor, to apply, that we can give the money to. So we can get Head Start going in the black community. Or something. Or the right people. The liberal whites or something.'

Perhaps because OEO's mission, when taken literally, aligned with those originally prescribed by SNCC, Greenberg found Levin, learned about his plan for preschool centers, and suggested Head Start as a funding source for that project.

Levin did not jump at the opportunity to partner with Greenberg. When they first spoke, Greenberg recalls,

[Levin] said, 'Well the Delta Ministry, headed by Art Tomas has many, many volunteers in Mississippi. They do voter registration. They were very involved last year. They are involved with us now. We want to start 5-10 day care centers for civil rights workers' children. And we're having a meeting next week in my office in New York and if you would like to come to the meeting. I'm sure nobody will go for this idea of yours.

Greenberg relates that Levin immediately warned her about the group's skepticism: to many grassroots civil rights activists in Mississippi, "federal money" meant that the program was just "buying off the poor, buying off the blacks." Historically speaking, this wariness was logical. Johnson's attempt to compromise the political representation of Mississippi blacks at the 1964 National Democratic Convention had colored their view of the Johnson Administration. MFDP leaders and members, their SNCC allies, and other leaders were less willing to work with the "establishment" that slighted civil rights to protect its own political prowess.

Levin and Thomas seemed to keep this collective caution in mind for they refused Greenberg's offer until she promised that the federal money would be used according to the conditions set by Levin, which were based on SNCC principles. Just as Greenberg stood by OEO's original vision for Head Start, despite her desperation to find grantees, Levin stood by his original vision for the preschools that would serve the Mississippi black civil rights movement. Using "federal money" might create yet another relationship where black Mississippians would continue to count on the President's loyalty, only to be misled again. When Levin and Greenberg met in New York in April 1965, Levin says,

[Greenberg] spent a long evening, debating, discussing, going back and forth with me up in my office on Eighty-First Street. I remember it well, trying to persuade me to consider using Head Start. I would keep telling her, 'I don't want government money. I don't want anything to do with the government. It will alienate everybody.'

And she said, 'No, we'll let you do what you want.'

According to Levin, before Greenberg convinced him of this flexibility and freedom, Levin explicitly said that if he took Head Start funds, he would not follow conventional social service practices. As he recreates their meeting during the interview for this project, he spells out some of his criteria, which reflect his determination for the future program to exist outside of existing structures that historically undermined the agency of black Americans:

I said, 'I'm not going to have things run by professional educators.'

She said, 'No, you can use who you want.'

I said, 'I'm not going to be committed to schools that will make the state of Mississippi happy. I insist that they be run by communities.'

She said, 'You can do what you want. We'll support it.'

Everything I refused, she gave me a reason why. I remember that I decided I'd give it a chance.

Levin remembers submitting an application for a development grant "that became the basis for the Child Development Group of Mississippi."

When Greenberg discusses the meeting at which she and Levin shared their visions, she reveals a perspective that complemented Levin's. She explains that she understood Levin's distaste for the prospect of federal funding and explains the inside political motive of the Johnson Administration in implementing Head Start in Mississippi.

They thought it was buying out the poor. That it was going to silence-that it was going to try to silence the civil rights movement. . .That's what they were afraid of. They said the freedom groups who would have to be the ones to carry the groups and organize this, the SNCC volunteers and core volunteers and Freedom Democratic Party and Delta Ministry, they will have to be the ones that go door-to-door and organize this, people to come to meetings and get the thing going. And they're not going to go for this because they'll see it as the federal government trying to shut up the civil rights movement. Give them a little job, give them a little money and stop voting.

And I said, 'No, they [the Johnson Administration] want them to vote. They are interested in starting the moderate Democratic Party. They are very interested in getting people to vote, not shut them up, but get their voice in there and shut up the segregationists and the white supremacists and the sovereignty commission and all the other bad guys.'

Johnson was interested in gaining votes and eventually shifting political power in the state away from the "Dixiecrat" Democrats and into the hands of Johnson's regular Democrats. He had demonstrated a commitment to realizing an end to racial injustice, for under his Administration, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which legally prohibited discrimination in public facilities and institutions and enforced the constitutional right to vote. The War on Poverty, the formation of the OEO, and Congress's 1965-66 passage of various laws that advanced the government's provision of welfare and social services also attest to the Administration's genuine interest in addressing the conditions of poverty and inequality in the nation. However, in actually fighting for these changes, Johnson also articulated his wish to "transcend conflict," a feat that would be difficult to accomplish, when tampering with Southern social order.v Both Johnson and OEO director Sargent Shriver supposed they could use education as a tool to "virtually eliminate poverty without '[setting] one group against another.'"vi Greenberg saw their good intentions and sought to give this tool to "the right kind of people" who would use education to politically empower black communities, hence enabling them to help weaken the Dixiecrat stronghold.

Greenberg wanted her connection to significant funding to yield qualitative social progress, much as Levin wanted his connections to civil rights leaders to help catalyze social empowerment. In pressuring Levin and Thomas to apply to Head Start, Greenberg depicted it as an opportunity to use the federal government's money to create resources for poor, socially excluded blacks via existing grassroots networks.

The first funds will be given out in May first and June. And you know it is real and it is supposed to go through the governor who can veto it. But there is a way to get around that and I know that way and I guarantee you, you can get this money. I can't guarantee how much or you know they might just give you for your 5-10. Your 5-10 day care centers that you want might be 5-10 Head Start centers that are fully funded. But you know, you'd have medical care for the children, you'd have hot lunches for the children. You'd have paid staff. You'd hire them.'

I said, 'I don't know anybody down there. I can't do this...'

I knew we were going to have Head Start in Mississippi. But none that was the right kind of people. I said, 'It will be there. Whether you like it or not. Or whether you have anything to do with it or not. This money is going. I can tell you, Midstate Opportunities is gonna get funded.'

Levin and Thomas could make good use of money that would otherwise only reinforce the white supremacist stronghold in the state. Levin could maintain his conditions and run the program with the primary participation of the poor black communities he had in mind. His plan fit into her own-to take literally OEO's proposed mission of poor people's participation and interracial cooperation. Though this program would not be of SNCC as Levin initially imagined, it would be through SNCC. It would involve collaboration with SNCC and other radical movement leaders and it would essentially adhere to their ideals of empowering poor blacks.

2. Putting the Vision into Action

Tom Levin did decide to apply for the Head Start grant after much debate and consultation with leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He drafted a preliminary proposal and received a mini-grant of $5,000 to write a formal, more detailed proposal. In his description of the Office of Economic Opportunity's (OEO's) reaction to his initial proposal, Levin illuminates how, from the beginning, he was determined to place the goal of poor people's participation above all else.

My requirements with OEO were very, very strict. I would only do it if they did not control us. I would only do it if every center was run by a community committee. I would only do it if the organizers could appoint the staff and teachers. I would only do it if it was open for all. And I would only do it for towns and groups that showed the initiative of organizing their own committees and finding a place to do it and getting parents, who would be willing to be associate teachers, and essentially it belonged to the community.

And they [OEO] said, 'Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.'

His reflections elucidate his insistence on community autonomy in the program, regardless of OEO's interests, and show an early awareness of OEO's political motivations. He continues,

. . .They [OEO] were so anxious to get integrated centers in Mississippi that it was imperative because it was part of, I believe, the Johnson Administration to destroy the separatist movement in Mississippi and the Loyalist Democrats... They had a name for the Southern segregationist senators. . . The Dixiecrat Democrats. They controlled the party and Johnson couldn't get anything done unless he could break their hold.

