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

“Parent Power”: Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty

ADINA BACK Parent Power” Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty Anyone in New York’s City’s South Bronx in the late 1960s would have found it hard to miss the “United Bronx Parents” sign at 791 Prospect Avenue. Stretching across the building’s facade, the large sign hinted at a complex and until now mostly hidden history of life, politics, and economics in one of America’s poorest urban communities. This history turns on the desires and aspirations of South Bronx families and the political activities they undertook to try to bring their children closer to achieving the dream of equal access to quality education. This history also illuminates the reach of the War on Poverty and the ways that populations very much out of the sight and the thoughts of Lyndon Baines Johnson and his planners were touched and transformed by community action. A close examination would show that the sign pointed to the role of the federal and local governments in helping these families organize. The third line of the sign read, “For Good Education in Our Community.” That wording is noteworthy. The sign’s creators were not using the language of integration, desegregation , decentralization, or community control. This struggle for educational equality was driven not by a particular strategy but by a general imperative —good education in our community. The sign explained clearly who funded the United Bronx Parents (ubp). Its primary sponsor was the federal Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo), the clearinghouse for President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. The organization also noted support from New York’s corporate and philanthropic sectors through the Urban Coalition, which was a public-private partnership of the kind that animated much community organizing even during the official War on Poverty years. This sort of mix of funds “Parent Power” [185] sustained community organizing in New York and scores of other American cities long after the oeo and its successor, the Community Services Administration , had passed into history. In its heyday, ubp operated six satellite centers, trained thousands of parents to advocate for their children in their local schools, organized summer lunch programs that served more than 150,000 children a day throughout New York City, offered direct services, and provided technical services to parent advocacy groups across the country. In all of these efforts, ubp used War on Poverty funds to wage a battle against a school system that shortchanged the city’s poor children. The group’s organizers were Puerto Rican mothers who embodied the ideal of community action, convincing thousands of poor parents that they had the right and the ability to take control of and improve their children’s education. ubp challenged not only inferior schools in one underserved community but also the mind-set of New York City Board of Education officials, who labeled that community’s children as victims of an impoverished culture that did not value education. The angry, articulate Puerto Rican mothers of ubp still challenge us, breaking down a panoply of myths and misconceptions about both the War on Poverty and the movement in northern cities for equal educational opportunities for children of all backgrounds. The Spanish organization name at the top of the sign, Padres Unidos del Bronx, provided a visible reminder that the movement for educational equality in many urban areas around the country was not exclusively an African American struggle. ubp was a grassroots organization staffed and driven by Puerto Rican parents, but its members were not exclusively Puerto Rican or exclusively of any one race. And a sign over the front door bore the image of two clasped hands, one light, one dark, announcing to visitors that this movement was multiracial. Leaning out the window above the organization’s sign, visitors often saw a woman with a big hat. Described by some in her community both as brilliant and gorgeous, Evelina López Antonetty had founded the ubp in 1965, leading a group of parents in the takeover of a city-owned South Bronx building intended for demolition. That building, located at 791 Prospect Avenue, became the ubp headquarters. Contrary to the popular political critique of the War on Poverty as essentially a failure, the story of the ubp offers powerful evidence that grassroots communities effectively used antipoverty funding to empower parents. The ubp battled [186] Back not only to improve education in the South Bronx...