The beginning of Community Action can be traced to the Great Society of the 1960s. On March 16, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to Congress to submit his Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.

He said, “Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty, I submit, for the consideration of the Congress and the country, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.”

President Ronald Reagan said, “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty and poverty won.” Now forty-five years after the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, poverty is still winning.

John Kennedy had been talking to his aides about what he called a “national assault on the causes of poverty.” All of the principals of the Kennedy administration did not believe that Kennedy would have publicly declared war on poverty. Kennedy spoke of “an article on a poor white area of Kentucky by Homer Bigart in the New York Times that there was a tremendous problem to be met.”

In February, 1964 Business Week said of the problem of black America, “The basic cause of Negro poverty is discrimination – in education, jobs, access to health care. Many Negroes have improved their lot by moving to the cities. But many others still live in the rural South.”

From 1947 to 1957 the percentage of American families with incomes of $2,000 went from 35 to 23, and percentages of black families went from 62 to 36. Poverty is not a black or white issue. It is a human issue that affects individuals and families from all racial groups.

President Kennedy’s Committee of Juvenile Delinquency poverty-fighting (and delinquency-fighting) idea was called community action. Over the years there has been a great deal of confusion about what community action meant – not surprisingly. It was an intentionally vague idea, difficult to understand and subject to widely varying interpretations.

The war on poverty was initially to be funded with 500 million dollars. The original plan was to start community action in ten centers, five urban and five rural with initial funding of one million dollars each. By January 1964, the plan was to open with community action programs in seventy-five cities. By 1967, there were more than a thousand independent local organizations, most of them new and run by inexperienced people. Community action boards were seen as possible power bases for the poor.

Part of the reason for circumventing political structure was the fear that public officials in the South would make their community action agencies all white unless Washington had a specific way to prevent it. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 passed in August. It created the Office of Economic Opportunity headed by R. Sargent Shriver.

In 1967, OEO almost died when Congress missed the regular deadline to renew its appropriations. It survived only because an amendment to the appropriation bill gave elective public officials appointive power over a third of the seats on the community action board. OEO never had any powerful friends and was at the edge of abolition almost from its founding.

The March on Washington was officially billed as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, its chief organizer Bayard Rustin, was annoyed that King’s overpowering “I have a Dream” speech effectively switched the focus from economic issues in the North to segregation in the South.

Community Action Agencies of which Charleston County Human Services Commission is one has a tripartite board of directors consisting of an equal number of business, government, and representative of the poor. The makeup of the board is prescribed by law. This makeup includes all of the stakeholders to the monumental task of eradicating poverty. The elimination of poverty makes good business sense because individuals with more resources are good for business, creates less of a burden on the public sector and creates a better lifestyle for many.