New Orleans after the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society

8. Making Groceries

CHAPTER EIGHT Making Groceries We are sure that no civic minded individual or public official could be so short sighted not to raise the $65,000 needed to impliment [sic] this plan. —Frank Meydrich, Louisiana Supermarket Association, 1967 They came for groceries. In August 1969, a reported three hundred welfare recipients, most of whom were female African Americans, made their way over land and water to the New Orleans Civic Center complex to collect on an offer of free food and shoes. At least, that is how the day started. The rest of the story is a bit cloudy, but, after a short while, the congregants realized that the promises of bread and footwear were, at best, a mistake or, at worst, a malicious hoax. The August heat and humidity intensified. Some grew surly. In the end, the event turned into what some analysts might characterize as a modern bread riot, a 1960s expression of ancient politics of desperation. In downtown New Orleans, protestors smashed windows and rushed the building that housed state government offices, making it to the third floor before being repulsed. Outside, a typical late-summer Louisiana thunderstorm helped to scatter the remaining crowd and defuse a potentially serious incident. In all, the police carted off three women, and workers cleaned up. Later in the day, the New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization (NOWRO) handed out thirty-five bags of groceries to compensate the food-seekers for their troubles.1 165 The people who had come for free food frequently had a hard time “making groceries,” a French-derived term to describe shopping for food.2 Besides having little money, low-income black citizens were caught between clean, well-stocked “white” grocery stores that were usually too far away and too hostile and ghetto markets that often charged exorbitantly for sub-par goods. By August 1969, however, the burden of making groceries was becoming slightly less onerous for eligible poor families. Six months earlier, the city had begun participating in the Food Stamp program run by the United States Department of Agriculture. In those six months, participation had grown to almost 38,000 people. The downtown disturbance demonstrated, however, that the program was no panacea. During the six years it took to fully establish New Orleans’s Food Stamp program, the program worked modestly to help reduce hunger—or food insecurity as some now define it—and bolster a fledgling regional liberal coalition.3 In the early 1970s, low-income families in New Orleans did not find themselves seated—metaphorically or literally—with gentry at the city’s famous Creole restaurants like Antoine’s, Arnaud’s, or Gallatoire’s, but they did find themselves able to bargain for more food at the local checkout counter. The August incident was, at one level, about bread, shoes, and the limitations of African American consumption. At a much broader political level, these low-income women were trying to find out where they stood in the post–Jim Crow South, to test revised meanings of freedom in a supposedly desegregated public world. The story of how New Orleans’s Food Stamp program developed is in part a story of how the American welfare state rewarded the people who controlled it at the local level. If small government advocates were in control locally—typically the case in Louisiana if policies were targeted to black citizens—the welfare state reaffirmed existing power relationships. If control was in the hands of motivated progressives who wanted to redistribute power and distribute goods and services to marginalized citizens, the welfare state could empower alienated constituencies. The New Orleans Food Stamp program developed in a convoluted, hesitating, and occasionally bizarre fashion, but it left racial liberals solidly in control of the agenda. From the outset the local program was a response to black assertiveness. Radicalized, 166 War on Poverty poor black women provided the pressure that led to its founding, and once in operation a black director administered it, black-led neighborhood councils oversaw it, and over forty black workers, primarily women from impoverished target-area neighborhoods, staffed it. Black target areas housed the program’s four offices. Compared to New Orleans almost ten years earlier—when the city had ground to a halt over four little black girls going to first grade at two white schools—the transformation was startling. Locally, the Food Stamp program served a largely black...