What did school lunches consist of in segregated black schools?

by J2quared
przyjaciel

I wish I had a menu I could present to you from that time but I don't. The reality is that the school lunch program morphed throughout its history from a mandate to the states to a federally funded program tied into the distribution of food surplus tied into the Department of Agriculture.

I just found a USDA report with menus from various communities:

United States. Dept. of Agriculture. Production and Marketing Administration. Participation of Negro children in school lunch programs.. Washington, D.C.. UNT Digital Library. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc6225/. Accessed August 30, 2015.

The reality is that too often segregated schools did not provide any school lunches, because of inequality in funding that existed in segregated school districts.

"Schools with the highest proportion of needy children were concentrated in low-income urban areas - neighborhoods that by the early 1960s were heavily black. Similarly, in the South, most of the all-black schools in that region's segregated system had no lunchroom facilities. In 1963, according to White House aide, Harry McPherson, Jr., the school lunch program in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia reached 62 percent of white children and only 26 percent of non-white."

Levine, Susan. (2011). School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America's Favorite Welfare Program (pp. 110). Princeton University Press.

School lunch programs were signed into law nationally by Truman in 1946, but food was served in schools before that time. The program codified it and mandated a method of disbursing of funds for it through the states. In 1962, the National School Lunch Act was signed that created a federally funded program.

An interesting episode was the attempt by New York congressman Adam Powell to defund school lunch programs for states that practiced segregation in the 1950s. It was controversial as some critics felt it would punish the children it was aiming to ultimately help by forcing states to abide by the Supreme Court's decision prohibiting segregation in public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Source: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1956/3/1/the-powell-amendment-pwhen-president-eisenhowers/

(Edit: Expanded answer to mention Powell's amendment and the overall history of the school lunch program. Urban auto-corrected to grab. Added link to USDA report with menus.)

przyjaciel

I found some menus from a 1950s publication produced by the Department of Agriculture entitled 'Participation of Negro children in school lunch programs."

One example is from a report from a school in Antioch, Alabama.

"This typical menu illustrates some of the ways [the school has endeavored to fully cooperate with the demands of the program]: Fresh and frozen fish (an abundant food), turnip greens (donated by the community), cornbread (made with dried eggs and soured dry milk), potatoes (another abundant commodity) with oleomargarine and dry milk." (pp. 8)

If you go through the document, you will find other examples from individual schools.

United States. Dept. of Agriculture. Production and Marketing Administration. Participation of Negro children in school lunch programs.. Washington, D.C.. UNT Digital Library. http://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc6225/. Accessed August 30, 2015.