He, they accepted this [CDGM's proposal] because this was an assault on the Dixiecrats and the most Dixiecrat state in the South. Now, that's what they wanted, that was their agenda.

Levin clearly opposed the leadership of these Dixiecrat politicians, however his purpose for the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) was not to bolster Johnson's power.

My agenda was not the same. I would say that what they saw was a part of me that was real, but not all of me. I presented to the OEO people, and everything else, from what I considered a kind of ethical and emotional commitment to the Friends Society of Quakers, where everybody had a voice according to their conscience and everything was done by community. And I wanted that kind of organization, and that's the stance I took.

Though Levin and OEO had differing priorities and despite Levin's headstrong expression of his "requirements," Levin clearly intended to appeal to OEO on the common grounds shared by the grassroots civil rights movement in Mississippi and the War on Poverty. As Polly Greenberg also explained, the Johnson Administration sought to win over the newly voting blacks of Mississippi and the other civil rights supporters, so that regular Democrats would be elected to state office in the place of the Dixiecrat Democrats. In some ways, the War on Poverty, despite its strong economic rhetoric, was created to have this political effect.

Meanwhile, by using morality to justify his insistence on local ownership over the future Head Start centers, Levin drew on the roots of white American as well as SNCC-based ideals. Quaker pacifism, humility, sharing, and personal dignity were at least ideologically upheld by the liberal, white Americans, like those in OEO. Meanwhile they saturated activist philosophy of the black and white progressive radicals who were committed to nonviolence and participatory democracy in Mississippi. After all, Bob Moses, one of the greatest influences in Mississippi's radical civil rights movement, filled his work with the Quaker spirit and principles to which a teacher had introduced him during his studies at Hamilton College.vii Thus, by drawing on Quaker ethics, Levin avoided having to directly express to OEO his intention to follow in the line of the radical, controversial civil rights movement in Mississippi.

What Levin would describe as OEO's desperation for integrated groups like CDGM led to the writing of the second, lengthier grant proposal. Levin, Polly Greenberg, Art Thomas, and Jeannine Herron, a journalist with civil rights and cooperative nursery school experience, met in Washington, D.C. and "hammered out a grant application, which, when it hit OEO, boy, they were awe-struck by it." As they wrote, Levin says, he came to understand more profoundly than ever how CDGM's approach to education would fortify whole black communities against the unrelenting oppression of the local, white-run economic and political systems.

To know, sharing, that we were capable of organizing centers where the teachers would be the mothers and fathers of the children. I pressed that. I said, 'Kids in Mississippi have lost their respect for their parents, because their parents can't protect them from racism. And they're going to see their parents in a new way, because their parents are going to be the teachers-the poor people. Not the teachers from the middle class who wanted us to speak good English, but the teachers from the poverty-stricken communities, where the kids came from.'

By using the first person-inclusive "us," Levin recalls this experience with a sense of identification with the black population that participated in CDGM. He emphasizes that the document they created was "as idealistic. . . [as] you can imagine. It conceived of the children and their parents and the relationship between them and how to bring about change." From the start, Levin's focus was social change through local and familial relationships.

Meanwhile, since she had been working for OEO, Greenberg knew that OEO director Sargent Shriver shared in her determination to fund an integrated, egalitarian program that served and also employed the participation of Mississippi's poor, even if his interests were more in the service of Johnson's political motives. Neither Levin nor Greenberg expected, however, that their application for five to ten preschool centers would receive 1.5 million dollars to fund eighty-four centers and serve 6,000 children over the course of the seven-week summer project. Greenberg expresses the feeling of thrill at finding out how much support CDGM received for the first summer:

I mean this is the second biggest one [Head Start program] in the country and the first biggest was NYC. It was what my bosses wanted. They wanted good things. They wanted good things. The inspection office, the ones working on the racial part, they wanted good things. Sargent Shriver wanted good things and no one was against it at OEO. It was one of the priority projects. . . . I knew this would be funded. I had no idea how hugely. I had no idea how many they were going to sign up! You know? And I had no idea that the price would be doubled in Washington. You know, it's unheard of!

But then all I wanted to do was be part of it. That's all I wanted to do.

Similarly, Levin says, "At that point, the whole thing got bigger than I could have ever imagined."

The grant was announced on May 18th, 1965 leaving five weeks until the opening of CDGM's centers.viii Quitting her job at OEO, Greenberg packed up her station wagon and she and her four daughters headed to Mount Beulah, Mississippi, a town about half-way between Jackson and Vicksburg, where CDGM's Central Staff had its new headquarters. Levin and other CDGM Staff awaited their arrival and thus began the rush of preparation for the new program. Greenberg, who would direct the education program, says, "We had arranged it and Tom was going to be the director to get it going to run it for the summer and Art was in charge of getting the word out. This had all happened already. There it was. It was funded. So getting it together and up and running in a couple weeks."

Even though Levin, Greenberg, Thomas, and the rest of the CDGM staff had little time to set up the summer project, they still managed to build a structure for the organization that reflected CDGM's priority of local control and ownership over each Head Start center. First of all, just as Greenberg had suggested when she was proposing that Levin apply for the Head Start grant, CDGM found a private sponsor in Mississippi that supported interracial civil rights work, a black school called Mary Holmes Junior College. This way, CDGM avoided state-level hostility toward Head Start and worked around the usual requirement that Head Start programs run through the Mississippi public school system, controlled by white supremacists and known for its inadequate offerings to black children. Moreover, the space that CDGM headquarters inhabited further encouraged the organization's progressive social work and reflected CDGM's primary motive. It shared the site of a former black college campus in Mount Beulah with the Delta Ministry and MFDP.ix Most of the CDGM community members who needed to communicate with the central office found the site accessible and safe. Moreover, CDGM's civil rights-oriented neighbors doubled as supportive partners to the organization, further enabling CDGM to be an outlet where its participants could continue their civil rights work.

Second, the structure and composition of CDGM's administration also created the conditions for community-based leadership in the various preschool centers. During the previous weeks, while he was directing the interracial and interdenominational Delta Ministries, Thomas was sharing information about CDGM with poor communities throughout Mississippi. His outreach led to the formation of the Council of Neighborhood Centers, a group of elected representatives from future CDGM communities. OEO decided this group could not serve as CDGM's board of directors and demanded a group of "responsible" and "respectable" citizens instead. CDGM staff mustered together an interracial group of progressive-minded but middle-class and somewhat more conservative leaders to be the board.4 x Levin was most concerned about ground-level activities and local black leaders who shared interest in the political and economic mobility of the black poor to have experience working in these positions. Altogether, thirteen of the top fifteen administrators had civil rights credentials, eight were women, and six were black.xi Of the people who worked in the field, nine out of ten were black Mississippians. "Most of them would staff the centers in their home communities. Of the 140 outsiders, Negro and white, more than 100 would work in the field as resource teachers and regional coordinators; the rest manned the central office. Three fourths of the Central Staff of forty were from outside the state."xii

Even though many SNCC members were slow to lend their support to CDGM, several eventually became CDGM staff and, along with members of the Delta Ministry, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and MFDP, continued to nourish local communities with the mobilizing spirit of the movement. It was largely women and a few men who identified with MFDP who staffed the local CDGM centers.xiii Members of those civil rights groups knew the most about local living conditions, the status of race relations in given communities, and the community contacts who would foster their communities' collective organization in setting up the preschools. In the interviews, Levin and Greenberg both emphasize the importance of involving members of these groups in order to build the trust of poor people in CDGM and to enable CDGM to tap into existing local leadership.

