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

3. Building Community Action

CHAPTER THREE Building Community Action What happens to a community that is economically deprived, where housing is deplorable, education is scarce, streets are mud-holes and yards are garbage pits—what do people do? . . . Do they wait for a miracle or a hand-out; or do they wake up and live? —Central City Areascope, April 1968 Community action was supposed to empower the supposedly powerless. One of the drafters of the Economic Opportunity Act, William B. Cannon , intended it to be “a method of organizing local political action,” not just a means of repackaging social services. Adam Yarmolinsky, one of the chief architects of the poverty legislation and a speechwriter for Johnson ’s War on Poverty message, believed that community action was to be “partly a means of ensuring black participation in the south.” Jack T. Conway , a former labor leader who headed up the national Community Action Program for the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in 1964 and 1965, claimed that “a big part” of community organization was to encourage the political mobilization of black southerners. In New Orleans, War on Poverty organizers wanted to encourage the “promotion of untapped leadership” and wanted community action to turn the poor into “positive social forces.”1 Local community action improved social services, but its most lasting legacy came from the mobilization of progressive constituencies . 59 President Lyndon B. Johnson apparently had a narrow understanding of community action and later became irritated when it did not resemble the New Deal’s National Youth Administration program that he had administered as a twenty-six-year-old in Texas. His secretly recorded telephone calls reveal that he did not want community action to challenge local politicians or to fund nonprofit agencies. Instead, he generally favored community action as a way for local governments to sponsor projects that could provide jobs, especially for unemployed black youth. To him, community action projects would pay young men to “work for the library or sweep the floors or work in the shrubs or pick the rocks.” In particular, he hoped it could “take a bunch of these young, strapping boys out of these damn rioting squads” and “put them to work.” Offering a slightly different interpretation, a local New Orleans activist wanted community action to inspire ghetto residents to “wake up and live.”2 Community action gave power and money to local leaders desperate for money and power. From December 1964 to early 1968, organizers expanded a neighborhood leadership core that had been roused by the civil rights movement. Leading efforts on the streets was a wide variety of professionals, activists, and common citizens.3 Organizers used federal policy to bring more power, more services, more money, and better living conditions to the target areas, particularly for children. They articulated visions of community and civic duty, drawing from traditional cultural values , and appealing to Christian symbolism, a populist-infused Americanism , and a devotion to place. They also appealed to shame, duty, outrage, and hope, implementing what TCA officials described as a “walking and talking” strategy in bars, schools, churches, anywhere people gathered. By 1967, black assertiveness—and what organizers called “community unrest”—had grown and been cultivated by organizers, many of whom used confrontational tactics taught by the legendary activist Saul Alinsky. Coupled with increased political sway from the Voting Rights Act, that unrest forced well-meaning white progressives to cede control over community action to a new generation of black leaders.4 To shape the newest meanings of freedom in the modern South, these committed activists had to seek answers to questions about feeding the hungry and caring for those on the margins. What services mattered most 60 War on Poverty to families? What could improve streets, drainage, utilities, water, sewerage , sanitation, and housing stock? What could force action from public institutions? What new institutions were needed, and how should existing ones be improved? The most frequent answer began with hands-on control over governing institutions. Black activists wanted the power to change the rules governing who could parade, who could run for office, who could influence influential boards and commissions, and who could get government contracts. At a deeper level, they also wanted to affect who could complain and be heard, who could talk back to the police, and who could sit and shop wherever they wanted. What started out as a warm-hearted exercise in civic uplift...