A Public Charity: Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis, 1929-2002

III. Rediscovering Poverty, Redefining Community: Religion, the Civil Rights Movement, and the War on Poverty

III REDISCOVERING POVERTY, REDEFINING COMMUNITY: RELIGION, THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, AND THE WAR ON POVERTY In the summer of , the executive committee of Community Action Against Poverty (CAAP) decided to establish Indianapolis’s first federally funded neighborhood center (called community action agencies in most cities) at St. Rita’s Catholic Church, an African American church located in Martindale, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In the days that followed, the news media described how St. Rita’s was a good choice to house what became known as the Martindale Area Citizens Service (MACS), because the parish had already demonstrated a strong commitment to the city’s underprivileged, offering a wide array of social services from emergency aid to day nursery care. When Faye Williams, the church’s most active parishioner, agreed to lead the new neighborhood center , it seemed that St. Rita’s was ready to fight Indianapolis’s War on Poverty.1 Notwithstanding the joy generated at the opening of the neighborhood center at St. Rita’s, conflicts raged for control of the War on Poverty and over the battles its warriors should fight. In Indianapolis and in cities across the nation, conflicts became particularly intense surrounding this federal initiative that included an assortment of loosely affiliated programs with competing missions. For example, the War on Poverty funded Head Start (preschool educa-   A Public Charity tion) and Manpower (employment training), both of which used education to fight poverty on an individual basis. However, other programs, such as the Community Action Programs (which funded the neighborhood centers) and the Legal Services Organization (LSO), were based in part on the assumption that poverty should be attacked by empowering the poor to challenge and reform the political structures which had left so many behind. These more innovative programs marked a significant departure in the history of social welfare, raising important questions about what specific rights and opportunities were needed to create a truly democratic society. The War on Poverty also provoked conflicts over the meaning and practice of local control. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal agency that oversaw the War on Poverty, sought to include the poor on the local level not merely as program recipients but as program administrators, as mandated through the ‘‘maximum feasible participation’’ clause in the federal legislation. In practice, the ‘‘maximum feasible participation’’ clause was supposed to ensure that each city that received federal funds would allow poor people to sit on the local poverty boards responsible for developing and overseeing programs. Across the nation the poor took this opportunity to challenge the paternalistic attitudes of traditional social welfare providers. Poor people argued that social welfare programs should challenge class and racial inequalities and expand the rights of citizenship. This put them on a collision course with traditional social welfare providers and conservative politicians who hoped to use the War on Poverty and the rhetoric of local control to further their own interests and monopoly over social welfare.2 In Indianapolis, African Americans quickly emerged as the most vocal participants in the debates surrounding the War on Poverty, as they sought to use this new initiative as a means to challenge a painful history of inequality. Constituting  percent of the city’s population, African Americans had long expressed frustration with discrimination in Indianapolis.3 In the s, most African Americans lived in one of two sections of the city: Martindale on the east  Rediscovering Poverty, Redefining Community side and the Indiana Avenue corridor just northwest of downtown, where most black businesses were located and the city’s only public housing project stood. Poor whites with roots in the Appalachian south populated neighborhoods south of downtown. Affluent whites, people with cultural roots in the North rather than the South, resided north of th Street, the boundary between Indianapolis and its northern suburbs. African Americans were, quite literally, sandwiched between these two distinct communities, and the forms of segregation they faced reflected the mix of northern and southern values expressed in the geographic layout of the city. Although African Americans in Indianapolis did not face the elaborate segregation laws that ruled in the South, discrimination and segregation nonetheless defined their daily life, determining where they worked, lived, and went to school. Businesses openly discriminated in their hiring practices, with the result that in  the medium income for the black population was $,, approximately  percent less than the overall city average of $,. The black unemployment...