This article examines the history of Head Start, a federally funded program, whose conceptualization emerged in earlier phases of the Civil Rights Movement in order to provide education, nourishing meals, medical services, and a positive social environment for children about to enter the first grade. While Head Start was implemented in states other than Mississippi, a focus on the development of Head Start in Mississippi is particularly significant because it illuminates the ways in which local people placed equitable educational access and opportunity at the center of the broader Civil Rights Movement and broadens one's understanding of how local people used, and in several cases essentially created, federal programs to address deeply contextual issues. Furthermore, by illuminating the significance of Head Start and thus federal programs within the Civil Rights Movement, this article demonstrates how the rise of the New Right in the mid and late 1960s was a reaction to a racialized "Welfare State" and the programs like Head Start associated with it. (Contains 98 footnotes.)