During the Johnson presidency a host of domestic programs were passed to provide federal aid for education and health care for the disenfranchised. These programs included Medicaid, food stamps, the Job Corps and Operation Head Start to benefit the poorest Americans. There were eighty-four Head Start Centers in Mississippi, many of them in the Delta, the poorest region in the state and in the nation.   Although these programs were providing much needed assistance to the poor, the control and management of this federal money became a political football between grass roots civil rights activists and local governmental agencies dominated by white segregationists.   In 1967, Senators Kennedy, Javits, Clark, and Murphy, members of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower and Poverty traveled to Jackson, Mississippi to conduct public hearings to examine and evaluate the impact of anti-poverty programs.