Greenberg makes the point that Levin intended to "pick up on the movement momentum, which was a whole other segment of society-the most down-trodden, the most disenfranchised." CDGM attracted people who did not apologize for being civil rights activists-not all local blacks. Comparatively well-off or upwardly mobile blacks tended not to support civil rights publicly or involve themselves in activism. They were more stable economically, usually relied on the institutional economic structure, and therefore had more of a stake in preserving their respectability in the white supremacist state. This faction tended to associate with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP's) Legal Defense Fund, which worked within the institutional legal system rather than on a direct grassroots level. Greenberg explains that Levin was friends with some NAACP leaders throughout his work in Mississippi, but "that was already there." On the other hand, by the end of 1964 Freedom Summer, Greenberg points out, "SNCC had no goal, other than to register people to vote." Those who worked with CDGM, like those who worked with SNCC, tended to be poor blacks or their sympathizers who wanted direct change on the ground level and were not afraid to risk recognition for that work.

For Levin, as he recounts his experience as CDGM's director, the most significant actions he took to realize his and Greenberg's vision were in applying the requirements he voiced to the OEO. His conditions for community participation in CDGM were strict and inflexible, but ensured that communities taking on the responsibility of running a preschool center would not depend on the imposition of outside directives:

Levin: So, CDGM started, with a call going out from SNCC and the Delta Ministry for any community in Mississippi, who wanted to have their own school, to organize a meeting, elect a committee, and call in to Mount Beulah. In a couple of weeks, we had sixty communities call in. That was the most stupendous job of organizing.

Friedman: Why do you think it was so appealing, even though it was government-funded and white-run?

Levin: First of all, it came from people they trusted-SNCC workers, Delta Ministry workers-it came from people they trusted and it came with an immediate directive. There would be a center only on a set of conditions, if it had a community committee, of local people who were in charge. Second, it would come only if the committee could supply a place, a building that the school could be held in. And it came only if they agreed to the structure. . . There would be community workers and, I think. . . staff workers.

Both the trusted movement veterans who delivered the criteria for CDGM and the obligatory local election and organization attracted rural Mississippians who wished to build a more equitable society in their state. Levin continued to take literally the War on Poverty rhetoric that its programs ensure the "maximum feasible participation of the poor" in their programs. Such requirements justified his tactics to give real tools to CDGM participants:

One of the missions of OEO was to develop citizenship. That mandated, to me, that every community was required to have meetings, at least once a week, in which they taught people how to pass the test to register and how they would vote. . . Adult education for citizenship went on day and night. . . But they were all taught that their job was to learn to vote. And they all got to understand that that meant that's where they could keep their centers.

In CDGM, as this example shows, these tools were information and education. Levin interpreted the concept of citizenship development to mean providing individuals with the knowledge and activation to make demands on public institutions. In this case, where these individuals were blacks in a society governed by white supremacists, Levin's interpretation threatened the social order and would arouse controversy over the federally funded program. For the time being, however, citizenship development was a condition for participation in CDGM that reflected the value of democracy and equal rights to representation.

Levin emphasizes that the salaries CDGM provided were an additional and convincing incentive to start local centers. Even the pay scale reflected the evenhanded, unprejudiced program Levin sought to implement, for all CDGM employees received either $150 or $200 per week depending on their position and whether they were community workers or hired professional staff.

I got paid two hundred dollars a week. The rest of the people, teachers, they got paid two hundred dollars a week. The people, who had chopped cotton the week before, and could barely read and write English, if they would work on any job on the committee in the kitchen, or helping to develop a program, they got paid one hundred and fifty dollars a week.

These salaries far exceeded the average income of poor blacks in Mississippi and enabled community members to support their families without depending on jobs from white landowners or from the railroad companies in the North. Not only could they avoid dependence on local whites and stay close to their communities, but also their work itself developed the power of their communities. Parents were hired to focus on the growth of their children, to improve local education, and to develop access to economic resources. Each CDGM community's autonomy and development of grassroots democratic structures was bolstered by the network that CDGM headquarters created. An orientation and training in Mound Bayou at the beginning of the summer provided opportunities for communication about rules and recommendations for all CDGM centers.

We ended up, as you know, with eighty-seven centers, twenty-six thousand people involved. I don't know how many kids-huge numbers. It was a totally grassroots organization! Totally!

Paid positions for this grassroots work emphasized the value of local community involvement in developing opportunities for the next generation of poor blacks to exercise their voices as equal citizens.

However, in his effort to ensure that the people who organized local centers developed their leadership and exercised self-government, Levin was seen even by his friends as domineering. His colleagues reported that, despite his goal to foster participatory democracy on the grassroots level, he often took charge and made decisions without consulting others on the administrative level. Levin gives an example of his insistence about approaching local community issues with the forcefulness that his colleagues criticized:

In the course of this one center -- . . .I came to a meeting, because . . . the people felt that the head of the organization, of this . . . little town had been hiring and appointing all her relatives and they wanted me to do something. I came in and I listened to everybody, and I said, 'In a week, you are to come back with a committee that everybody accepts, that the teachers of the committee will accept, and a leader that is accepted by the community. And I would be delighted to fund you. If you can't do it, I want to congratulate you for your efforts, and we will not fund you.' That's my stance.

I wouldn't argue about it. I wouldn't discuss it. You had to resolve your problems, we will not resolve them. We sent people down to help and everything, but we would not make decisions, for communities. I think that is what made it work. I would stand on that 'til the death.

Asked whether he might have been imposing or too forceful with his strategy, Levin does not second-guess his behavior. When local CDGM staff organized centers according to his requirements, they tended to build community cohesion and either proved or gained the self-reliance needed to survive as part of CDGM's pilot program and also for continued community action and activism in the future. Levin's aim was for CDGM administration to do all it could to bolster these values locally, regardless of the different interests that Central Staff members represented:

Well, I got by-the people in the central staff frequently had really trouble with me. I would say, 'Listen. Listen to me carefully. When I'm having a baby and this is my baby, you can either help, or get the fuck out of the way. There's no choices.'

And I was determined about this. And people considered me arrogant and very difficult to deal with. I insisted on things they often didn't like. I insisted that they pay the workers in cash, all the time, everything, it came first. And often it was hard. We couldn't get money together and I had to agree to checks. I had to find banks that would cash the checks. But, I was very determined.

Unfortunately Levin's disregard for others administrators' ideas damaged the cohesion of the group and the commitment of some staff members. It seems that in the rush to organize everything and open CDGM centers by July 12th, 1965, Levin justifies his dictatorial directives by implying a sense of urgency and by expressing his duty to enable the poor to exert control over their resources.

Such a sense of duty recalls the understanding and concern Levin developed at an early age for an individual's belief in his or her self-the sense that one matters-and ties back to the purpose with which grassroots civil rights activists had set out in the first place. Greenberg describes the strong psychological influence of Levin's approach as CDGM communities grew mobilized:

Tom wanted the people to maintain as much power as they had. They were just beginning to feel: 'Not only am I registered to vote, I am involved in deciding things! And the community committees-this is our little school board for Head Start. I am on that committee. I am involved in making decisions for this program. I have been to Washington! I have been to Bank Street College of Education! I am part of running this program.'

