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

Plantation Politics: The Tufts-Delta Health Center and Intraracial Class Conflict in Mississippi, 1965–1972

GRETA DE JONG Plantation Politics The Tufts-Delta Health Center and Intraracial Class Conflict in Mississippi, 1965–1972 In 1965, the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo) approved a proposal to establish a community health center in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The center promised to serve impoverished residents of northern Bolivar County, who had almost no access to medical care. Initiated and staffed by civil rights activists, the project sought to move beyond providing medical services to address the underlying causes of poor people’s health problems . The Tufts-Delta Health Center (tdhc) began operating in November 1967 and launched a full-scale assault on the oppressive structures associated with the region’s plantation economy. Dilapidated housing, poor sanitation, malnutrition , inadequate social welfare services, and political powerlessness became targets of tdhc staff and the local activists involved in the project. Organizers encouraged poor people to participate in decision making and recruited them for training and jobs at the center, disrupting long-standing class and race hierarchies in the Delta. Some of the poor people most closely associated with the program would go on to long and satisfying careers in health care delivery. The tdhc’s connections to the civil rights movement and the challenges it posed to the social order generated the usual protests from racist white officials . Less predictably, the project exposed class divisions within the African American community that hindered efforts to empower poor black people. White elites in Mound Bayou, as in other southern communities, were threatened , but just as important, the economic and political interests of Mound Bayou ’s black middle class were threatened by antipoverty projects and the po- Plantation Politics [257] litical mobilization they generated. The situation was further complicated by the rise of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s and demands that African Americans be allowed to control their own affairs. Pressure from local black elites making arguments about the importance of black-controlled institutions ultimately would persuade the federal government to order a reorganization of the tdhc, which had a white founding director. Ironically, this reorganization shifted most decision-making authority away from rural poor people and restored the power of local white elites and middle-class black community leaders to determine the distribution of resources. The history of the tdhc highlights the complex forces that hindered antipoverty work in the Delta and demonstrates that struggles for social justice in the South cannot be understood without reference to class oppression as well as to the racism that characterized the region. HEALTH CARE AS A BATTLEFRONT IN THE WAR ON POVERTY The health needs of low-income Americans emerged as an area of concern for the oeo soon after the agency was established in 1964. Proposals received from groups seeking to set up agencies under the Community Action Program (cap) often included requests for money to provide medical services to poor people, and in its first four years, the oeo allocated 11 percent of cap funds for this purpose. At the same time, suggestions for a more comprehensive approach came from H. Jack Geiger and Count D. Gibson, two white professors of preventive medicine at Boston’s Tufts University. Geiger’s approach to health care was shaped by his experiences working at a community health center in South Africa that served a black housing project just outside of Durban. The South African clinic was part of a network of centers created by Sidney Kark, whose holistic philosophy of medicine emphasized the connections between health and the social environment. In these clinics, Geiger explained, “One never saw an individual patient; one saw patient, family, and community, with the community as the ultimate focus of concern.” After returning to the United States, Geiger helped to found the Medical Committee for Human Rights, an organization of health professionals that provided medical services to civil rights workers in the South. Through his participation in 1964’s Freedom Summer, Geiger realized that conditions resembling those he had encountered in developing nations existed in his homeland. He shared his experiences in South Africa with other volunteers and suggested set- [258] de Jong ting up a similar health clinic in Mississippi. Gibson arranged for his department at Tufts Medical School to sponsor the project, and the two men drafted a proposal to apply for federal funding. After convincing the oeo that community health centers could instigate social change and address the underlying...