In the 1960s, a Black home economist at Howard University recruited kids for an experimental preschool program. All were Black and lived in poor neighborhoods around the campus.
Flemmie Kittrell had grown up poor herself, just two generations removed from slavery, and she’d seen firsthand the effects of poverty. While Flemmie earned a PhD from Cornell, most of her siblings didn’t make it to college. One of her sisters died at just 22 years old of malnutrition. And it was the combination of these experiences that drove Flemmie to apply her academic training to help improve the lives of people in her community.
In the early 1960s, Flemmie decided to see what would happen if you gave poor kids a boost early in life, in the form of a really great preschool. Every day for two years, parents would get free childcare, and their kids would get comprehensive care for body and mind—with plenty of nutritious food, fun activities, and hugs. What kind of difference would that make? And would it matter later on?
EPISODE GUESTS
- Dolores Caffey-Fleming
Former Howard University student
Program Director of Project STRIDE, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science Willowbrook, California - Allison Horrocks
Public Historian
Lincoln, Rhode Island - Lauren Bauer
Fellow, Economic Studies
Brookings Institution
Washginton, D.C.
HOSTS
PRODUCERS
- Danya AbdelHameid, producer; Danya is an audio producer, fact checker, and writer from Virginia, by way of Sudan.
- Elah Feder, senior producer; Elah Feder is a journalist and audio producer.
FURTHER READING
- Flemmie Kittrell audio interviews, Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library Institute
- Kittrell, Flemmie, The Negro Family as a Health Agency, The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 18, No. 3, The Health Status and Health, 1949
- Baure, Lauren, Does Head Start Work?, The Brookings Institution, 2019
- Horrocks, Allison, Good Will Ambassador with a Cookbook: Flemmie Kittrell and the International Politics of Home Economics, University of Connecticut, 2016
- First report on Howard Preschool Experiment: Prelude to School: An Evaluation of an Inner-City Preschool Program, Children's Bureau (DREW), Washington, D.C. Social and Rehabilitation Service, 1968
- Talbot, Margaret, Did Home Economics Empower Women?, The New Yorker, 2021
- Zigler, Edward, and Muenchow, Susan, Head Start: The Inside Story Of America's Most Successful Education Experiment, 1994.