School Lunch Politics (27 page)

Overall,
Their Daily Bread
reported that few poor children participated in the National School Lunch Program, and those who did were often discriminated against or embarrassed in the lunch line. “The odds are against the hungry child whether he goes to school in a rural Southern County or a large Northern industrial city,” the report concluded. New Jersey, for example, offered free lunches to only 12,933 of its 108,767 poor children. In Alabama, only 38,149 of the state's 244,311 poor children received free lunches. On the Marysville, Washington, Indian reservation, no free lunches were offered in the district's only high school.” The principal of a St. Louis, Missouri, “slum elementary school” told the CSLP that of the 1,045 children in his school, the majority of whom were on welfare, “twelve are given free lunches.” “There are no reduced price lunches,” he added.
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The heart of the problem, the CSLP reported, was the fact that there were no enforceable federal standards governing school lunch programs. “Local custom,”
Their Daily Bread
stated, ended up perpetuating racial discrimination, mistreating poor children, and neglecting poor communities. The women uncovered wide disparities across the country. Because the federal government left it up to local officials to decide which children were eligible for free lunches, eligibility requirements often differed from school to school or county to county within the same state. In Reno, Nevada, for example, one principal offered free lunches to children's whose family income was under $200 per month, while at another school the principal set the figure at $300. In neither case did family size enter the equation. Some principals let any child whose parents were on welfare eat for free, while others insisted on a minimum income, regardless of the state welfare standard. In Sumter County, Alabama, for example, families earning less than $2,000 were eligible for free lunches, while in Palm Beach County, Florida, mothers on AFDC had to request free lunches from the welfare department. In some states parents had to submit evidence of income; in others, teachers decided which children were eligible by their clothing. The worst element of “local choice” for the CSLP was the fact that the Department of Agriculture did nothing to prevent discrimination against black children and all-black schools. The state of Georgia, for example, sent no federal money to Tailaferro County, which not only was one of the poorest areas of the state but had no white public schools. Ultimately, local officials had complete leeway over which children ate lunch at school. While most school principals and teachers probably tried to be fair and just in their decisions, the system was left open to individuals like the Tucson principal who said, “I don't believe in free lunches for welfare people.
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Despite the fact that Congress formally banned discrimination in the program and Department of Agriculture officials insisted that there was none, the CSLP found that poor children were, in fact, treated differently from paying children.

What disturbed the CSLP's liberal sensibilities most was the fact that minority children, “Negro, Puerto Rican, Mexican-American, and American Indian,” were left out of the National School Lunch Program altogether. “We did not design our questionnaires to find out about racial and ethnic discrimination,” they wrote, but “the material in this report amply documents wholesale economic discrimination.” While the women were not surprised to find discrimination in the South where racial segregation had for so long characterized public education, they were stunned to discover widespread discrimination in the North as well. Although northern cities did not have the same history of legal segregation, housing and employment discrimination resulted in highly segregated neighborhoods and schools. “The exclusion of urban slum schools” the CSLP found, meant that millions of poor, black children were left out of the program. Sixty percent of Cleveland's children, for example, attended schools without lunchrooms. In Detroit only 79 of the city's 224 elementary schools participated in the school lunch program. One-quarter of the schools not participating, the CSLP found, “are located in the slums.” In Philadelphia, “not a single one of the 12 slum schools” surveyed had lunch facilities.
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There was only one conclusion the women could come to. “Our chief recommendation,” the CSLP declared, “calls for a universal, free school lunch program.” Understanding, however, that such an idea was utopian, at best, the women made two practical and politically appealing suggestions. First, they recommended that the price and funding formula for school lunches be revised, and second, they insisted that the federal government issue unequivocal guidelines and standards for free lunches. Every school district,
Their Daily Bread
declared, should be obligated to feed all of its needy children, and those children should be identified “according to a uniform Federal standard.”
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The release of
Their Daily Bread
in the spring of 1968 coincided with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and underscored the increasing sense of political and social crisis pervading the nation. Believing in the good faith of government officials, the CSLP had arranged to meet with Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman on April 4 to present their findings and provide him with the opportunity to respond before they publicaly released
Their Daily Bread
at a news conference scheduled for the next day. On the morning of the news conference, however, CSLP spokeswomen Jean Fairfax and Olya Margolin awoke to the news of King's death. Margolin's first instinct was to cancel the news conference. “I feel all this seems somehow irrelevant in the wake of the tragic events,” she confided to Fairfax. In the end, however, the women decided to proceed, because, as Margolin put it, “perhaps the most judicious thing we can do is to persevere in our efforts.”
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Margolin's caution stood in sharp contrast to Jean Fairfax's view of the situation. Without the knowledge of the CSLP executive committee, Fairfax invited the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) to appear at their news conference. The LDF took the opportunity to announce that, based on the findings revealed in
Their Daily Bread,
it planned to sue the Department of Agriculture if the National School Lunch Program was not brought into compliance with civil rights laws. The LDF threat appalled and embarrassed the CSLP sponsoring organizations. The entire executive committee immediately sent a telegram to Secretary Freeman apologizing and distancing themselves from the LDF's confrontational politics. Thanking the secretary for his “very cooperative attitude,” the CSLP assured him that the LDF threat was made without their prior knowledge or endorsement. A legal suit, the women assured Freeman, “is not part of our pro gram.”
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Still, the moment of the King assassination marked a shift in mainstream liberal politics as activists increasingly moved toward a more militant, if more despairing, politics of confrontation. For CSLP women and others in the civil rights and anti-hunger campaigns, the moment also marked an intensified sense of impending social upheaval.
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In fact, from the start, Jean Fairfax had an agenda slightly different from the CSLP sponsoring organizations. Where the CSLP groups believed that their research and the facts they uncovered would surely move legislators toward fairness and equity, Fairfax was less confident. Indeed, she had been Dean of Women at Kentucky State College and at Tuskegee Institute and worked for the YWCA during the 1940s. After World War II, Fairfax worked with the American Friends Service Committee and then the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She had seen first-hand the intransigence of racism, both north and south. Fairfax was happy to present the CSLP findings to the press, to congressional committees, and before community forums, but she also wanted immediate and concrete change. Although she had promised the CSLP executive board to keep “the tone of the project … constructive,” Fairfax clearly had doubts about how effective liberal persuasion would ultimately be. After the debacle of the news conference, Fairfax warned the CSLP women that the time for caution had passed. While it appears that Fairfax herself had been caught off-guard by announcement of the LDF suit, she nonetheless reminded the CSLP that “a suit against a public official is neither a personal attack nor a hostile act.” Where Margolin and others on the CSLP executive board clearly felt the action had been a breach of “good faith and etiquette” because it occurred immediately after what had been a “pleasant” meeting with the Secretary of Agriculture, Fairfax insisted that the meeting with Freeman had not been intended as “a social occasion.” Indeed, she said, “we were in his office on serious business relating to starving children.” The point, Fairfax insisted, was that Freeman's department was guilty of inaction and neglect. A lawsuit in such cases, she said, “is the most conservative and traditional” way for American citizens to claim their rights.
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Questions of style masked important strategic differences among the women. At the same time, however, conventional, “lady-like” behavior afforded the CSLP women a certain legitimacy and an entree into the halls of government. For mainstream liberal women during the late 1960s, style and polite behavior proved to be powerful weapons.

