The Women Who Held Power Accountable: The Honorable Frankie M. Freeman, U.S. Inspector General for the Community Services Administration
To celebrate Women’s History Month, For 250 More is honoring the women who were the OG IGs of the Federal Oversight Community.
Written by: Jenny Banner Rone
Frankie Muse Freeman was “…one of the great women of our time. At a time when others tried to place limits on her aspirations, she chose to follow her dreams and help lead the fight against discrimination.”
—American Bar Association’s Trailblazers Project
The description above is a fitting introduction for a woman whose life reshaped civil rights law, federal oversight, and the architecture of anti‑poverty programs in the United States.
The Honorable Frankie M. Freeman made history as the first and only Presidentially Appointed/Senate Confirmed Inspector General of the Community Services Administration (CSA), the independent federal agency responsible for administering anti-poverty programs through local community action agencies.
Her appointment in 1979 placed her at the center of a national effort to restore public trust in government through independent oversight. Ms. Freeman was nominated by President Carter in June 1979 and confirmed by the Senate in October 1979. In her hearing before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs on September 20, 1979, Ms. Freeman stated her mission with characteristic clarity:
The position of Inspector General of the Community Services Administration is one of great responsibility and challenge. We have an obligation to institute and maintain controls and safeguards to assure efficiency in management and operations at all levels. As Inspector General of the Community Services Administration, I will have a crucial and critical role in the restoration of public confidence in government [emphasis added]. I will endeavor to give attention to fraud prevention activities by taking advantage of audit and investigative resources operating in tandem. I am assured of the full cooperation of the Director and her staff.
Context on the agency she led is helpful to understand the significance of her leadership. The CSA was established in 1974 under the Community Services Act. It served as the successor to the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was created in 1964 under the Economic Opportunity Act to implement President Johnson’s War on Poverty. For nearly two decades, the agency drove the federal government’s community‑based anti‑poverty initiatives—until it was dissolved in 1981 under the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981. Its programs were transferred to the Community Services Block Grant program housed under the Department of Health and Human Services. The full history of the agency is captured in the fascinating “Mission Without Precedent”: The Rise and Fall of the Office of Economic Opportunity, 1964-1981.
She, along with the other fourteen incumbent Inspectors General, were fired by President Reagan on Inauguration Day in 1981. (Five of the fifteen were reappointed to IG positions.)
Freeman’s federal service was part of a long and distinguished career.
After graduating from Howard University Law School in 1947, Ms. Freeman started her own firm the following year. In 1954, Freeman became lead attorney for the landmark NAACP case Davis et al. v. the St. Louis Housing Authority, which ended legal racial discrimination in public housing in St. Louis, Missouri. Her success in that case led to work as a staff attorney for the St. Louis Land Clearance and Housing Authorities as associate counsel and later as general counsel of the St. Louis Housing Authority.
In 1964, President Johnson nominated Ms. Freeman as the first woman to serve as a Commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and she was reappointed by 3 more Presidents. She served until 1979, spending 15 years at the heart of the nation’s civil rights policymaking before becoming Inspector General.
After serving as Inspector General, Ms. Freeman joined 15 other former high federal officials to form a bipartisan Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, a group committed to ending racial discrimination and developing remedies for the harmful effects of discrimination.
Her leadership extended beyond government. Ms. Freeman served as a Trustee, Chair and member of various Boards, including Howard University, the National Council on the Aging, Inc, and the Girl Scouts of America. She also served as the National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. She is the recipient of various honorary doctorate degrees, many awards, and was inducted into the National Bar Association’s Hall of Fame in 1990.
In 2003, she published her memoir entitled A Song of Faith and Hope: The Life of Frankie Muse Freeman and in 2015, at age of 99, President Obama appointed her to serve as a member of the Commission on Presidential Scholars. In 2017, shortly before her death at 101 in January 2018, a statute of Ms. Freeman was erected in downtown St. Louis in Kiener Plaza.