And the program was weeks old! Weeks! People were just beginning to feel this and they felt it very, very much as a continuation of what they'd been getting from they freedom movement. A sense that you matter, a sense that you are a person. 'You have rights, you can vote. You can have a program for children. You can start it. You can learn how to teach it. You can go to Washington and fight for it.'

In her explanation, Greenberg links the mission of the movement's radical branch with Levin's life-long mission: "A sense that you matter." Historian Charles Payne says in his description of movement ideology: "SNCC preached a gospel of individual efficacy. What you do matters. In order to move politically, people had to believe that."xiv The movement's radical activists, like Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Bob Moses-who shaped SNCC's "beloved community" approach-not only tested the limits of repression, but also pushed "the oppressed to participate in the reshaping of their own lives."xv They used participatory political and educational activities to get poor blacks to rely on themselves and their communities.xvi Greenberg emphasizes that this approach overlapped with Levin's belief in using education and organizing to empower those deprived of economic and political power:

So for them-the poor black people of Mississippi, those who were involved in all these many counties, they wanted that power, which of course is very little power in the world. But from where they were standing it was a lot of power. They did not want that taken away.

And Tom, that was his big concern: that psychologically how you help these children is let them see their parents empowered, fighting for their rights, going through the bullets to register to vote, going to Washington to tell Mr. Shriver to give them money for their grant. That's what helps children. That it's very nice to have a few hours a day of hot lunch and play, it's good for them of course, especially in a state with no kindergarten and such horrible black schools in the Delta. But that's not the real thing that's going to help the children with ego building and sense of power themselves and sense of possibility. It's going to be seeing their parents do these things because that's who has the most influence on them.

Though his tone was strict and imposing to his colleagues, Levin's requirements for CDGM communities reinstated the conditions for self-reliance and empowerment that the next generation would inherit. Levin pushed CDGM communities to stand on their own feet according to his and SNCC's overlapping purposes. The synthesis of organizing, activism, and education was the keystone of civil rights activism in Mississippi when few other resources existed.xvii

Actualizing this synthesis seems to have been most fulfilling to Greenberg as well, for she emphasizes how her system for the development of CDGM educators fostered a similar form of self-reliance and empowerment. Of the belief that parents most influence their children's development, Greenberg was particularly interested in building role-model relationships between the children attending preschool centers and their parents and other relatives. The latter were frequently hired as teachers so that they would be in the position to make decisions about their own children's learning. Applications for teacher positions requested information about individuals' civil rights, organizing, and child-rearing experiences, revealing Greenberg's push to tie education to organizing and activism for larger social change.xviii

Greenberg's sympathy for a SNCC-like community-based approach to teaching characterized this push for socially dynamic education. Though she received formal education in child development, she explains that she did not impose a pedagogical approach when working with CDGM teachers: "I don't discuss theory, ever, or research. Never do I discuss either one, even though I know it all, because that isn't . . . how you come to this. You take what the person is interested in and passionate about and wants and you work with that." The progressive education Greenberg received earlier in life influenced this way of seeing things. At Sarah Lawrence, for example, she and her professors designed her course of study with consideration for her personal intellectual background and interests. Exposure to the human services work of her family members, which was going on when community-based needs assessment became more popular-during the advent of sociology as a scholarly discipline and the height of settlement movement-probably also influenced Greenberg's perspective. In any case, her progressive, specialized approach to teaching gave credibility to local conditions and leadership, naturally favoring existing civil rights activist leadership. Even though she and other Staff had to work quickly, the style complemented the Freedom Schools' "slow process of helping people develop their powers"xix and SNCC's movement "to exploit communal and familial traditions that encouraged people to believe in their own light."xx Unita Blackwell, a CDGM parent who had become a civil rights activist during Freedom Summer 1964, attested to the local impact of this system: "When you say CDGM you are talking about the local people-we are talking about the people in the community."xxi

To spark this community collaboration between CDGM teachers and to prepare local CDGM communities for the summer's work, Greenberg applied her situation-specific approach to determining teaching material and her expertise in child development. In her reflections, Greenberg recreates a dialogue between herself and a group of CDGM teachers, elucidating the link between education and activism:

So that's why you would have a discussion . . . about them fighting for their rights. . .

'What kind of people do you admire?'

'Oh, people who stand up for what they believe in.'

'How do you think people should work together?'

'Well, they should listen to each other's ideas.'

And you go do all that and you've got a nice picture of it. Then you say, 'Well, if that's what you believe. I'm not saying it, you're saying this is what you believe, this is the kind of person you admire, then isn't it sensible that you would do all these things with children? And listen to their ideas. . . . So you would raise them to be independent.'

And then you discuss, 'Well, how would you do that if you're talking about four your olds?' So you take it always from-you take it from what they want-the people you're working with and then you take it to where it is that you're trying to go in this case, 'cause that's where the funds were. And Head Start has rules.

Greenberg expresses her continuing enthusiasm about the interactive process she employed and the logical relationship between the adults' existing ideals and their ability to influence the next generation. By distinguishing between but connecting "what they want" and the requirements imposed by "the funds," Greenberg implies that existing ideas elegantly dovetailed with Head Start's educational purpose as well as Levin's vision for Mississippi black children to inherit the social and psychological empowerment of their parents.

Greenberg set this grassroots approach into action through her teacher-training program, the Area Teacher Guide (ATG) system, which she described as a highlight of her leadership in CDGM.

The Area Teacher Guide system . . . was very good because I just asked at each center . . . who is the woman in this community that's the best with children? Who is just known to be a terrific mother just a wonderful person with kids, you really admire her and respect her. And everybody of course could name somebody. And I said, maybe she would be the area teacher guide. I wanted one for every 8 centers because the idea was that I would train 16 people on Wednesday. . . . I could have a workshop on children's literature. I have all the books shipped to all the centers and I have the some shipped to this warehouse where we have the training.

So we spent a whole Wednesday, me reading to them out of these books that I had purchased and they had in their centers. Then they read to each other. They could barely read, but I had just read it to them. It's the same way we teach reading in kindergarten or first grade. So I read it to them two or three times. We talk about the pictures. 'Now it's your turn. Can you read it to her? If you don't know all the words just wing it. You know the story. You can see the pictures,' you know, huge embarrassment. But pretty soon by the end of the afternoon everyone is nicely reading or telling.

Then you do the things like read the book this way [holds book close to her face] and there's fighting and I said, 'What's the matter?' 'Well, I can't see the book!' 'Oh, well, you gotta always read this way.' [holds book out to audience] [laugh] You know, learn through experience. . . . 'Next Wednesday what we'll do is math. What do you have that you could count? Well, is counting 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 as useful as touching? One, touch it, pick it up, two.'

You know, one-to-one correspondence.

After each of Greenberg's workshops, the ATGs would return to their areas and give half-day workshops, similarly participatory and interactive, in each of the communities they served. Aside from practice in these traditional forms of literacy, Greenberg encouraged CDGM teachers to engage children in the local environment: "They [the children] were outside a great deal on play equipment made by the community and they were taken to the pond and to see the cow." The ATG system and the inquiry-based decision-making process that Greenberg described illuminate the importance she placed on participatory rather than didactic teaching style. This attribute fostered CDGM's success, particularly as an organization that white Northerners who only recently developed ties to Mississippi founded and directed. It enabled CDGM to intertwine with, draw from, and nourish radical educational models indigenous to the struggle for social justice in the South.

