By Marian Wright Edelman
“The bread that is cast upon these waters will surely return many thousandfold. What a sense of achievement, and what great pride, and how happy that will make all of us who love America feel about this undertaking.”This is how President Lyndon B. Johnson concluded the speech from the White House Rose Garden 60 years ago in May 1965 officially announcing the establishment of Project Head Start. Its founding was an acknowledgment of how crucial a quality, comprehensive child development program could be for the physical, emotional, and educational health of all children, and especially for children growing up in under-resourced and under-served families and communities. Head Start began as an eight-week summer program; it has since served nearly 40 million children and families across the United States. But today, like other basic needs programs millions of children, young people, and families rely on, Head Start has been under attack.
Many of Head Start’s roots were sown even earlier in the Civil Rights Movement. For example, Dr. Julius Richmond, Head Start’s first director, was serving as chair of the department of pediatrics at the State University of New York’s Syracuse College of Medicine in 1954 when the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision inspired him and his colleague Dr. Bettye Caldwell to begin studying how economic circumstances affected the development of infants and preschoolers. They discovered that by the time children living in economically marginalized families were 18 months old, insufficient quantity and quality of food, lack of access to health care, and other factors related to growing up experiencing poverty were already affecting their ability to learn. They also realized that exposing young children to a high-quality learning environment as early as possible could make a significant difference in preparing them to thrive.
The vision began to take shape of an innovative early childhood program that comprised quality education teaching children letters and colors but also provided breakfasts and lunches, access to health care, workshops for parents, and all the needed supports for families to give their children the best possible start. In 1964, Sargent Shriver, the head of the then new federal Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in Washington, asked Dr. Richmond to join him at the agency and to go to Mississippi to develop two public health initiatives that would directly aid local families. The first, which Dr. Richmond began in 1965, was Project Head Start.
As the first and only Black woman lawyer in Mississippi at the time, I experienced the harsh resistance Dr. Richmond and his colleagues encountered as OEO began establishing the first centers serving primarily Black children. White protestors threatened workers and churches and other buildings that housed the centers were targeted. Then there were the repeated brutal battles with Mississippi’s Jim Crow congressional delegation over efforts to kill the transformative program after the state turned down the desperately needed Head Start funds and our coalition of community groups, the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), applied for and won the federal Head Start money the state declined to use. The resistance did not stop Dr. Richmond, CDGM, or other local partners in the venture from doing what they needed to do. Within its first six months Head Start went national and was serving more than 500,000 children and families at 2,700 sites in Mississippi and around the country.
Its impact immediately spanned entire communities. As the National Head Start Association puts it, “From the beginning, family and community involvement were at the foundation of Head Start’s model. In Mississippi in 1965 this meant that parents, Black mothers in particular, had unprecedented opportunities to shape their children’s education which was, as [historian Crystal Sanders] notes, ‘an opportunity denied to them in the public school system that was under white supervision.’ Not only were parents able and encouraged to play a role in their children’s education through CDGM, but many also gained employment as administrators, teachers, and cooks.” For many it was the first chance for work outside of the entrenched plantation sharecropping system. Successive generations of young people and adults have now been able to testify to the difference Head Start made in their lives. Dr. Richmond later served as U.S. Surgeon General and Assistant Secretary of Health under President Jimmy Carter, a reflection of the national value placed on his expertise.
Whose expertise is valued right now? As Head Start turns 60, the investments made in children and families can be measured in multiplied returns, just as President Johnson predicted. The National Head Start Association says it is “committed to the belief that every child, regardless of circumstances at birth, has the ability to succeed in life,” and in the face of the latest resistance and threats to Head Start, this remains a belief worth fighting for.