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8. Conclusions
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C h a p t e r 8 Conclusions Because people wouldn’t work for such low amounts of money, they were accused of being lazy—dependent on the government. In a real sense taking a job could put you further in poverty because you wouldn’t qualify for aid. People didn’t like living on public assistance. You know, they wanted to do something. An ablebodied man couldn’t get a job, so he had to abandon the family to be sure that they were able to survive. . . . These policies were antithetical to building family, to strengthening family. Then they turn around and accuse the family. —Bernard Lafayette, founding member of SNCC, former SCLC National Program Administrator, National Coordinator of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, interview with author, July 10, 2008 During the 1960s, local groups and affiliates of national civil rights organizations worked in African American communities throughout the South, and in northern cities, registering people to vote. Local workers for national organizations were consistently struck by the levels of poverty in these communities, and understood that one’s economic concerns interacted with one’s potential for political participation, making the latter less likely. Driven by these concerns, local organizations, and national staff working at the local level, pushed for a focus on economic equity by the civil rights movement.1 After Congress passed Johnson’s War on Poverty, many local organizations saw the program as an opportunity to have their anti-poverty efforts funded by the federal government. Once these local groups, including chapters of the NAACP, NUL, SNCC, and CORE, became Conclusions 159 involved with implementation of the War on Poverty, anti-poverty issues entered the national civil rights agenda. National offices, which had not recognized the growing importance of local anti-poverty efforts to the movement, were now behind the curve. The struggle to regain preeminence and relevance to the movement led national organizations, such as the NAACP and CORE, to prioritize anti-poverty policy. For the NUL and SNCC, groups that had been more consistently concerned with poverty issues, the War on Poverty was an opportunity to influence the civil rights agenda, and to solidify their positions within the civil rights issue niche. By the late 1960s, organizational competition within the civil rights issue niche had almost disappeared. The NAACP and NUL were concerned with maintaining themselves financially as other groups became inactive and disintegrated. These concerns, coupled with changes in the political environment, led both organizations to step away from advocacy for national, high-cost anti-poverty programs. In more recent history, both advocated on behalf of the poor when there was national attention devoted to the issue. Driven by their need to maintain their relevance, both groups sought to provide assistance to and advocacy on behalf of Katrina survivors. In this chapter, I return to the questions posed at the beginning of this project. How do interest groups choose their priorities? When do the poor gain representation? As I note in Chapter 7, organizational archives are not yet available concerning the welfare reform battle of the 1990s or the response to Hurricane Katrina. Therefore, when addressing the reasons groups represent low-income African Americans, I rely on my analysis of the 1960s and 1970s. My findings indicate that organizational decision-making cannot be understood by examining either internal or external factors in isolation. Because of differences in each organization’s structure, the NAACP, NUL, CORE, SNCC, and SCLC responded differently to organizational competition within their issue niche in their determination of priorities during the 1960s. By the early 1970s, changes in the external political environment drove the NAACP and NUL to reassess their attention to anti-poverty policy. Each organization’s financial status, tactics, and structure determined how it responded to changes in the external environment. Organizational decisions to represent the poor were sometimes strategic , sometimes based on an ideological commitment to represent the poor, and sometimes both. However, decisions were never purely ideological . Groups were always aware of strategy, and of their position within their issue niche, when determining their priorities. Even for SNCC, arguably the most ideologically driven group studied in this project , advocacy on behalf of the poor happened in part because of the group’s acknowledgment of its effect on other civil rights organizations’ [52.55.214.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:39 GMT) 160 Chapter 8 priorities. Ideology is certainly relevant to group strategy—SNCC’s rejection of the War on...