OEO and CSA Archive Frontmatter 

File 02  About This Archive: what is and is not in it                                             November, 2024

This archive has about 570 documents (about 6GB) starting with LBJ’s State of the Union speech in January of 1964 and the 1964 Task Force that drafted the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity existed from August 8, 1964 through 1974.  The successor U.S. Community Services Administration existed from January 4, 1975 to September 30, 1981.  This archive includes selected documents related to community action that were published by or about those two agencies.  It has some bonus documents from the first twenty years of the Community Service Block Grant that continued major themes, strategies or programs started by OEO or CSA.

OEO and CSA documents were produced before computers and digital file storage.  The typewritten version of some official issuances from OEO or CSA went to the Government Printing Office to be typeset and printed.  Some official issuances were typed by OEO staff on an IBM Selectric that was used throughout OEO (and which even then cost $400), and then copied on a Xerox machine and mailed to the Regional Offices.  Other documents were produced by outside contractors and delivered to OEO or CSA. Some had cover memos, some did not.  Most had dates, some did not.  Some were signed by an OEO or CSA official, some were not.  But as OEO Field Representatives we knew that any pile of paper that landed on our desk was supposed to be implemented.    

Scanning these old documents proved to be challenging.  The print on some documents was faded badly.  Sometimes I could bring it up using the dark/light adjustment, sometimes not. Some pages were just missing.  Some pages were stuck together, forever.  Some of the paper was so brittle the document had to be hand-copied one page at time so that it could be scanned.  Some I had to retype.  Thank you to the National Community Action Partnership for supporting the staff time to do the scanning and special thanks to the Community Action Program of Sonoma County (now Sonoma CAN) for the use their scanning equipment for years. 

The documents were obtained from many sources.  About six banker’s boxes came from John Buckstead who worked at the Office of Economic Opportunity Regional Office in Kansas City, then at CSA Headquarters until it closed, then at OCS before becoming Executive Director of the Partnership.  Jim Masters had a few boxes, including a complete set of the OEO Instructions he got from Bill Parker, former Director of the San Mateo CAA.  Others who contributed documents or information about how to find them, are: Bob Clark, Bob Zdenek, Larry Parachini, Dick Sumpter, Art Blaustein, and Charles McCann.  McCann’s videos are particularly illuminating.  Apologies to those who sent items and I have forgotten where they came from. 

Final selection of the documents was done by Jim Masters at the Center for Community Futures.  Jim was an OEO Field Representative based in Kansas City from 1966 to 1970, then an Assistant Deputy Administrator in the New York City Human Resources Administration and CAA from 1970 to 1975.  He was the principal consultant to CSA in creating and installing the Grantee Program Management System from 1978 to 1981.  From 1981 to 1985 he was Project Director to create the National Voluntary Reporting System, the precursor to the CSBG IS.  He was on the OCS Monitoring and Assessment Task Force that created ROMA from 1994 -- 1999.  He was an Interim CAA Director twice.  He wrote the histories of community action for NACAA and then the Partnership for the national conferences that were on 25th, 40th and 50th anniversaries of the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act.  

The Archive is focused on the Community Action Program Division of OEO and the CAAs, and then CSA.  These documents described the statutes, values, principles, goals, strategies, and program guidance that created, shaped, explained and sustained community action.  Most evolved from an idea that initially was just being recognized as allowed activity, then over months to years grew to become best practices, then to guidance, then to instructions.  These are what OEO and CSA expected the field staff and CAA’s to implement.  These documents describe community action as we lived it at the live-action interface between OEO/CSA and the CAAs.   I am confident that this archive contains 99% of the important historical documents from OEO and CSA that helped shape and power the community action movement in the early days.  That said, the primary driver of change was the social movements in which millions of people self-initiated action.  At OEO, we collected their actions and hopes, put words to them, synthesized them, wrote about them in a form of “street sociology”, spread these ideas around and helped others who wanted to replicate and adapt.  OEO was a mirror, an aggregator, a synthesizer, a catalyst and a communications network.  OEO also had the best program development system since the New Deal.  The dozens of programs from Foster Grandparents, family planning, community health centers, WX, LIHEAP did not spring whole cloth from the minds of Congress.  They arose from local efforts using local initiative money -- nurtured by CAA’s and OEO or CSA and built into something that Congress could be persuaded to expand.  The Archive does include a few references to federally-funded Legal Services, federally-funded Family Planning and federally-funded Community Health Centers, all of which started as programs in or delegate agencies of CAAs. 

The only important issuance we know existed but we cannot find is the CSA document from about 1977 requiring CAAs to prepare an Equal Employment Opportunity Plan for their CAA and to report on conversations they had with other major employers about their EEO policies. 

