The Struggle Begins Early: Head Start and the Mississippi Freedom Movement

Abstract

Floree Smith, a teacher in Marion County, Mississippi remembered that participating in the Head Start program “made a difference in our lives, our home lives, our church lives, and it made it so beautiful and it was a help for the children and it was a help to us too.” The program etched in Mrs. Smith's memory involves Mississippi teachers, sharecroppers, store clerks, preachers, landowners, civil rights activists, and other local people who galvanized the Freedom Movement and democratized the field of education by organizing 280 Head Start centers that served 21,000 children across the state of Mississippi during the summer of 1965. This article examines the history of Head Start, a federally funded program, whose conceptualization emerged in earlier phases of the Civil Rights Movement in order to provide education, nourishing meals, medical services, and a positive social environment for children about to enter the first grade. While Head Start was implemented in states other than Mississippi, a focus on the development of Head Start in Mississippi is particularly significant because it illuminates the ways in which local people placed equitable educational access and opportunity at the center of the broader Civil Rights Movement and broadens our understanding of how local people used, and in several cases essentially created, federal programs to address deeply contextual issues. Furthermore, by illuminating the significance of Head Start and thus federal programs within the Civil Rights Movement, this article demonstrates how the rise of the New Right in the mid and late 1960s was a reaction to a racialized “Welfare State” and the programs like Head Start associated with it.