The War on Poverty and the Battle for Community Control

In that saddest and most turbulent of seasons, the long painful weeks between spring and summer 1968, the Lincoln Memorial was engulfed by a sea of tents and hastily constructed shanties. Caravans carrying African American, white Appalachian, Latino, and Native American activists descended on Washington, D.C. There they settled in to occupy what came to be known as "Resurrection City, USA."

They lived together for about six weeks, the symbolic beating heart of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, conceived in part by Martin Luther King Jr. then carried on after his death as a living memorial. Approximately 3,000 poor people occupied the most visible space in the capital, using it as a base to lobby, march, and protest. Like the bonus marchers who occupied Washington's Anacostia Flats in 1932 and like their political descendants in Occupy Wall Street, the denizens of Resurrection City did more than protest. They built energetic, democratic institutions for their newly forged community: a day care center, a cultural center, a People's University, a community kitchen, a newspaper (pp. 143-48). They were determined to show that they could care for the poor more effectively than the so-called experts; that, in the words of a group of welfare activists from Nevada, some of whom were among the crowds in Resurrection City: "We can do it and do it better."

Resurrection City can be seen as an outgrowth of the Civil Rights Movement, but it was equally a product of the hopes, frustrations, and massive outpouring of creative energies unleashed by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, with its call for "maximum feasible participation" by the poor in their own uplift. From the South Bronx to backwoods Kentucky, from the barrios of San Antonio to the multiracial ghettos of Los Angeles, and across Native American country from the Northwest to the Navajo nation and east to Mississippi, activists submitted proposals to the federal Office of Economic Opportunity for funds to help them open schools, clinics, and housing and food cooperatives. They sought to generate energy and renewal from the ground up. The very idea that the poor should participate in and help shape, if not drive, these new poverty programs was electrifying to many grass-roots activists.

That same idea was, of course, horrifying to other kinds of political leaders—mayors, city council members, and police captains, not to mention conservative Southern Democrats in Congress and rising Republicans in the Western states. They saw the mandate for community action as little more than government-funded subversion. Grumbling loudly, they launched local, state, and federal Red-hunting investigations of community activists who had received federal dollars. Few Communists were discovered through these hearings but many reached the same conclusion: the War on Poverty was little more than bleeding-heart liberal social engineers in D.C. stirring the pot of unrest in somebody else's backyard. With the help of friends in Congress, local power elites across the U.S. restored their own control over federal community-action dollars by 1967-68. (This was accomplished largely through the Green Amendments to the Economic Opportunity Act, giving local governments veto and administrative power over federally funded poverty projects.)

Nevertheless, the seeds had been thrown. The coalitions had been built. Community projects were underway and the impulse toward grass-roots institution-building had taken hold of many—from liberal reformers to homegrown revolutionaries. So, too, had a sense of anger at feeling betrayed. Hopes that material resources and power might actually be redistributed had been raised and dashed. Grass-roots activists began to wonder if maximum feasible participation was not simply a ploy to "co-opt" radical protest, to diffuse genuinely revolutionary energies.

Alyosha Goldstein's new book, Poverty In Common: The Politics of Community Action in the American Century, probes these contradictions as it traces the long history of community action as poverty policy. Rich...