War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980

“Someday . . . the Colored and White Will Stand Together”: The War on Poverty, Black Power Politics, and Southern Women’s Interracial Alliances

CHRISTINA GREENE Someday . . . the Colored and White Will Stand Together” The War on Poverty, Black Power Politics, and Southern Women’s Interracial Alliances Few federal programs in the past four decades have been the target of as much vitriol and distortion as President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty. Critics on the right deride it as a glaring example of federal waste, fraud, and misguided handouts to the undeserving poor. Some on the left complain about the failure to eradicate poverty, while feminists castigate its focus on angry young men. Convinced that taxpayer money was fomenting social unrest, both Republicans and Democrats realized that the antipoverty program’s mobilization of the poor threatened powerful political machines and entrenched economic interests. In such southern locales as Atlanta, Memphis, and Sumter County, Alabama, white officials co-opted War on Poverty programs and refused to allow meaningful black participation, while in Las Vegas, Republican political operatives destroyed one of the most successful and remarkable antipoverty programs created and run by poor black women. Scholarly attention similarly has been both overly broad and excessively harsh in its assessment of Great Society programs. Utilizing a national perspective or focusing largely on northern cities, scholars generally and to some extent correctly dismiss the federal antipoverty initiative as a mere skirmish rather than all-out war. Some scholars castigate southern officials for their usual obstructionist hostility to federal intervention. Others dismiss as naive or arrogant what they see as top-down social engineering. [160] Greene Forty-five years later, however, the program deserves another look. While most of these critiques contain some kernel of truth, an examination of local efforts, especially those of southern neighborhood women in Durham, North Carolina, and elsewhere, yields some surprising discoveries. Although historians have examined interracial alliances among southerners, few have thought to look for such efforts in low-income southern neighborhoods where racial segregation as well as racial antagonism seemingly prevailed. The War on Poverty certainly eliminated neither poverty nor racism. But far from simply a failure or cynical ploy, the federal initiative—most notably the community action agencies (caas)—and its mandate for “maximum feasible participation” of the poor fostered a climate for creative community projects and interracial alliances among women in low-income neighborhoods. That the women failed to create the kind of multiracial poor people’s movement that some organizers had envisioned makes their efforts no less remarkable. Moreover , their achievements, limited though they were, challenge interpretations of community organizing and racial politics in the 1960s and 1970s in at least three important ways. First, two groups seemingly among the least likely to reach across the racial divide—low-income southern whites and blacks—did so at a time when Black Power politics and a virulent white backlash supposedly had eroded the possibility for such a coalition. Second, women’s interracial cooperation occurred in low-income neighborhoods, long considered sites of racial separation or racial hostility, especially after blacks who were displaced by urban renewal (or “Negro removal,” as skeptics termed it) “intruded” into formerly all-white areas. Finally, the women’s efforts complicate the gendered debate about service provision and antipoverty programs that presumably diverted mostly female recipients from engaging in more overtly political activities . This debate characterized not only Durham’s antipoverty programs but also national groups, including the National Welfare Rights Organization and Students for a Democratic Society’s Economic Recovery and Action Project. Male radicals in particular tended either to ignore women’s activities, especially those of poor women, or to view them as outside the realm of political activism. But as political theorist Martha Ackelsberg has observed, “Unless we begin to change our conceptual framework to incorporate a broader conception of politics, and of who can and does participate in it, much of the radical potential of actions that are already taking place will be lost—even to those who participate in them.” Indeed, official efforts to thwart women’s antipoverty activism not only in the South but across the country suggest that women’s “Colored and White Will Stand Together” [161] subsistence politics, which frequently displaced street demonstrations as the dominant form of black protest, constituted “political” activity, whether activists then or scholars since have recognized it as such. Women’s local antipoverty activism also pushes us to rethink the links among civil rights protest, the War on Poverty, and Black Power. The late 1960s have frequently been characterized...