Major Owens: “I want to congratulate the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Education, the gentleman…”

“I want to congratulate the chairman of the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the Committee on Education, the gentleman from California [Mr. Martinez] for his rapid movement of this very important bill through the process. We are reauthorizing a program which is only a tiny part of what it was when it first began under Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society programs were on target. The program probably, within the Great Society programs, which was most on target was the Community Action Program. The Community Action Program does not exist at the same magnitude as before, not because it was not effective, but because it was killed by racism and killed by mean-spiritedness, people who did not understand that empowering poor people was the best answer to most of our pressing social problems in the inner cities in particular, but also in many rural communities. The philosophy of the community action programs was to reach out and pull the so-called clients, or the people who were the recipients of the funds, into a process by which they would also help to make the programs go.”