The indigenous radical educational models that contributed to CDGM's immediate effectiveness arose from the enduring philosophy of Myles Horton, the founder of the Highlander Folk School, an adult education school for organizing and social change in Tennessee. Horton, an acquaintance of Greenberg's mother, founded Highlander in 1931 for labor organizing and it later became a center of civil rights education and training that sowed the seeds for Citizenship Schools and Freedom Schools in Mississippi. Thus the groundwork for CDGM naturally overlaps. While Horton refused to apply any one teaching theory, he held true to certain principles of education: "I know that any decent society has to be built on trust and love and the intelligent use of information and feelings. Education involves being able to practice those things as you struggle to build a decent society that can be nonviolent."xxii His belief in education as a tool for progressive social change agrees with Greenberg and Levin's convictions and, in Greenberg's case, probably influenced them.

In the mid-1950s, black Mississippi in particular suffered from increased white-supremacist control. The White Citizens Council was founded and funded through state revenues and the state legislature enforced a law making it obligatory for voter registrants to interpret a section of the state constitution. This made registration impossible for many blacks who were illiterate and uneducated, and the number of blacks on the polls subsequently decreased. Horton describes Highlander's response in his autobiography, The Long Haul:

We had made the decision to do something about racism-we were having workshops with black and white people to figure out some answers-but we didn't know how to tackle the problem. The Highlander staff didn't approach it theoretically or intellectually, they just decided to get the people together and trust that the solution would arise from them.xxiii

Horton's goal was to use the school to "multiply leadership for radical social change. The Citizenship School during the civil rights period is an example."xxiv

Highlander was the inspiration for the Citizenship Schools, founded by radical Southern activists like Septima Clark and Ella Baker, which would later shape the Freedom Schools and thus CDGM, as described above. Citizenship Schools usually provided groups of disenfranchised black Southerners with literacy skills and information on voter rights and registration. But Citizenship School leaders saw literacy and registration as a means to an end. "The basic purpose of the Citizenship Schools is discovering local community leaders," said Septima Clark. "It is my belief that creative leadership is present in any community."xxv Schools needed "the ability to adapt at once to specific situations and stay in the local picture only long enough to help in the development of local leaders."

Like Greenberg, Citizenship School leaders believed that getting people to feel empowered "requires participatory political and educational activities, in which the people themselves have a part in defining the problems. . .Start where the people are."xxvi Also, the schools employed poor people who had been fired from their jobs due to their activism and supported individuals who refused to work for white racists. Thus Greenberg's progressive social activist approach to education meshed well with the fundamental activist goals of Southern educators who had been working for radical social change. The CDGM founders' external material resources and expertise innovated the existing movement-related educational structures, by economically and politically supporting poor black communities as they participated maximally in their own solutions to poverty.

During CDGM's first summer, on a grant of $1.5 million, six thousand young people received healthy meals, medical check-ups, and freedom to play and learn in lively, nurturing spaces. Their parents and other adults in their lives had been doing domestic service, working in the fields, and-in many cases-spending even more time away from their children because of their dedication to civil rights organizing. Now, adults in the communities were teachers, mentors, and role models to their own youths.

Also, 1,100 adults who had received little formal education acquired skills in communication and coordinating materials, budgets, transportation, and activities. These were useful not just for gaining greater autonomy to organize and lead their movement, but also for finding employment with better pay and working conditions. Thus poor black Mississippians gained a political and economic hold that they could exercise in everyday life.

This empowerment also served as a means to defy opposition as the strengthened network of Mississippi blacks and their allies sparked antagonism from white Mississippi. Historians John Dittmer and Charles Payne explain how white Mississippi attacked CDGM along racist lines. The Jackson Daily News called Head Start a "communist" program and denounced its conditions of racial integration as a means for subtly mongrelizing the country. CDGM communities faced violence and hostility:

Local school boards refused to rent their buildings and buses to Head Start. Racists fired shots into several Head Start Centers and harassed CDGM workers. In the Delta town of Anguilla plantation owners refused to permit sharecroppers' children to enroll in the program, and the Klan burned a cross at the center. Nevertheless, blacks in these communities, toughened by their experience in the movement, carried on and all the centers opened on schedule.xxvii

CDGM catalyzed the continuation of the powerful belief and practice of early SNCC members to put their lives on the line in order to overcome the social injustices they faced. Levin articulated a similar notion when he described his reason for going to work in the South in the first place with MCHR: "I used to preach that we need to put our bodies where our ideas are. That neither our money nor our verbal support or our political supports mattered if we didn't put our bodies there." These understandings nurtured a faith among many freedom fighters and CDGM participants that helped them persevere despite these terrifying odds.

CDGM received immediate acclaim from education specialists, journalists, and the OEO for fostering parent participation and community-supported preschool centers. Because most local employees of the organization had little or no experience working with budgets or paperwork, once in a while the record keeping was faulty. However, the OEO recognized CDGM as one of the best-operating Head Start summer programs-a model of the economic opportunity the Johnson Administration hoped to represent- and sent staff to help adjust the problematic administrative procedures so that fewer errors would occur. However, the fidelity of OEO to one of its most groundbreaking, progressive beneficiaries was not to be taken for granted. As OEO economist Elmer J. Moore said, "CDGM was one of the best. . . community action programs that the Office of Economic Opportunity funded. . . it really exceeded the wildest expectations of the community action programs. Therein lies its difficulties and the source off its downfall."xxviii

3. CDGM, Political Agendas, and the War on Poverty

Polly Greenberg and Tom Levin had successfully joined the strongest threads of a prominent social movement and a progressive federal program. Through the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) they reinforced approaches to community and personal empowerment of egalitarian civil rights organizations. As they achieved this, they realized the goals of Head Start as a Community Action Program (CAP). The most audacious of these CAP goals was that Head Start grantees not only serve children below the poverty line, but also enable poor people to participate in Head Start center operations as much as possible. Greenberg and Levin's vision for CDGM were focused on this goal. They helped economically and politically disenfranchised black Mississippians develop community leadership and parent role-modeling, which in turn boosted their agency to challenge unjust institutional power. As active, empowered adults worked to improve their children's education, they got more involved with transforming the white-dominated school system and made more demands on political leaders in local and state government. Since the parents also taught at, cared for, and managed their children's preschools, many CDGM children escaped the repressive conditioning of public schools for some time, and later took interest in continuing community empowerment. Several became community leaders, teachers, college graduates, and political leaders.

However, these achievements raised attention and pressure from state authority so that competing political agendas jeopardized Levin and Greenberg's ability to continue carrying out their purpose. Head Start already spurred general controversy around its fundamental requirements and, in Mississippi in particular, where the Dixiecrat Democrats held a strong grip over the state ever since the end of Reconstruction, ingrained racial hierarchy amplified these tensions. The struggle between CDGM's radical progressivism and Mississippi's systemic conservatism put opposing pressures on the moderate Democratic Johnson Administration and those associated with it, such as many liberals in the civil rights movement. They were caught between the institutional power of aggravated politicians and the civic power of disenfranchised Americans, beginning to exercise their political voices.xxix The impact of these competing political agenda on CDGM recalls the previous problem of radical Mississippi civil rights organizations that sought support from Johnson and raises the question of the viability of such support. The attempt of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to gain recognition at the National Democratic Convention just one year before foreshadowed CDGM's downfall. It exemplifies the pattern of political contention that surrounded Southern civil rights and the standards of tenacity set by grassroots, radical movement leaders.

