War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980

Saving Babies in Memphis: The Politics of Race, Health, and Hunger during the War on Poverty

LAURIE B. GREEN Saving Babies in Memphis The Politics of Race, Health, and Hunger during the War on Poverty Barbara McKinney, who has worked for the same African American community action organization in South Memphis, Tennessee, for more than forty years, first encountered severe symptoms of malnutrition among infants and children in her neighborhood in 1967, when she began visiting homes as a newly employed neighborhood aide in one of the most poverty-stricken sections of the city—and, indeed, the country. McKinney remembers her shock at entering rundown houses and witnessing children with the swollen bellies, visible rib cages, smaller-than-normal head sizes, and low activity levels that are telltale signs of malnutrition. “In talking with people,” she recalled, “we learned that children were going to school without breakfast. And they were having problems with clothing and shoes for school.” In the block clubs she helped organize, however, the aides and neighborhood women “had conversations with each other about what we could do. Sharing with one another helped.” A resident of South Memphis, McKinney was in only slightly less dire straits than those she assisted. As a young black parent without a high school diploma, McKinney attended night school and learned from her teacher about the Memphis Area Project–South (map-South) and its recent federal funding for antipoverty work. She and the other seventy-five neighborhood aides, most of them poor South Memphis residents, helped make map-South—an organization that viewed the antipoverty struggle as a continuation of the black freedom movement —the city’s most vibrant community organization from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Conversely, map-South strived to help the community workers become “self-actualizing” by developing confidence and a sense of responsibility in their community. [134] Green Their endeavors took an unusual turn when McKinney and other neighborhood aides literally carried the most critically malnourished babies to the recently founded St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, just north of the mapSouth area. The hospital’s director, Dr. Donald Pinkel, was forming his own conclusions about the dire need to address hunger and malnutrition right in his “own backyard.” The remarkable collaboration that emerged between mapSouth and St. Jude saved the lives of otherwise failing infants and young children and ultimately changed federal policy. Project directors convinced the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo), the principal agency of the War on Poverty, to fund a nutrition program in Memphis that became a prototype for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (wic), approved by Congress in 1972. Pinkel recalled, “My perception when leaving St. Jude in 1974 was that the map-South/St. Jude program was our most important achievement, rather than our much heralded cure of childhood leukemia.” This sort of activism by poor black women and their medical collaborators in the 1960s and 1970s challenged decades of cultural thought that blamed black infant mortality in the South on their mothers’ presumed immorality. The map-South/St. Jude experience influenced medical approaches to malnutrition , including St. Jude doctors’ decision to recast malnutrition as a catastrophic childhood illness, paralleling leukemia. And it prompted shifts in public health practice, with neighborhood aides such as McKinney, who served as a health coordinator for map-South and liaison for the St. Jude project, playing key roles in the health care process. Together, these changes temporarily reversed the top-down, usually racist production of medical knowledge by southern public health officials. These conflicts over health and hunger have until recently remained in the shadows of civil rights scholarship, which has traditionally focused on desegregation and voting rights battles. Even the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike, hailed as a coalescence of labor and civil rights activism and the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, looks different in light of map-South’s work to obtain food donations for strikers’ families. This effort anticipated map-South’s later antihunger program. Strikers’ families lived on the same streets and in the same housing projects as did map-South participants. Some were members of map-South. Welfare recipients and public housing tenants involved with mapSouth supported the strike, stressing the commonalities between their families and those of the sanitation workers. Saving Babies in Memphis [135] The story of map-South enables us to view the period following the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 from a fresh perspective...