Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945-1980

5. Building Bridges, Fighting Poverty, and Empowering Citizens

145 5 Building Bridges, Fighting Poverty, and Empowering Citizens In the mid-1960s, while the members of WECC were marching in support of an ordinance banning discrimination in housing, they also were organizing residents of public housing projects to demand garbage pickup and a traffic signal; hosting weekend-long arts festivals where blacks and whites could have fellowship while enjoying music, theater, and dance; and coordinating the fight against poverty in one of the poorest sections of the city. And WECC was not alone in engaging in this broad spectrum of action. LACRR, while sponsoring vigils of laypeople and clergy for open housing, also attempted to bridge the gap between whites and blacks by hosting discussion sessions on race relations. In addition, young men who came to town with SCLC to work for open housing legislation joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and worked with WECC to organize for the empowerment of the black community. Meanwhile, the NAACP led boycotts and negotiated for equal access to jobs for blacks while campaigning for improvement of the schools. In short, in the mid-1960s, civil rights advocates in Louisville fanned out into myriad actions around the issues of race and class in the community. Members of WECC articulated the concern underlying much of this work: the sense that Louisville and the broader civil rights movement were now at a crossroads. When it passed the open accommodations ordinance, the city had earned a victory, at least on paper, over the manifestation of racism most associated with the region: Jim Crow in public spaces. But it was now at a “perilous point” because it was developing the potentially explosive conditions that plagued the North. 146 Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South The effort to overcome what was considered that region’s primary race relations problem, segregation in housing, although it eventually resulted in a local ordinance against discrimination, in the meantime caused increased racial tension in the city and frustration among movement activists. The local conundrum reflected the national situation at mid-decade: despite civil rights legislation, ongoing racial inequality was creating a rise in discontent and leading to waves of violence in the “long hot summers” of 1964 and thereafter. As the end of legal Jim Crow left activists in both North and South with the task of fighting de facto segregation and institutionalized racism, the distinction between the regions’ racial problems began to blur. Now the question for civil rights advocates in Louisville, as across the country, was whether the passage of civil rights laws merely highlighted remaining inequalities less amenable to legislative solution or, more hopefully, marked the beginning of a concerted effort to achieve the “beloved community.” To nudge the answer toward the latter, in Louisville WECC activists and others simultaneously worked to empower west end citizens to fight the poor housing, lack of opportunity, and crumbling schools that buttressed continued inequality and to create relationships across race and class that would be the start of a truly interracial community. In language that had inspired civil rights activity in the city for at least a decade, they hoped that by doing so they would make the west end “a model for North and South.”1 Standing at the crossroads of the mid-1960s, Louisville activists understood the need to develop new strategies to accomplish those goals. Just as this period saw a lessening of the distinction between northern and southern racial problems, it also saw a melding of different approaches to confronting them. In the popular imagination, the civil rights era is often divided into two periods, with corresponding characteristic ways of acting and regional identification: the early southern mass movement of nonviolent direct action aimed at securing the end of discrimination through legislation, followed later in the decade by northern militants’ calling for community solidarity, pride, and self-determination. Historians have recently challenged this dichotomy, pointing out the overlap in the ideology, personnel, and even timing of these two supposedly separate phases of the freedom struggle. Incorporating the War on Poverty into the mix, scholars now emphasize the interconnections among these three important phenomena of the period.2 Louisville activists’ move in this period from older ideas Building Bridges, Fighting Poverty, and Empowering Citizens 147 about the nature of racial problems and tactics to new understandings and methods illustrates how such connections were made. The fight against economic discrimination became a War on Poverty...