Nationally, Head Start stakeholders widely accepted Head Start policy. Providing preschool education, hot food, and health care to impoverished youngsters was undeniably worthwhile. Experts in the field liked the requirement of parent involvement, for a leading development theory at the time held parent influence as the most decisive factor in child development. Regardless of their political leanings, advocates of the poor saw services for youngsters facing poverty as an agreeable way of helping, and poor people themselves were generally receptive to the services. Finally, politicians wanted Head Start funds to gain popularity among their constituents.xxx

In Mississippi, powerful white segregationists opposed the entire War on Poverty. Initially, all of Mississippi's congressional representatives voted against funding the poverty program in 1964. However, even here, as Greenberg explained, some Mississippi politicians, such as Senator James Eastland, could see that black people soon would be voting in greater numbers, given the increasing civil rights legislation of the Johnson Administration. Eastland accepted CDGM and also helped to form Midstate Opportunities, a community action program that a prominent white business owner had started. As it included a Head Start program and served blacks, it garnered political support for Eastland.

CDGM's successful fulfillment of CAP ideals was the cause of the organization's disintegration. Like all of the Office of Economic Opportunity's (OEO's) programs, Head Start was a community action program and thus legally obligated by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to foster the 'maximum feasible participation' of the people it served. Civil rights activists, such as Levin and Greenberg, saw this as a chance for blacks, disproportionately represented within US's impoverished population, to finally exert control over social services, since community action programs were separate from racist political, economic, and educational structures.xxxi To them, "maximum feasible participation of the poor in the solution of their own problems" meant government resources would rest in the hands of these marginalized US citizens. However, giving money and therefore power to poor people themselves was not politically sound to many Head Start stakeholders. Often, local politicians wanted OEO funds to sustain the loyalty and the services of traditional welfare agencies, which middle-class whites usually controlled. These disagreed with handing control to the poor themselves.xxxii

In the South, and particularly in Mississippi where Jim Crow laws were only just beginning to break down, the direct control of social services by poor people meant substantial economic power in the hands of poor blacks. This power endangered the race-based social hierarchy that segregationist government officials sought to uphold, since it bolstered their platform and their political power.xxxiii Mississippi's white political leaders attacked CDGM when they saw how it helped poor black communities secure their economic and civil rights, rather than bolstering local political officials' popularity. Just as President Johnson and Sargent Shriver had intended, CDGM operated independently and was committed to racial equality, as it received federal funds.xxxiv But in a state that was openly averse to shifts in race-based power, and whose support Johnson depended on to fuel the Vietnam War and to achieve his mission to prevent conflict, Johnson could not ignore what followed.

Before July 12th, 1965, when CDGM's 84 centers were to open for the seven-week program, Mississippi congressmen William Colmer and John Bell Williams accused CDGM of using its funds to support civil rights activities. On June 29th, Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson wrote Shriver to complain that "extremists and agitators" were undermining local authority and causing racial conflict.xxxv Meanwhile, Senator John Stennis, a powerful figure on the Senate Appropriations Committee, convinced the Committee to send inspectors to uncover CDGM's problems. The white-supremacist State Sovereignty Commission, which had placed two informers in CDGM's central office, collaborated with these Senate inspectors. While not openly advancing the racist rationale for wanting CDGM gone, Stennis used the findings of these inspectors-that the organization's administrative structure was disorderly and that employees were often not accounting correctly for their spending-to demand that Shriver withhold remaining funds.xxxvi Levin summarizes in the interview, "They investigated everything under the sun."

The validity of Stennis's accusations and his importance to the Johnson Administration, as a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee which funded both the War on Poverty and the war in Vietnam, spurred OEO to appease Stennis. CDGM's administrative structure was disorganized. Local center staff had very little training in administration before they were expected to comply with meticulous processes of financial documentation. Also, Central Staff did not yet have an efficient method of communicating between all 84 new centers. Greenberg recalled how Central Staff members requested OEO's help in order to keep up with the requirements: "Send administrative support. We are having trouble here. It's a vast program. We're all just learning." According to Dittmer, at first OEO auditors came to Mississippi to help clarify and correct the administrative and financial procedures that CDGM centers had difficulty performing, and disallowed only $5,000 of the $1.5 million grant after finding that fiscal irregularities accounted for only one percent of the program's costs. But, since Stennis's pressure persisted, OEO took initial measures to bring CDGM into line according to Stennis's interests.xxxvii

These measures transformed the relationship between Central Staff and OEO. Central Staff's trust in OEO's commitment to the organization plummeted. Aware that Stennis's real issue with CDGM was its autonomous association with civil rights, OEO presented a compromise on July 31st at a last minute meeting in Mississippi. OEO would allow CDGM to continue operating if it moved its headquarters away from the Delta Ministry and MFDP central offices in Mount Beulah to the remote Mary Holmes College, 200 miles away in the corner of the state. Central Staff had six days to move.xxxviii The board agreed, but Central Staff refused to comply, on the grounds that CDGM would not be able to support its centers reliably from a site that most poor community members could not access. Also, the move would divert time and attention from running the summer program, which would be over in a few weeks anyway. In turn, OEO reversed its demand and agreed that the move was unnecessary considering the summer program would end so soon. Soon afterwards, OEO supposedly pressured the CDGM board of directors to remove Levin as director. Despite his arrogant assertiveness, which stifled many of his colleagues, Levin was the key protector of CDGM's community-centered focus. As Dittmer points out, "His commitment to CDGM as not only a preschool program but also an agency for social change was what had made CDGM unique to Head Start."xxxix Dittmer conveys that, when OEO removed the principal CDGM leader who required CDGM's freedom from OEO to practice this commitment, the organization collapsed.

This collapse occurred over the next year and half, and brought CDGM into increasingly more traditional, politically moderate leadership. Without Levin, CDGM more readily succumbed to OEO's demands and the organization lost many of its connections to civil rights activism. At the end of the summer program, Central Staff headquarters moved out of its civil rights base at Mount Beulah to a building in Jackson that housed the Mississippi FBI offices. Several SNCC veterans left the organization out of disillusionment. But CDGM workers proved that many of Levin and Greenberg's guiding principles still held. In February 1966, after CDGM centers had operated on a volunteer basis for nearly six months, two busloads of CDGM teachers and toddlers (including their full array of toys, games, and arts and crafts supplies) traveled to Washington DC to lobby before the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee and request another grant. CDGM was refunded within two weeks, though OEO granted half the amount proposed.

By the fall of that year, however, after another of Stennis's investigations reported unfavorably about CDGM and further threatened to withdraw support of the Administration, OEO's dismantling of CDGM continued. Shriver secretly set up a more moderate group called Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP) in August 1966 and then announced with no prior warning that MAP would replace CDGM. A coalition known as the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty (CCAP) instantly materialized to protest this decision with an October 19, 1966 New York Times advertisement, "Say it isn't so, Sargent Shriver." Shriver, who originally made CDGM a priority program, now had to bend to political pressure of the establishment, which was overriding CDGM's grassroots political pressure. On his subsequent public relations campaign, he falsely accused CDGM of being a segregated organization-few white Mississippians would enroll their children in a program that included blacks- and argued that he favored integrated poverty programs like MAP. Historian Charles Payne reveals the continued grassroots political strength and dedication of CDGM workers even after many of the original organizational leaders had abandoned the project: "During the fall of 1966, MAP, with three million dollars, was only able to establish five centers in two counties, serving one hundred children. CDGM, meanwhile, operating without any funds at all, was running sixty centers serving four thousand children."xl

Ultimately OEO smothered CDGM as an institutionalized network of civil rights-based community empowerment. CDGM continued to receive Head Start funds for 14 of the original 38 counties in which its programs operated and then received its third and final Head Start grant in late 1966. Individuals and institutions that sympathized with CDGM formed the Friends of the Children of Mississippi (FCM) and supported the refunding of CDGM. FCM took responsibility for continuing operations of CDGM centers in the five counties that the OEO added to MAP's 18 in the last minute of negotiations. But by this time, OEO had transformed CDGM's central focus. Levin's replacement, John Mudd, received criticism from black power advocates for empowering white outsiders to lead CDGM while local blacks had diminishing leadership roles.

