New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society

5. Making Better and Happier Citizens

CHAPTER FIVE Making Better and Happier Citizens Until the citizens in the neighborhood are better and happier citizens, we cannot have a better state or nation or world. —Kingsley House, New Orleans, May 1965 While community action was helping to build structures for black political inclusion after Jim Crow, an equally important question was being worked out at an intellectual level: Why should black residents be included as full citizens? The answer, judging from the ideas of local progressives , was that alienated and segregated people reduced productivity , constrained consumption, and threatened tranquility.1 To discourage disorder and expand the economy, local progressives pushed for black psychological transformation and civic assimilation, focusing arguments for inclusion on improving the way black citizens learned, worked, purchased , and, most important, believed in themselves. Self-esteem and self-realization took on key economic and political functions. As the administrators of Kingsley House explained, “Until the citizens in the neighborhood are better and happier citizens, we cannot have a better state or nation or world.”2 Sister Kathleen M. Hensgen, a Head Start administrator in Louisiana, explained the economic and psychological value of her program to an audience of business leaders. “In 1967,” she acknowledged, “there is a dream to spend $1.7 million to help people find themselves and to be somebody.” Great Society money would help people find “an 104 identity within themselves that they had never possessed before” and help them “take their place” in society.3 In the aftermath of the Voting Rights Act, local citizens did not have to pass tests to register to vote, but they still had to fulfill plenty of other requirements if they wanted to take their place at the mythical American table. In the local dialogue about those requirements , one theme seemed to gain widespread acceptance: One did not merely receive full citizenship, but one earned it by being a stable, productive contributor to the economy and the society. Viewed in retrospect, the process of racial inclusion involved applying psychological solutions to political problems. The objective common to each of the early War on Poverty programs was to transform the identity of the poor. Great Society advocates looked first to the individual in trying to overcome what were ultimately the institutional legacies of segregation—including low wages, union discrimination, inadequate city services, ineffective public schools, discriminatory credit practices, an almost exclusively white and wealthy corporate culture, restricted access to higher learning and skills development, and racialized housing opportunities . During the middle 1960s, many reformers saw that the best way to remake the ghetto was from the inside out, one American at a time. At a time when southerners were trying to figure out how they were going to live without Jim Crow, the War on Poverty was a grand experiment in psychological policymaking and civic redefinition. The experiment was so grand because so many thought the problem of alienation was so deep. “The poor are not like everyone else,” wrote Michael Harrington, a socialist intellectual whose book The Other America refocused attention on American poverty. “They are a different kind of people. They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class looks upon.” The U.S. Labor Department’s August 1965 Moynihan Report, named after principal author Daniel Patrick Moynihan, contended that the poor, especially the black poor, were caught in a “tangle of pathology” and blamed much of that tangling on the disintegration of the black family. Critics excoriated Moynihan for blaming the victim and for misguidedly blaming the black family, but in retrospect, many of the report’s assumptions were not out of the mainstream and parroted thinking about poverty by theorists and Making Better and Happier Citizens 105 by people on the street.4 Reverend Morris A. Edwards, a black Baptist minister from New Orleans’s Desire area, added a variation of that sentiment . The poor “can climb the ladder,” he predicted. “They can be like other people.”5 Similarly, a community action-sponsored group of teens in the Desire area, the Students for Human Advancement and Community (SHAC), explained that “lack of one’s identity usually results in a person not adequately knowing his role in our society which can further lead to an inability to relate to the American way of life.”6 As Jim Crow was torn down, the local War on Poverty attempted to make the black poor more...