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

Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up

ANNELISE ORLECK Introduction The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up On a blistering Las Vegas day in 1972, a desolate, dangerous corner of the city’s black West Side came to life. Sweating, skinny teens carried load after load of garbage out of an abandoned hotel while their mothers, arms laden with cleaning supplies, set to work making the long-abandoned interior habitable again. Over the next few months, poor African American women and men armed with hammers and saws and carrying two-by-fours and rolls of wallpaper transformed a crumbling shell dating to the days of segregation into a thriving community and social service center. Long an eyesore, a symbol of the flight of capital and of the government’s lack of interest in the poor, the old Cove Hotel would soon become home to one of the nation’s most successful free pediatric clinics, a medical and nutrition center for pregnant and nursing mothers, free breakfast and lunch programs , community anticrime projects, a food stamp distribution office, a day care center, parenting courses, a community newspaper, and a public swimming pool. All of these programs were funded at least in part by government antipoverty dollars and were run by the poor themselves. The women who created the Operation Life center soon opened their neighborhood’s first library and performance center. They mounted voter registration drives; attended county, state, and national political party conventions; and ran electoral candidates who called this desperately poor neighborhood home. A sign hanging over the doorway to the clinic summed up this local movement’s efforts and ethos: “In the Poverty Community, Of the Poverty Community, For the Poverty Community.” [2] Orleck That spirit—the fierce, proud energy with which a group of poor families reclaimed and revitalized a long-impoverished community—was ubiquitous between 1964 and 1980, the era that President Lyndon Baines Johnson ushered in on January 8, 1964, when he declared America’s War on Poverty. That initiative galvanized poor people across the United States. It bubbled up from community meetings in coal-mining hollows and among councils of elders on Indian reservations. It animated late-night fireside discussions in the camps where Mexican migrant workers lived. This book captures the spirit that animated the War on Poverty from the bottom up. It is a story of how the poorest of the poor, despite daunting obstacles, transformed themselves into effective political actors who insisted on being heard. These antipoverty activities swept up large numbers of African Americans, building on the accomplishments and the disappointments of the civil rights movement. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, with its call for “maximum feasible participation” by the poor, grew out of the mass civil rights mobilizations in the 1950s and early 1960s that, with blood and sacrifice, had won basic political rights for African Americans across the South. With more than half of all black Americans still living in poverty, waging a struggle for economic justice was the logical next step. In an age of intensifying racial nationalism, the soaring rhetoric of a president who promised to end poverty in our time raised the hopes of poor black city- and country-dwellers, inspired and ignited by visions of community control and economic self-sufficiency. African Americans responded with clear social blueprints for revitalizing their communities as well as with a willingness to perform the hard work necessary to make it happen. They were not alone. Poor people across the nation mobilized in the name of participatory democracy and greater community control: rural whites in Appalachia , Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers in Wisconsin, and Chinese immigrants in overcrowded Chinatowns from New York to California. This book chronicles the largely untold histories of these community crusades: how people built enduring social programs based on lbj’s vision of a greater, more just society. The master legislator from Texas was not the sort of president to present his policies in muted shades of gray. “I have called for a national war on poverty,” he announced from the porch of a house inhabited by an out-of-work white coal miner in Inez, Kentucky, on April 24, 1964. “Our objective: Total victory.” During that winter and spring, President Johnson traveled the country drumming up support for his antipoverty crusade. He consciously sought to appeal Introduction [3] to white voters. A White House–produced film of his...