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Nine. After LBJ: Republican Ascendance and Grassroots Antipoverty Activism
- University of Texas Press
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N I N e In 1968 Ralph Abernathy, the new chair of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), chose to go ahead with a march on Washington that Martin Luther King Jr. had been planning when he was murdered. King called it the Poor People’s Campaign. He hoped the event would be a show of unity as people of all races gathered in the capital to dramatize the plight of the poor. King wanted to make clear to the nation that the demands of economic injustice compelled the civil rights movement to continue. In the summer after King’s death, some seven thousand protesters gathered on the national mall in Washington and built a camp of tents they called Resurrection City. The march drew very little attention at the time and had no impact on national economic policies. There was just too much going on in 1968 for the Poor People’s Campaign to capture public attention.1 King’s assassination and the riots that followed, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the Tet offensive , and Lyndon Johnson’s abdication combined to make Americans weary. Even people sympathetic to King when he came to Washington in 1963 had grown tired of marches. Bertrand Harding, who took over the OEO when Shriver left, wondered whether the Poor People’s Campaign accomplished anything: I just don’t know, and it may be decades before we’re really able to judge whether on balance it was a very intelligent thing to do or a very stupid thing to do. I’m very ambivalent about it. I can see it in one perspective where it did dramatize. I can see it in another where after lbJ Republican Ascendance and Grassroots Antipoverty Activism Republican Ascendance and Grassroots Activism 1 it sickened people who were otherwise supportive, and threw people across the line who were sort of in a middle-of-the-road position.2 Harding’s ambivalence about the Poor People’s Campaign reflects the national disposition toward turning the civil rights movement into a campaign for economic justice for the poor. Few Texans viewed “the poor” as a group needing a campaign. In terms of group identification, race trumped class. White Texans declined to participate in Johnson’s War on Poverty. Even if they recognized their poverty, low-income white Texans showed little interest in taking advantage of OEO programs because they associated the Great Society with the demands of nonwhites. The growing electorate of affluent or middle-class whites in the state, even those Harding described as “supportive” or “middle-of-the-road” in relation to civil rights or the War on Poverty, opposed the OEO due to its association with racial militancy and urban violence. Many African American and Mexican American Texans, under the influence of militant nationalist movements, determined that racial solidarity offered the best way out of poverty. The groups competed with each other over OEO funds and sought to exclude whites from programs. With scant support among white Texans and often bitter competition among nonwhite groups, politicians had little reason to defend the OEO. Indeed, attacking the OEO promised more political benefit. During the 1968 campaign Richard Nixon attacked the OEO as a prime example of the failure of the Great Society. Once in office, however, Nixon did not abolish the OEO. The new president appointed Rumsfeld, then a young congressman, to oversee a gradual “de-escalation” of the War on Poverty. Rumsfeld worked to both weaken the OEO and make it more consistent with the political philosophy of the Nixon administration.The new director transformed the OEO from an “activist agency” to an “initiating agency,” meaning Rumsfeld abandoned the ideal of participation of the poor in creating programs.3 In Texas, Rumsfeld’s transformation limited the political activism of OEO programs. CAAs and VISTA projects became providers of services designed in Washington with little input from the poor themselves. Rumsfeld also streamlined the Job Corps, closing centers in Texas and opening less expensive, nonresident local training programs. Nixon’s cutbacks and general opposition to Great Society initiatives compelled administrators to keep OEO programs at a low profile in the state as the 1970s began. Opposition to the OEO also illustrates the growth of conservatism in the state. The economy of Texas, like the rest of the Southwest, was integrating [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:04 GMT) 1 Freedom Is Not Enough into the Sunbelt in the sixties. As the state’s population grew and...