Freedom Is Not Enough: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Texas

Five. Making Maximum Participation Feasible: Community Action in Urban Texas

F I v e Recent scholarship on the War on Poverty focuses on the significance of community action and other OEO programs to the political mobilization of marginalized groups at the grassroots level. African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and women in general, already activated politically for the civil rights revolution, saw the OEO as a means to include and advance the cause of economic justice on their agendas. Civil rights activists took the OEO’s principle of maximum feasible participation seriously—for them it was feasible for the poor to participate by running the programs in their communities .1 This represents a departure from the earliest scholarship on the War on Poverty, which tended to depict confrontations over OEO funds between local civil rights groups and city hall, often controlled by local Democratic machines, as a liability for LBJ and the overall Great Society agenda. There was little or no acknowledgment that in many cases community action was working according to its design. Just about everyone in OEO assumed that local governments would run the poverty programs and recruit the poor to work in them to achieve maximum feasible participation.2 Shriver and his team never seemed to grasp that empowering the poor was the whole point of community action theory. Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky and other social activists had designed community action to politically organize the poor to give them a louder, more unified voice in their battles with intransigent mayors and city councils.3 The young academics who introduced the concept experimentally in the Kennedy administration ’s juvenile delinquency programs hoped that community action making maimum Participation Feasible Community Action in Urban Texas   Freedom Is Not Enough had the potential to forge “the disinherited into a political instrument capable of compelling the reconstruction of communities.”4 LBJ liked the idea of the poor participating in their own betterment. The president probably envisioned noble unemployed men rolling up their sleeves and swinging pick axes like something out of the New Deal. He certainly did not anticipate that men and women from poor neighborhoods, people whom Johnson considered friendly constituents, would march into planning meetings demanding federal money from city governments controlled by the Democratic Party.5 As CAP developed, advocates of the poor embraced this original concept of community action and maximum feasible participation, much to the surprise of the administration and often to the annoyance of local politicians. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley likened maximum feasible participation to “telling the fellow who cleans up to be the city editor of a newspaper.”6 In a 1965 letter to Bill Moyers, Daley angrily asked, “What the hell are you people doing? Does the President know he’s giving money to subversives? To poor people that aren’t a part of the organization?”7 In June of that year the U.S. Conference of Mayors sent a resolution to LBJ condemning CAP for “fostering class struggle” in American cities.8 To put an end to such criticism, Congress eliminated the troubling maximum feasible participation guideline from the renewal legislation for the EOA for 1966. The amended act fixed the amount of poor participation at one-third of the membership of local CAA policy-making boards.9 This retreat from maximum feasible participation stoked the anger of local leadership in low-income communities. In April 1966 Shriver was booed off the stage of the first annual convention of the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty, an activist group led by former Kennedy antipoverty warrior Richard Boone, for abandoning maximum feasible participation.10 Under attack by the poor and by the mayors, Shriver attempted to resign as OEO director in order to salvage his own political future.11 Johnson refused the resignation but privately scolded the director for allowing so many “kooks and sociologists” to infiltrate his program.12 The new scholarship on the War on Poverty makes it clear that Shriver and local party kingpins like Daley were not simply dealing with the handiwork of “kooks and sociologists.” Instead, historians on the local level have illustrated the extent to which those representing the poor embraced the concept. By retreating from maximum feasible participation, the OEO began the gradual dismantling of the Community Action Program because it was functioning the way it was supposed to. In cities across Texas, CAP increased local activism on behalf of the poor. Making Maximum Participation Feasible   Black and Mexican American civil rights activists, church leaders, and...