Kindle Notes & Highlights
This book argues that, as much as the progress of middle-class and elite blacks from the mid-1960s through the 1970s resulted from a number of factors (not least of which was their own talent and industry), many of the opportunities they enjoyed (and capitalized on) were created as part of the broader political project that aimed to co-opt and nurture the Black Power impulse that this book charts in the nation’s inner cities.
Washington officials suspended award of the grant, advising CATPL they would support the group only on condition that it stop its police-monitoring activities. The grant was rubberstamped after CATPL reluctantly agreed.
Community Alert Patrol, Los Angeles
In this case, it was the authority of the LAPD—a vital organ and symbol of local white political control—that seemed at risk. Allowing CATPL members—some of whom were urban black youths with police records—to continue monitoring the police’s conduct at the taxpayers’ expense threatened an intolerable subversion of local power relations.
Indeed, by 1974, after ten years of antipoverty operations, the number of Americans estimated to be living below the poverty line had been halved. Moreover, the Johnson administration’s Great Society program—of which the War on Poverty was a vital part—helped better the lives of millions of Americans by providing improved education, housing, food, and medical care to communities where they were desperately lacking.
By 1960 over forty million Americans—22 percent of the population—lived a very different life, below the poverty line.11 They remained largely on the margins of the nation’s economy, political landscape, and wider public consciousness, until the publication of two books—economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society in 1958 and sociologist Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962—helped to scandalize the extent of America’s “poverty amidst plenty.”
Over 50 percent of all African American families lived below the government-defined poverty line ($3,000 or less annual income for a family of four) compared to just 20 percent of white families. In 1962 the average black family income was $3,023—barely above the poverty line—whereas the average white family’s was nearly double at $5,642.
Speaking at congressional hearings in April 1964, Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League (America’s largest racial progress and urban interest advocacy group) made it clear that civil rights legislation would not “solve the problem of poverty.” “We’re afraid,” he continued, “that we’ll end up with a mouthful of civil rights and an empty belly.”
As anticommunist crusaders attacked the New Deal liberal-labor–civil rights coalition in the late 1940s and 1950s, black leaders increasingly turned away from questions of poverty and economic disadvantage and instead prioritized less controversial targets and methods, such as legally challenging segregation and disfranchisement and securing formal legal equality.
The War on Poverty further undermined the Myrdalian model by stimulating ferment in black urban communities nationwide that made plain the national reach and structural nature of racial inequality. In the process, the antipoverty program played a vital part in an ongoing shift within the black freedom struggle: the drawing of focus away from the rural South to the problems of the urban North that led to the crystallization of the Black Power movement.
As O’Connor has explained, policy makers in Washington broadly accepted “culture of poverty” theories that implied the need for the reforming of attitudes and behavior rather than more substantial change. They therefore saw urban problems not as the result of institutional racial discrimination or capitalism but of natural and unstoppable socioeconomic forces that could be successfully managed, if not solved, by the state-sponsored application of technocratic and scientific expertise.
From the outset, then, an important contradiction lay at the heart of the War on Poverty: it possessed the radical potential for mobilizing the poor, but its fundamentally conservative economic and philosophical foundations would tightly circumscribe its ability to substantially reduce poverty.
Johnson endorsed Cold War liberals’ assumption that the American economy did not require structural change, and thus dismissed the idea of federal job creation programs. Johnson possessed an unshakeable faith in the nation’s free enterprise system and believed that the $11 billion tax cut his administration passed in February 1964 would stimulate economic growth, in turn creating more private-sector jobs. The War on Poverty would complement the tax cut by preparing the poor, through skills training, to take up those jobs.
Richard Cloward, MFY’s research director, argued that “City Hall doesn’t want powerful organizations built in the ghetto by Negroes and Puerto Ricans. It doesn’t want any ghetto in City Hall; it wants more City Hall in the ghetto.”
MFY - Mobilization for Youth, NYC
After years of antipoverty experimentation in the city, New York’s poor black communities understandably assumed the War on Poverty was intended for them. In a city where poor whites outnumbered poor blacks two to one, the pilot antipoverty agency, MFY, had been established in an area with a largely black and Puerto Rican population, and the next two set up in the years before 1964—HARYOU-ACT and Youth-In-Action (YIA)—were located, respectively, in Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, the city’s two largest black ghettoes.