The CSLP women were hardly prepared for the impact their report had on policy makers and activists alike. They modestly hoped their report would offer “enough evidence of discrimination in the School Lunch Program to warrant a thorough study” and speedy reform. As it turned out, the CSLP project would become the centerpiece of an increasingly acrimonious debate about welfare rights and the fate of poor children in America. At the moment that the CSLP findings reached headlines in newspapers across the country, Martin Luther King's followers in the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) camped out in front of the Department of Agriculture and vowed not to leave until Congress and the president did something about poverty and discrimination. In the aftermath of King's death, the PPC brought several thousand protesters to Washington to dramatize the economic dimensions of the civil rights movement and to channel the energies evident in the growing urban unrest. When Ralph Abernathy, spokesman for the encampment dubbed “Resurrection City,” presented the Secretary of Agriculture with the PPC's demands, free food stamps and free school lunches were at the top of the list. The Department of Agriculture, he charged, has “let our people starve.”
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Although Jean Fairfax assured the CSLP Executive Board that King's lieutenants would “do everything they can to prevent violence,” she also warned that “poor people are desperate and angry” and worried that things could quickly spin out of control. Much of the anger, Fairfax knew, was directed at Freeman and the failures of the National School Lunch Program. Fairfax urged the CSLP women to use their influence to convince Secretary Freeman “to join with us in a militant effort to implement the recommendations” of
Their Daily Bread.
“If our efforts can produce some tangible results soon,” she assured the women, “we may help not only to prevent violence but to give the poor some reason to believe that our system can become responsive to their needs.”
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This was precisely the appeal that CSLP women intended to make. Eschewing the tactics of the street, these women believed that solid evidence and reasoned debate would move lawmakers to action. In 1968, however, liberal confidence in the democratic process was severely challenged.

During the months following the release of
Their Daily Bread,
social tensions deepened the divisions in American political life. The image of hungry children in the midst of affluent America seemed to represent the heartlessness and inequities of a system in which increasing numbers of people were feeling left out of the mainstream.
Their Daily Bread
became the authoritative evidence for a broad-based anti-hunger movement that coalesced as the civil rights and anti-war movements intensified during the summer of 1968. Illinois representative Roman Pucinski praised
Their Daily Bread
but deflected blame away from his fellow congressmen. “You women and your organizations have made a monumental contribution in calling attention to one of the main reasons of why there is unrest in America,” he said. However, he believed that the unrest stemmed from the fact that “we in Congress pass programs in good faith, but then those programs don't get down to the local level.”
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In the context of urban riots, an escalation of the Vietnam War, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a polarized political climate led even the most optimistic liberals to doubt the sincerity of public officials and the ability of the federal gov ernment to ensure racial equality and economic opportunity. As liberal policy makers desperately sought ways to address the public anger and discontent through traditional political channels, community groups, often funded by President Johnson's War on Poverty community development funds, became increasing politicized and militant. Radical and liberal groups alike used the CSLP report to buttress calls for welfare reform and an end to poverty.

Free school lunches fit with the radical agendas of groups like the Black Panther Party as well as with liberal efforts to “make the system work.” Organizations as disparate as the Catholic Church and the Black Panthers used the CSLP findings to bolster demands for more free lunches. The Catholic Conference, for example, used the women's interview model to survey school lunch programs in Catholic schools. The Poor People's Campaign demanded that the Department of Agriculture immediately open food programs in counties where none existed. Free food stamps, better consumer education for the poor, and free lunches, PPC leaders agreed, should be the department's focus—not aid to farmers. The Citizen's Board similarly demanded that the Department of Agriculture “immediately provide free and reduced price lunches for every needy child.”
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Even government agencies outside the USDA took up the call. HEW, long eyeing the school lunch program for its own, convened a task force on nutrition and children's meals. Finally, some states began, for the first time, to enact new tax laws to pay for free lunches.
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While the CSLP women intended their report to point toward the need for a universal school lunch program for all American children, the crisis atmosphere of the time made them admit this goal was a long way off. Instead, the demand for free lunches for poor children held center stage.