From the first posting on this blog, excerpted from a paper I wrote in 1977:

“An example closer to home was the surprising preference of the local powers in some unreconstructed rural Southern counties for the food stamp program over the old commodities distribution program. Most people in the North thought the food stamps far more liberal and humane.

In 1968, while travelling in upstate Louisiana for the Office of Economic Opportunity, I found out that the food stamp program (a) enriched the local storekeepers, (b) permitted both the hiring of white clerks and the firing of Black warehousemen, and (c) was driving the poorest of the poor out of the state. They could not afford the minimum cost of the food stamps, and their source of commodities was shut off.

I dare say that few of these consequences were uppermost in the minds of the major sponsors of the food stamp legislation.”