Journal of Southern History

Though it has been more than a half century since the program's establishment, academic studies of the War on Poverty remain relatively limited. While a number of studies have examined the impact of War on Poverty programs on local communities from the ground up, focusing on initiatives such as Head Start, Job Corps, and community health centers, Emma J. Folwell concentrates on the political ramifications of the War on Poverty in Mississippi. In particular, the author looks at how federal programs designed to uplift and empower the poor in the nation's most impoverished state became vehicles for the Republican Party to gain a foothold in the Deep South.

It is no surprise that white Mississippians resented and resisted the establishment of War on Poverty programs, which, on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, were seen as more federal intervention designed to improve the lives of African Americans. Folwell has a fascinating chapter on the role of the Ku Klux Klan as an anti–War on Poverty force in the state, threatening antipoverty workers and even setting fire to Head Start centers. Ostensibly, Klan opposition to Head Start and other antipoverty programs rested on the belief that they promoted integration, which was borne out by the fact that Klan intimidation focused on white people who worked at or participated in War on Poverty projects. However, as Folwell explains, the real impetus to white opposition to these federal programs is that they promised to empower Black Mississippians, giving them economic opportunities outside local white control.

While opposition to antipoverty programs in Mississippi has been well documented, it is Folwell's exploration of how War on Poverty programs like Head Start were co-opted by local whites that makes up the main argument in her meticulously researched book. Initially, most Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) programs in Mississippi were run by a coalition of Black civil rights veterans and white liberals. However, those alliances eventually became strained, especially with the rise of the Black Power movement, as conflicts over both leadership and access to federal funding arose. These divisions, combined with the decentralization of War on Poverty programs under Richard M. Nixon's OEO director Donald Rumsfeld, provided an opportunity for Mississippi's white establishment. "Middle-class whites, who had no need of the services provided by antipoverty programs," writes Folwell, "were often willing to sit on program boards in order to control the nature of black advancement and participation" (p. 218). Exploiting class divisions within the Black community, the middle-class whites recruited acceptable members of Mississippi's traditional Black middle class to community action boards, eliminating the radical element of those who had been active in the civil rights movement.

As whites gained control over antipoverty programs in Mississippi, they were able to undermine Black involvement and diminish the programs' impact. Central to this effort, Folwell asserts, was the nascent Republican Party in the [End Page 365] state. "Ultraconservative Mississippi Republicans were foot soldiers in the battle against the war on poverty," argues Folwell (p. 160). "They sought to vilify the antipoverty programs by depicting them as un-American, an approach that was utilized by Republicans across the nation" (p. 160). At a time when Nixon was honing his so-called southern strategy to attract white southerners who saw themselves as deserted by the national Democratic Party because of its ties to civil rights, the GOP used a war on the War on Poverty to galvanize support in Mississippi.