OEO's intervention also worsened political tensions between the more radical, community-empowerment advocates in MFDP and the more moderate, upward-mobility advocates in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). CDGM initially chose staff members who identified with the former, which alienated the latter from the start.xli When OEO formed MAP, CDGM's rival institution, it put many NAACP leaders in charge, heightening division among civil rights workers. Also, OEO employed teachers and administrators for MAP who already had qualifications for those jobs, rather than poor local activists, like those in CDGM who gained marketable skills as they sustained their community organizing.xlii

When the third grant ran out in December 1967, there remained only a few CDGM centers, which parents organized through a local community college. Many CDGM community members and children carried CDGM's light with them when they worked later in areas such as social services, education, government, and health. But the Johnson Administration and the War on Poverty program ultimately smothered the institution of CDGM and substituted it with a program that failed to fulfill their own CAP guidelines.

The initial financial and ideological investment of OEO in CDGM, followed by its actions to smother the organization's ability to influence substantial social change, fits into a trajectory of federal-level damage to the civil rights movement's morale. During 1964 Freedom Summer, a similar momentum was built up by grassroots coordination, bolstered with the hope of federal support, and then squelched as Johnson demonstrated that he would tolerate only so much controversy in fulfilling his commitment to racial equality. Freedom Summer leaders and volunteers succeeded in raising political consciousness and activism among black Mississippians to put their civil rights to the test and loosen the hold of white supremacist government authority within the state.5 Three thousand children attended the project's Freedom Schools, 1,600 new black voters registered, and 80,000 disenfranchised blacks joined the new MFDP, an extralegal alternative to the white-only regular Democratic Party in Mississippi.xliii By the end of the summer, thousands of local black people were educated about civil rights and activated as political individuals within their communities.xliv All along, Johnson advocated voting rights and led MFDP to believe that he supported its work.

But in August 1964, when MFDP attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to achieve national publicity for the exclusion of black people from Mississippi government and politics, the limitations of this support betrayed the Mississippi movement. The MFDP, an outgrowth of SNCC, led a local interracial campaign opposite that of the regular Dixiecrat Democrats. Walking through the back roads of Mississippi, MFDP leaders and Freedom Summer volunteers successfully enrolled 80,000 black members, held local and state conventions, and selected 68 delegates, all but four of them black, to attend the Democratic National Convention, where President Johnson expected to be nominated unanimously.xlv

Expounding on the barriers of local law and brutality that made voting (let alone joining the regular Democratic party) impossible for black Mississippians, MFDP garnered the support of liberals on the Credentials Committee, who said that the convention should acknowledge MFDP's legitimacy by granting them half of Mississippi's seats. Johnson would not agree for fear that the Mississippi regulars and many other Southern states' delegations would abandon him, and he called the FBI to spy on and subvert MFDP. Meanwhile, he sent his presumptive vice-presidential running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to propose a compromise in which white Mississippians would pledge their support of Johnson before being seated, the Freedom Democrats would receive two seats at the convention to vote at large, and future conventions would not include delegations that formed under racially discriminatory means.xlvi This proposal would look familiar a year later to movement leaders in CDGM when OEO demanded the organization sacrifice several days of its summer program to move to an inaccessible location, if it wanted to continue its programs. Similar to the Atlantic City compromise, Johnson was giving CDGM a bit of leeway, but accommodating its segregationist constituency first.

Much like CDGM's board, headed by liberal supporters of stepwise social change, which supported OEO's demands on CDGM in 1965, liberals on the Credentials Committee who previously had rallied for MFDP now joined the compromise. In effect, they betrayed the one opportunity for MFDP to present their case on the floor, before the nation. The Johnson forces on the Credentials Committee pressured the committee to vote immediately, before the MFDP caucus could voice its dissent. This would help prevent more hesitant supporters of the compromise from swaying the other way, overcoming Johnson's plan, and then sending a minority report to the floor, which would allow MFDP to get what it wanted: the chance to broadcast nationally the atrocities black Mississippians faced in attaining the vote.xlvii Meanwhile, the MFDP leaders, Bob Moses, Ed King, and Aaron Henry, sought to negotiate and include the whole MFDP delegation in the decision to accept or reject the compromise, but Humphrey and other representatives from the Johnson Administration and the SCLC did not want a debate.

At the same time, the Credentials Committee announced its unanimous approval of the two-seat compromise and that it was a civil rights victory. Actually, a few members of the Credentials Committee had voted against the compromise, since they wanted to include the Mississippi delegation in the decision, but there were too few of these loyalists to submit a minority report.xlviii In response SNCC, CORE, and MFDP supporters picketed the convention gates and twenty-one MFDP delegates gained access to the seats on the convention floor, which the Mississippi regulars had abandoned. This protest forced Johnson and the liberal Democrats to invite MFDP back to accept the compromise.xlix The rallying of MFDP's allies and the successful petitioning of Johnson's further attention reinforces the place of CDGM in the grassroots civil rights movement. Just as MFDP resisted concessions in Atlantic City, CDGM's Central Staff resisted the requested move and later mustered coalitions of allies, when OEO threatened CDGM's refunding.

By the time Johnson invited MFDP to accept the compromise once again, the delegation had divided along socioeconomic and organizational lines. The more educated, middle class of the Mississippians, who tended to support NAACP, supported the compromise, while those poorer ones, who had aligned with SNCC and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), continued to oppose it. Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine of the latter group persuaded the delegation to turn down the compromise. Annie Divine said that she "reminded [the delegation] of what the people back in Mississippi were expecting from us, and that I for one was not going back to Mississippi and tell those people a lie."l Fannie Lou Hamer finished, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats."li

MFDP leaders turned down the compromise on August 24th and returned home more disillusioned by the national Democratic Party than ever. Bob Moses remarked in reaction to this event: "You cannot trust the political system. I will have nothing to do with the political system any longer." 6 lii At that point, the radical wing of the movement turned away from its hopeful readiness to work with liberal white leadership in the mainstream political system toward an eagerness to institutionalize black rights through independent structures of participatory democracy. As they explain, Levin and Greenberg gave those original movement principles another chance through CDGM. When they too found that the Johnson Administration submitted to institutional power that represented the oppressive status quo, the tenacious leadership of Hamer, Divine, and other early activists modeled their response.

Thus, in many ways, OEO's compromise that CDGM move its headquarters, followed by Central Staff's refusal and Levin's expulsion from CDGM's directorship, mirrors the Atlantic City compromise. Both incidents raise the question of whether federal support was a viable means of achieving racial equality. The few historians who discuss CDGM's history and significance portray it as a model of how interracial, North-South collaboration in civil rights movement activities can be successful, but they point to the danger of relying on institutional support. To them CDGM is also another failure of the movement to maintain federal allegiance. CDGM, like MFDP, depended on the support of an administration that ultimately would not expend much capital for civil rights, before accommodating its more powerful, segregationist constituents.

