On
July 18, 1963, the state of North Carolina began an "all-out
assault on poverty" with the incorporation of the North
Carolina Fund. The North Carolina Fund was an innovative program
designed, administered, and operated by local communities. It
was the first project of its kind in the country.
In the early 1960s, many North Carolinians were in trouble.
Historians James L. Leloudis and Robert Korstad describe the
economic conditions in the state when Governor Terry Sanford
took office in 1961:
North Carolina's factory workers earned some of the lowest
industrial wages in the nation; thirty-seven percent of the
state's residents had incomes below the federal poverty line;
half of all students dropped out of school before obtaining
a high school diploma; and one-fourth of adults twenty-five
years of age and older had less than a sixth-grade education
and were, for all practical purposes, illiterate.
By 1960 the state's rate of growth had been falling for decades,
in part because of heavy emigration due to the declining number
of agricultural jobs. Governor Sanford promised to experiment
with new programs and ideas in order to enable North Carolinians
to compete in a rapidly changing society.
The North Carolina Fund was established as an independent, non-profit
corporation. Incorporated on July 18, 1963, by Governor Sanford,
Charles H. Babcock, C.A. McKnight and John H. Wheeler, the Fund
was financed by a seven million dollar grant from the Ford Foundation
and by additional funding from Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation and
the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Having secured funding
and organized a Board of Directors and Executive Committee composed
of many of the state's most prominent citizens, the agency established
program offices in eleven urban and rural counties across the
state. This decentralized structure was designed to permit each
office to coordinate locally administered public and social services
and to assist the poor by developing an approach unique to each
community's needs.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson successfully pushed the U.S. Congress
to pass the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act -- a piece of legislation
shaped both by Governor Sanford and Executive Director George
Esser and the experience of the nascent North Carolina Fund --
and the direction of the state's antipoverty initiative took
a new turn. On May 7, 1964, President Johnson, accompanied by
Governor Sanford, visited the home of tenant farmer William D.
Marlow near Rocky Mount, to promote the President's "War on Poverty."
This new national program, the cornerstone of which was the Office
of Economic Opportunity (OEO), would administer millions of dollars
in federal funding for the creation of local anti-poverty projects
across the country and offered the possibility for expanding
existing anti-poverty efforts. As the OEO called for the creation
of community action programs developed with the help of the people
the programs would serve, the North Carolina Fund instructed
its own local programs to submit proposals to the federal agency
with an increased emphasis in grassroots community development.
Within a year of the Fund's incorporation a number of these applications
were approved and many local offices soon became not only federally-funded
Community Action Agencies but partners in the national War on
Poverty.
The North Carolina Fund developed a variety of programs across
the state, including: the North Carolina Volunteers, a service
corps initiative that trained college students to work in rural
communities; a program to train community action technicians
(CAT) to work in North Carolina and Volunteers in Service to
America (VISTA); a summer internship and curriculum development
program; academic research on poverty and economic development
in North Carolina; daycare, home, and lifestyle management programs
such as sewing and cooking classes, tutoring for school children,
and adult literacy programs; community action and civic engagement
programs; manpower and economic development initiatives such
as Head Start and Neighborhood Youth Corps programs; and low-income
housing development.
Over the next five years the Fund's staff and volunteers touched
the lives of countless North Carolinians and its programs and
services affected communities across the state. However, many
lawmakers began to question the uses of Fund resources and services,
especially when some North Carolina Fund programs became involved
with local black freedom movements. By 1968, according to historians
Leloudis and Korstad,
"[T]he Fund's future was in peril. "The agency "had
expended its initial foundation grants, which had been awarded
for a five-year period, and the national War on Poverty was
under siege. When the Fund's philanthropic backers offered
to extend their support, its leaders declined. In part, they
held to a vision of the Fund as a temporary and experimental
agency. The founders had no desire to see their work routinized;
to allow such a development, they insisted, would be to sacrifice
innovation to the very forms of inertia that had for so long
crippled the nation's response to its most needy citizens."
At the end of 1968 the North Carolina Fund disbanded, spinning
off many of its successful state-wide programs into independent
non-profit organizations.
Aidan Smith
July 2005
Suggestions for Further Reading:
James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad, "Citizen Soldiers;
The North Carolina Volunteers and the South's War on Poverty,"
in Elna C. Green, ed., The New Deal and Beyond: Social Welfare
in the South since 1930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2003), pp. 138-162.
LeMay, Erika N. "Battlefield in the Backyard: A Local Study
of the War on Poverty." M.A. Thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, 1997
Alt, Patricia Maloney. "The Evolution of Community Action: Training
Goals and Strategies of the North Carolina Fund." M.A. Thesis,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1971.
Archival Resources:
North Carolina Fund Clippings: People, General Articles, and
History of the Fund, 1963-1969. North Carolina Collection, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
North Carolina Fund Records (#4710). Southern Historical Collection,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Billy Ebert Barnes Collection (# 34), containing a number of
photographs of North Carolina Fund people and activities. North
Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) (Series O.
Foundation History). Southern Historical Collection, University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
George H. Esser Papers (#4887). Southern Historical Collection,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
