In 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Agriculture and Consumer Protection Act into law, which expanded food stamps nationwide and allowed all counties in the country to begin to participate in the program. Nixon’s expansion of the Food Stamp Program was an enormous success, with an unprecedented five-fold growth in participation to 15 million participants by the time of his resignation from the presidency.
Within a year, every county in Florida was administering food stamps. However, the cost of purchasing food stamp coupons prevented some households across the country with low income from being able to participate, particularly Black households, who lived in poverty at a rate three times that of white people. According to Census data released in 1973, although the number of white people living in poverty nationwide dropped by 9 percent, the number of Black people living in poverty rose by 4 percent, from 7.4 million to 7.7 million.