However, while the impact of the Johnson Administration and its liberal constituents on MFDP parallels the events of CDGM's first summer-when OEO sought to compromise CDGM's most influential principles, the oral histories of Levin and Greenberg provide a different angle. In both episodes of compromise, MFDP and CDGM leaders had Johnson's support. Of various grassroots civil rights tactics in 1964, Johnson advocated voter education and registration, which were MFDP's priority. Similarly, by the following summer, Johnson's War on Poverty required poor people's involvement in running the services they received, which was CDGM's priority. Thus, even though the leaders of both groups were fulfilling the said intentions of the Johnson Administration, political pressure from the government establishment appears to have won out, suggesting that social movements should avoid state support and programs. In their interviews, Levin and Greenberg raise these possibilities. But they, as CDGM's founders who had great personal investment realizing their visions, portray alternative conclusions. They make sense of the liberal establishment's damaging impact on CDGM by emphasizing the impact of their contributions.

4. Reflections on CDGM's Summer 1965

In their reflections, Tom Levin and Polly Greenberg focus on their experiences during the Child Development Group of Mississippi's (CDGM's) first summer, acknowledging CDGM's loss, but challenging the conclusion that their organization was defeated. They acknowledge that the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) would not protect CDGM because it feared losing the support of the Mississippi State government, and they charge that the federal agency went back on its original agreement with Levin's conditions for accepting the Head Start grant. In addition, Levin and Greenberg both emphasize the division within CDGM, between the radical or socially progressive Central Staff and the more moderate, liberal board of directors. The board's political leverage over the Central Staff is vital to Levin and Greenberg's understanding of CDGM's problems.

Despite the disappointments, however, Levin and Greenberg do not regret having formed their alliance with OEO or having accepted institutional support. Instead they each make sense of the terrible obstacles that OEO and the liberal faction of CDGM presented by returning to their personal ideals and the movement principles that led them to the organization in the first place. Their oral history accounts reinterpret the story of OEO's compromise with CDGM's Central Staff and the removal of Levin. They say that, despite the immediate loss of funding and Levin as leader, the preservation of CDGM's principles represented a more valuable, permanent gain, since the whole point of CDGM was to help realize racial equality through the most effective civil rights movement ideology. Though the OEO and CDGM board's diplomatic search for a settlement between CDGM and conservative Southern politicians enabled CDGM to live on through other Mississippi Head Start social service programs, it is true that Levin and Greenberg's defense of CDGM's empowerment philosophy sustained the organization's movement spirit as it continued in other forms.

Conclusion

The personal accounts of Levin and Greenberg transform the story of an ill-fated poverty program into an example of how strong men and women can stand firmly for social justice and revolutionize society on the local level. The narrators say through their life stories that, even though the President ultimately proved that the federal government was unreliable, the use of federal support and funds to give power to poor people was worthwhile. Levin and Greenberg demonstrated the potential of the government's money to enact constitutional principles of freedom, equality, and democracy through a federal-grassroots alliance. In addition, they are emphasizing their agency as compassionate outsiders and educated middle-class whites to contribute their resources effectively where powerful authorities would not.

Undeniably, Levin and Greenberg had the privilege to retreat back to their careers and homes in the North when they had finished work in Mississippi. One may argue that this position allowed them to risk defying OEO and also the Child Development Group of Mississippi's demise, since they did not rely on the organization's structure as the local communities did. However, if these considerations contributed to Levin and Greenberg's actions and perspectives, as I would imagine they naturally would to some extent, these founders of the organization nevertheless nurtured the seeds of change during the time that they did commit to CDGM and now, in a new way through these oral histories.

In creating oral history accounts of these founders' lives, new truths about the history of CDGM emerge. Levin and Greenberg's words highlight the lessons of CDGM's history for a living audience today. As Greenberg wrote in a letter to me after our first meeting,

Let me say how important I think it is that you are 'capturing' Tom Levin, who, in my opinion, is a brilliant social change conceptualizer and did something extremely significant in steering Mississippi history, when that history was at a crossroads, in the direction started by a decade of freedom movement happenings. The summer of '65 was just as important as the infamous summer of '64, but is not documented.

Levin and Greenberg piece together elements of their past and their reflections on its meaning, and pass them to the next generation, partially out of an urgent desire that their work should not fade or be diminished by better known and more commonly taught civil rights history.

The coincidence of present events surrounding the creation of these oral histories contributed to Levin and Greenberg's urgency to record them. I discovered CDGM during the summer of 2002, while researching Mississippi civil rights at the Tougaloo College Archives in Jackson, Mississippi. Upon returning to the North, I stopped by a friend's house for dinner. Sitting in the yard of his Upper West Side brownstone, I explained how I had spent my summer in the Deep South and he mentioned that his neighbor had been involved in Mississippi civil rights. So had many Upper West Siders, I thought to myself, but I asked the name of his neighbor in the chance I would recognize it after my recent immersion. "Tom Levin," he replied, "he's an old psychoanalyst."

By the time I called Tom Levin in mid-October 2002 with the hope of interviewing him as part of my work for an academic course in oral history, he had just recovered from triple bypass heart surgery and was particularly interested in documenting his recollections. He explains in the interview that various people have asked him to write about his life and says the transcript of our interview will help him put together his thoughts for that purpose. Because of his near-death experience, Levin looked acutely at the significance of his life. He relates it to the most meaningful experience he had early in life, when his father expressed to him the psychological hardship of the Great Depression:

I'm very emotional about it because I just came from surgery and the doctor's said, 'You have to have an operation, or you'll be dead in a few days.' And so I woke up after the operation and looked out on the world. A lot of things become very clear to me. Among the things is this particular thing. The most important thing in the world is that people feel they matter and that other people matter.

The timing of our interview was opportune.

Levin's ill health incited such urgency that Greenberg contacted me in an effort to help her old colleague achieve his goal. When she called, she informed me that since Levin and I had met, he had had a stroke and, though he was recovering well, she was eager to gather together materials that honored his life and CDGM. She was interested in the oral history work I had done with him and enthusiastically accepted my invitation to have an interview and support my small oral history project. Twice Greenberg traveled all the way from Washington, D.C., to New York, partially to visit Levin and relatives in the area, but also to record her memories and reflections. Thus, since one of her main motivations in meeting was Levin's pressing desire to share his history, it is not surprising that much of her discussion of CDGM's history focuses on Levin. At the same time, however, she relates to me her own experiences as a progressive, educated woman, sharing her personal history and the lessons she learned, that they may inspire effective activism and social work today and in the future.

Thus, as Levin and Greenberg reframe the significance of CDGM as it existed in the contexts of the civil rights movement and War on Poverty, the use of oral history as a medium of transmittance powerfully links the past with the present. Through it, CDGM becomes more than a story of individuals who demonstrated their strength to help achieve social justice and racial equality despite the wavering support of Johnson's liberal Administration in the mid-1960s. Because the living leaders of CDGM carry their story into the present, CDGM also becomes a story of what is possible for people now and in the future.

Levin says at the end of the interview, "Caring is everything about being human. It's the essence of it. . . It takes millions of forms." Levin and Greenberg persisted through CDGM to care immensely for black children and communities of Mississippi and by investing their energy in recording that history, they demonstrate their persevering care for the lessons they learned through their work. Their words bring forward the memory, significance, and promise of CDGM to a new generation of individuals with the capacity to stand for racial equality and justice in their own choices and actions.

Footnotes