Lobbying for Welfare in a Deep South State Legislature in the 1970s

On March 4, 1976, Georgia Poverty Rights Organization (GPRO) director Frances Freeborn Pauley sat alone in the gallery of the Georgia Capitol, watching the state's lower chamber take the final vote on the fiscal year 1977 appropriations bill. It had been an emotional General Assembly, with many of Georgia's representatives vigorously opposed to increasing benefits for families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Indeed, as the last sticking point in the appropriations bill—the most important legislation that lawmakers confronted each year—the AFDC debate had prolonged that year's General Assembly. Doubting the work ethic and honesty of Georgia's welfare recipients were conservative legislators, whose rhetoric during the session ran hostile. At the other end of the spectrum, the GPRO, other welfare rights organizers, and members of the nascent Georgia Legislative Black Caucus considered the bill's welfare proposals to be racist and punitive. But on March 4, the GPRO and its allies won that session's battle: the Georgia legislature eliminated a $32 cap on average monthly welfare payments, which opened up the opportunity for AFDC grant increases. Despite conservative opposition to welfare programs, a pervasive antiwelfare culture, tight budgets, and a racially charged environment, Georgia's poor could claim a victory.¹

The Georgia Poverty Rights Organization, a liberal interest group that lobbied the state's elected leaders in behalf of Georgia's poor, was formed in the mid-1970s to fill a gap in the state's antipoverty and welfare rights movements. Direct action alone had not brought about substantive AFDC increases, and professional lobbying promised to amplify traditional protest tactics and translate the desires of poor families and their allies into law. Georgia's activists certainly had committed to direct action. Like states across the nation, Georgia boasted a number of welfare rights organizations, groups that had utilized protest politics to increase transparency in welfare operations, to demand professional treatment from caseworkers, and to defend means-tested entitlement programs. But antipoverty advocates had made little headway in influencing state policy making related to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (popularly referred to as welfare), a program in which states were allowed substantial latitude in setting enrollment qualifications. As it stood, Georgia and other states in the Deep South paid out some of the lowest AFDC grants in the nation (Table 1), and in 1974 Georgia's average monthly AFDC grant met only 70.2 percent of the state's standard of need, defined as the cost of providing a basic level of "subsistence and care compatible with decency and health."² To be sure, direct-action campaigns had been successful in improving welfare services. Clients finally had access to welfare manuals, and administrative offices had become more responsive to client needs.³ But in 1975, state-level policies resulted in grant cuts, and a newly installed $32 ceiling on AFDC allocations signaled that legislators had no plans to address inflation's impact on families' monthly grants, much less to raise grants to meet 100 percent of Georgia's standard of need. Indeed, by limiting AFDC spending to a monthly average of $32 per recipient, legislators established in law that they would only commit resources sufficient to draw federal matching funds. With such a cap in place, Georgia's poor would likely never reach the state's own standard of need. Welfare grants would simply make families less poor.

Georgia legislators implemented the $32 ceiling as federal legislators, led by southern Democrats, rolled back means-tested entitlement programs and continued to erect a workfare state. Such workfare policies, which included the Work Incentive Program (1967), the Talmadge amendments (1971), Supplemental Security Income (1972), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (1975), were intended to support those who worked but still lived below the poverty line and those who were unable to work. Importantly, and despite years of political effort by the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and its local affiliates, such legislation did not recognize mothering as work.⁴