Three years after then-President John F. Kennedy authorized food stamps on a pilot basis, the Food Stamp Program became permanent in the United States in the 1964 Food Stamp Act under President Lyndon Johnson as a voluntary program for counties that wished to participate. Although the 1964 act gave households extra food stamps to help purchase a more nutritionally sound diet, it continued to require participants to buy stamps.
Counties that chose to administer a Food Stamp Program were required to go through their state welfare or public assistance agency. However, counties were not allowed to operate both a Surplus Commodities Program and a Food Stamp Program. Instead, they were required to choose between participating in the former, which was free to eligible households yet provided limited selection in the food distributed to recipients, or the latter, which allowed households to purchase food of their choice but continued to require that eligible households purchase food stamps.
Despite its popularity, Johnson’s Food Stamp Program reached very few of the otherwise eligible people in the United States. This was due, in part, to the fact that those with the lowest income, including many households of color, were unable to participate in the program because they could not afford to purchase food stamp coupons. Particularly hard hit by the purchasing requirement were Black sharecroppers in the South, many of whom could only afford food stamps if they paid a surcharge for store credit to buy their coupons.
Even though nearly one in four counties in the state did not even participate in the Surplus Commodities Program, many counties in Florida were in no hurry to get a Food Stamp Program off the ground. It would be another five years before any county in Florida began to participate in food stamps, a delay which was attributed to racism and elitism by many at the time.
Image Source: USDA National Agricultural Library
Image Description: 1970s program aid document from USDA about the use of food stamps. Two pages of the document explain why people join the program and how to use the food stamp book.