Creek subsistence practices. Many Creeks became migrant or day laborers to make ends meet. They also took jobs in the lumber and turpentine industries. Jim Crow segregation and other forms of overt racism limited opportunities for economic advancement for group members. Because they had stayed behind and not removed with the main body of the Creek Nation after the 1830s, members of the Poarch Band received no federal aid or recognition of their indigenous status at the tribal level. In the first decades of the twentieth century, local governments established segregated schools for Creek Indian children in southwest Alabama. Because of Jim Crow segregation, Creek Indians were denied admittance to area businesses or forced to use segregated facilities in theaters and medical offices. In the 1930s, the Episcopal Church sent missionaries to aid the Creek community. They established a school and worked to secure federal aid for the people. During the Indian New Deal of the 1930s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, at the urging of the missionaries, sent an investigator to southern Alabama in 1938. Finding that the Poarch Band was clearly a surviving Creek enclave with a high degree of racial intermarriage with whites, the Bureau agent recommended educational aid for the community. The federal Indian Reorganization Act, the cornerstone of the Indian New Deal, required non-recognized groups that did not live on a federal reservation to prove at least one-half Indian blood to fall under the act. Because the investigator felt the Poarch Band would have difficulty proving its blood degree, he recommended not establishing a federal Indian reservation for the group. Because of federal funding shortages, no federal Indian aid was provided for the Poarch Band during the 1930s and early 1940s. The lack of federal aid resulted from the fact the Creek who remained in Alabama had to give up their tribal membership, and were considered United States and state citizens, as a condition of remaining. The people maintained their community ties and culture, living in Alabama as an identifiable, distinct community for the last two centuries. After World War II, Calvin McGhee, a descendant of Band founder Lynn McGhee, began organizing the Creeks of southern Alabama and northern Florida to pursue land claims and other rights denied them as indigenous Americans. Under McGhee, the group filed a lawsuit for equal education and won their case, several years before the landmark Brown v. Board of