It does not include other departments of OEO like Job Corps or programs for Native Americans that did not operate through CAAs. 

This Archive does not include documents or citations from the Federal Register.  The Federal Register was important (a) to delineate the domain boundaries between federal agencies, and (b) to reflect agreements reached with the White House and the Bureau of the Budget from 1964 to 1970 and with OMB from 1970 onward, and (c) as a historical record of what had already happened.  In the 1960s and 1970s, BoB and OMB were simply the bean-counting arm of the White House.  Their influence only began to expand later: when OMB Watch convinced Congress to establish the OIRA in 1980; when President Clinton established the Regulatory Planning and Review Process in Executive Order 12866 in 1990; and after Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act in 1993.  In the 1960’s and 1970s, when something was published in the Federal Register it was often just describing history -- describing something that been on the streets for a year or more.  Yes, things are different now in that publication is often required BEFORE you can do anything.  Back then, OEO and the community action movement started or mirrored tens of thousands of things and some of it was eventually reflected in the Federal Register.

It does not include documents describing procedural matters like how to fill out a form and due dates. 

It does not include the Limited Purpose Agencies (LPAs) funded by Headquarters.  When CSA went out of business in September 1981, there were 932 CAA’s covering about 2/3 of the nation’s counties.  And there were 860 LPA Grants the went to Children’s Defense Fund, Food Research and Action Center, every other national advocacy organization, and several universities.  Some (I would say not enough) of the reports to OEO HQ on the LPA activity under those grants and contracts eventually trickled into the community action network.

Jim points out that he may have missed important documents. If you have one, email a copy to him at jmasters@cencomfut.com or email Jim for a FedEx number you can use to loan him the hard copy.

How to access EVERTHING that was printed by OEO and CSA is described below by Bob Clark.  Bob is the author of Maximum Feasible Success: A History to the Community Action Program.  296 pages, published by NACAA in 2000.  Maximum Feasible Success (wordpress.com)   Bob describes how he used the LBJ Library at the University of Texas and the National Archives and Records Administration in Maryland to do research while writing the book. 

How to Use the National Archives and Records Administration and the LBJ and JFK Libraries to Do Research, by Bob Clark. 

For the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, start at https://discoverlbj.org/   In the search box, type “Office of Economic Opportunity” (with the quotes). There are other search tips and tricks but that is the best one to start with. Like other libraries, the collection is far from fully digitized.

When I was researching Community Action over twenty years ago, I applied for and received a small travel grant to the LBJ Library. The staff there were extremely helpful in digging out and making available relevant materials. Both in applying for a travel grant and working on-site the key thing is to have done your homework and to be as clear and specific as possible on what you are looking for. This Library staff were (and I imagine still are) happy to support relevant research about the Johnson Administration but they can only be as helpful as the input they receive.

The collections of the National Archives are many orders of magnitude larger.  NARA stores billions of documents -- basically everything published by the U.S. Government.  These are mostly printed copies with some on microfiche and some digital.  It includes all the Presidential Libraries. (Sargent Shriver’s papers, for example, are stored in the JFK Library.) But the same search principle applies. Start with https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog.  Search for “Office of Economic Opportunity”, “Community Services Administration” and “Community Action Program”, etc.  Again, they list other search techniques (see https://www.archives.gov/research/catalog/help/search-tips) but that’s the way to start.  I’m not aware of what if any travel grant support they now provide.  I live where I could drive to the National Archives office and work on-site at 8601 Adelphi Rd, College Park, MD 20740.  (This is near the College Park Metro Station.)  The staff there was helpful but with the variety and volume of requests they handle, searches took time for them to fulfill. Another reason to be as specific as possible.

Final notes: NARA and the LBJ Library provide research support, not the research itself. Preserving, cataloging and over time digitizing the records of the federal government is a vast undertaking.  I can’t prove but suspect that the more demand there is for particular types of records, the greater the incentive for NARA and the Presidential Libraries to pick up their pace in those areas. In that respect alone, the Partnership’s project to compile historical documents from OEO and CSA is doing a service.  A few late additions:

Another “how to" on how to use the National Archives:  Accessing Electronic Records Online via the National Archives Catalog | National Archives

National archives of the Office of Economic Opportunity.  https://catalog.archives.gov/id/10483098

National Archives of the Community Services Administration https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/381.html#381.1

LBJ Library  https://www.discoverlbj.org/solr-search?q=war+on+poverty

Sargent Shriver’s personal papers are in the JFK library at:  R. Sargent Shriver Personal Papers | JFK Library   See Series 03. U.S Office of Economic Opportunity.

--Written by Jim Masters, Center for Community Futures, November, 2024