Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. Also in the late 1940s, McGhee spearheaded an effort to file a lands claim case with the Indian Claims Commission. He formed a group that became the Creek Nation East of the Mississippi that pursued a case for compensation for lands lost by the Creeks in the nineteenth century. The group received a favorable judgment; members received modest sums beginning in 1972. Through the lands claims litigation, Bufford Rollins and Eddie Tullis emerged as leaders of the Poarch Creek community. Along with Calvin McGhee, they took part in major events of the Indian renaissance of the Southeast in the 1960s and early 1970s. Calvin McGhee attended the landmark Chicago Indian Conference of 1961, an event that galvanized unrecognized tribes to pursue their rights as indigenous peoples. McGhee was among the delegation that presented the Conference's "Declaration of Indian Purpose" to President John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1961. The Conference, along with other pan-Indian activism, prompted Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, to establish Indian programs outside the Bureau of Indian Affairs as part of his War on Poverty after 1963. Poarch Creeks secured federal grants during this era. They established federal job training, Headstart, and Department of Education Title IV Indian Education programs for area Creeks. The Band pursued cultural revival efforts as well. In 1971, it created the annual Thanksgiving powwow that proved central to Creek and other pan-Indian cultural revival efforts. The group also worked to formalize its government structures. Growing out of the Indian Claims Commission petitioner, the Creeks East of the Mississippi, in the first years of the 1970s McGhee, Tullis, and Rollins established the modern Poarch Band of Creek Indians government centered near Poarch, Alabama. After the death of Calvin McGhee in the early 1970s, Eddie Tullis was elected as McGhee's hand-picked successor. The Band joined the National Congress of American Indians and was active in pan-tribal eastern Indian organizations at the time. With a federal Administration for Native Americans grant, the Band secured funding to research and to write a petition for federal tribal recognition during the 1970s. With the help of anthropologist Tony Paredes, the Band utilized federal land records, censuses, court records, and school documents to prove they were a surviving Creek enclave, eligible for federal tribal status under the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Federal Acknowledgment Process regulations created in 1978. The Band was successful