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

Gender, Civil Rights Activism, and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles

ROBERT BAUMAN Gender, Civil Rights Activism, and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles Three women of color, Opal Jones, Francisca Flores, and Graciela Olivarez, made signal contributions to the War on Poverty in Los Angeles. In the process, these women challenged the racial and gender status quo in that city’s African American and Mexican American activist communities, in Los Angeles city government, and in the administration of the federal War on Poverty. Jones, Olivarez, and Flores had long and consistent connections to civil rights and social service organizations, giving them experience that informed their leadership of community organizations during the War on Poverty. Tracing these women’s involvement with the federally funded Community Action Program illustrates the ways in which the War on Poverty was linked to and became an extension of important social movements of the era, particularly the black freedom struggle, the Chicano movement, and working-class feminism. Such an examination also provides a clearer understanding of how activists such as Flores and Jones, with deep roots both in their communities and in civil rights movements, used the structure of the War on Poverty, particularly its mantra of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, to provide more opportunity for and advance the causes of African American women and Chicanas. This exploration of the intersection between civil rights and antipoverty work expands and challenges our understanding of both histories in three distinct ways. First, it emphasizes the significant role women played in civil rights/ empowerment movements and in the War on Poverty in Los Angeles as well as the ways in which women’s activism forced male colleagues to rethink their assumptions both about women’s capacity as leaders and about the gendered nature of the poverty program. Second, Jones’s, Flores’s, and Olivarez’s stories [210] Bauman highlight challenges, tensions, cooperation, and conflict between Chicanos and African Americans as they attempted to create interracial coalitions through the War on Poverty. The War on Poverty in Los Angeles, like the city itself, was a multiracial enterprise. This view offers an important corrective to the popular imagery and historiography of the poverty program that has created a misconception that community action occurred only in racially homogeneous communities . Finally, these determined, motivated women fashioned careers that challenge the traditional chronology of the War on Poverty as ending with Richard Nixon’s election as president. As these women’s careers illustrate, a “long war on poverty” continued to evolve and grow after the demise of the Office of Economic Opportunity (oeo). Flores, Jones, and Olivarez challenged the racial and gendered status quo by changing the definition of women’s roles in the War on Poverty. Its architects originally focused almost exclusively on men, omitting from the programs professional employment opportunities and antipoverty programs geared for women. In 1967, when the oeo announced a conference on women in the War on Poverty, the idea likely was generated by women directly involved in state and local oeo programs who were dissatisfied with the male-centered focus of oeo’s job training programs and with women’s general share in the antipoverty effort. Olivarez, who in the late 1960s headed Arizona’s oeo, had badgered agency officials in Washington for some time to do something to increase opportunities for women in the War on Poverty. And when the conference was announced, she encouraged her longtime friend, Flores, to attend. But most oeo officials saw women involved only as an interest group lobbying for funding or as volunteers aiding the operation of programs. oeo director Sargent Shriver wrote to President Lyndon Baines Johnson that one purpose of the conference was “mobilizing the various women’s organizations for legislative backing.” Perhaps as a result of this view, most of the delegates came from mainstream, white-dominated women’s groups. Shriver and other oeo officials who spoke at the conference emphasized the large numbers of women who had volunteered in War on Poverty programs and encouraged women to continue to do so. Flores asked why she was one of the few conference attendees who represented organizations of women of color, even though they suffered disproportionately from poverty. She, Olivarez, and Jones challenged oeo’s limited vision by arguing that the agency should broaden its focus to include pathways for women to well-paid employment and programs geared specifically to serve women’s needs. The War on Poverty in Los Angeles [211] Race consciousness...