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

11. Women, Welfare, and Political Mobilization

CHAPTER ELEVEN Women, Welfare, and Political Mobilization We got the governor scared. He wants to tell us we ought to express ourselves through the vote, but I told him our children are starving and they can’t vote. —Shirley Lampton, New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization, August 1969 Generalizing about men and women is dangerous business. In the late 1960s, however, a few trends in local black activism do stand out. In particular , organizations and/or activities that focused on black capitalism or political mobilization (e.g., negotiating construction contracts, running for public office) were almost always led by men. As advocates of black capitalism, they often saw political power and economic growth as inseparable , frequently using muscular tactics to attract support from white business leaders and governmental bureaucrats. Women were certainly interested in those issues and quite willing to be aggressive. Dorothy Mae Taylor, Oretha Castle Haley, Lavada Jefferson, and others pioneered War on Poverty organizing efforts. In 1971, Taylor was elected to the state legislature and became a local political legend, and Haley pushed vigorously to redraw voting districts in the city. Plenty of other women were involved in political organizations and made key contributions.1 Nevertheless , women antipoverty organizers tended to concentrate on matters of family and safety. Two local woman-led groups offer examples of how women organized to help their families and men. Comprised 224 mostly of poor black women, the New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization (NOWRO)—and its sister organization, the New Orleans Tenants Organization (NOTO)—took on bureaucratic white men and their segregationist institutions. Driven by compassion and a sense of civic duty, the New Orleans League of Women Voters (comprised mostly of affluent white women) settled into a poor area of town and encouraged the political rise of neighborhood black men. To achieve any progress, these two disparate groups of women had to clash intensely with some men, while cultivating support from others. The Welfare Rights Movement The New Orleans Welfare Rights Organization was started in the late 1960s, and it likely had more direct impact on the lives of the poor than any other local group. A small group of black, female welfare recipients led NOWRO, and they were helped by attorneys from the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation (NOLAC), a few community organizers, and occasional representatives from the National Welfare Rights Organization . These women were not trained social theorists demanding entitlements . They were mothers trying to feed their children and pay the rent on their public housing apartments. They became social activists to prevent welfare benefits from declining, not to expand the welfare rolls and to redefine the social and economic rights of citizenship. Eartha St. Ann, Shirley Lampton, Audrey Delair, Clementine Brumfield, Monica Hunter, and others took on a massive state bureaucracy well-known for making brutal cuts in welfare relief. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Louisiana’s Department of Public Welfare created a series of welfare crises when it systematically reduced benefits in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC was known as Aid to Dependent Children or ADC until 1962 amendments). It was that action of Louisiana bureaucrats and segregationists, not the oft-blamed “outside agitators,” that radicalized the local welfare rights movement. Although the coalition supporting NOWRO was small and much less powerful than its opponents, its members lobbied and litigated their way to modest successes in preserving AFDC benefits and in publicizing the plight of welfare recipients. Women, Welfare, Political Mobilization 225 The fight over AFDC was critical in sorting out the role of race in the post–Jim Crow South. From the late 1960s until the end of the millennium , few words were as politically powerful or as racially coded as welfare. For many it represented things un-American—sloth, parasitism, unproductiveness, and self-limitation. The confrontations between the NOWRO and the Louisiana Department of Public Welfare tested the new political meanings of individualism, productivity, and civic contribution . Savvy white conservatives interpreted those concepts in ways that reinforced traditional racial stereotypes and preserved a politically potent psychology of exclusion; black activists and liberal leaders employed their own interpretations in their Great Society-linked search for inclusion and economic progress. There were many War on Poverty programs implemented in New Orleans because a wide variety of political leaders and business people were quite willing to use federally funded programs as deterrents to disorder...