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Head Start was built on a strong base of civil rights advocacy and a long history of private and government-funded US early childhood education programs. At the 50th anniversaries of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, it is fitting that we remember that Head Start was born of President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty in the middle of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
At the time of Head Start's creation, 10 years had already passed since the Supreme Court's momentous Brown v. Board ofEducation (1954) decision that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others were helping the United States focus on the needs of underrepresented groups. President Johnson announced the creation of Head Start in a special message to Congress on January 12,1965, in which he focused on the expansion of "preschool program[s] in order to reach disadvantaged children early" (Osborn 1991). Lady Bird Johnson launched her role as a national spokeswoman for the Head Start program with a tea in the Rose Garden, attended by members of the Head Start planning committee. The gathering, which was covered on newspaper society pages, gave the program "an aura of respectability" (Kuntz 1998,8-9).
Varying views on Head Start
Views varied on what kind of program Head Start should be. It was widely believed at the time that "poverty and welfare dependencies are transmitted intergenerationally [because]... education, independence, ambition, [and] concern for the future are not reinforced during a childhood spent in poverty and dependence on welfare" (Washington & Bailey 1995,21). Those who held this view believed that since parents were accountable for their children's condition, antipoverty programs-including Head Start-should either remove children from the influence of parents who were not meeting their needs or work to improve the parents for the benefit of the children. This attitude led to the cultural deprivation theory, which "suggested that the poor needed to be educated, to have opportunities to learn the values embraced by middle-class America and that, if introduced to these ideas-most important to the work ethic-the poor would straighten up and act like real Americans" (Kuntz 1998,4).
Others, believing that parents should personally benefit from a program and...