Panracial class solidarity, then, was an exception, rather than the rule, in both New York and Los Angeles. The clear trend of racial identity politics in both cities’ antipoverty programs reflected the growing strength of nationalist ideologies in black and other minority communities. It also underlined the War on Poverty’s capacity for nurturing racial nationalism, something most clearly visible in the organizations examined in the following chapter. Lastly, racial conflict between minority groups over antipoverty jobs and resources further discredited the War on Poverty and lent weight to
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An African American himself, Knox’s intraracial criticism reveals that class tensions, and a clash of political cultures, could just as easily occur between established black middle-class and professional political elites and black poor citizens as it could between the black community and white officials.
By offering a platform for disadvantaged communities to assert and defend their rights, the War on Poverty became intertwined with other important movements within the broader antipoverty coalition. The most significant of these was the welfare rights movement.
By providing assistance only to female-headed households, the program effectively incentivized the father to leave the home, thereby destabilizing the traditional two-parent family structure in poor black communities nationwide, stigmatizing single mother–led black families and further dislocating AFDC recipients from the idealized vision of American citizenship and social organization.
As one black AFDC mother from Los Angeles explained to Sargent Shriver when he visited the city in August 1966: How much do you think the human mind and body can stand? [. . .] You think there is something nice about being on welfare and having a social worker come snooping under your bed, to see if you got a man there? It don’t leave no dignity. You know it would be real nice if some of you people could change yourselves and be poor for a while. You see what the poor people have to go through. Who wants welfare? Who wants to have someone look down their nose at you all the time to give you a
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While the Johnson administration had intended the War on Poverty to decrease welfare enrollment (a natural corollary to the training and employment of African American men in the nation’s ghettos), it was far more successful in vaulting a highly vocal, militant, female-led welfare rights movement to national prominence.
Writing in 1970, Mayor John Lindsay recognized this growing sentiment among white New Yorkers: In the last few years, governments at all levels have mounted a wide range of programs to aid the deprived. They have, in the main, been meager programs; they have in no sense represented the commitment of resources and energy we need—but they have been visible. Many governments, New York City’s included, have attempted to break through the decades of neglect and demonstrate to our most deprived citizens that government cares about them and it can respond to their grievances. And seeing this—seeing
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As historian Dan Carter has argued, although most northern whites ostensibly eschewed overtly segregationist politics, many nevertheless shared southerners’ “deep and visceral apprehensions” concerning African Americans, and rioting brought these fears to the surface. Urban rioting shattered the civil rights movement’s carefully sculpted media image of blacks as peaceful and nonviolent, stoking fear and feeding prejudice among whites everywhere.
For example, in May 1967, southern and northern conservatives in Congress combined to pass an amendment (by a vote of 232 to 171) discontinuing the Rent Supplement Program. Established in the Housing Act of 1965, this program specifically targeted tenants in public housing and new and rehabilitated Federal Housing Authority–financed accommodations (but not privately owned slum housing). The program had been described by one black poor advocacy group as “one of the very few which offer decent housing to the poor at rents more or less in keeping with their incomes.”
Accusing the federal government of conspiring to “spread rent supplement into middle-income suburbs and neighborhoods,” Fino dismissed the program as a “racial and economic balance sheet” that “rewards rioters and subsidizes spongers.” For Fino (who also strongly opposed the antipoverty program and busing), rent supplements were another example of liberals’ attempts to socially engineer the nation toward integration and redistribute whites’ hard-earned wealth to the undeserving inner-city minority poor.
Bronx Republican Paul Fino
Ever since the nation had been rocked by the Watts riots in August 1965, Kennedy had dedicated his efforts to seeking a solution to black inner-city poverty and urban decay. For Kennedy there was no greater single problem facing the nation. As he told a group of New York community leaders in late January 1966, “What is at stake is not just the fate of the Negro in America but the fate of all Americans, of the legacy of our past and the promise of our future.”
Bobby Kennedy
Restoration, as it came to be known, was the first incarnation of Kennedy’s community development corporation (CDC) blueprint, which he developed and articulated as the urban crisis deepened after Watts.
The CDC was a nonprofit, tax-exempt organizational model intended to address these limitations and help channel the creative energy of urban black communities into the revitalization of the nation’s ghettos. Kennedy’s vision for remedying urban poverty rested on the expansion of private enterprise in ghetto communities by inducing external businesses to relocate to the inner cities and by supporting entrepreneurship among local blacks. Capitalism (as an engine of urban regeneration and as a source of jobs, investment capital, and local taxes) was fundamental to Kennedy’s schema for inner-city
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Just as the Watts riots had spurred Kennedy into action, they also convinced the Ford Foundation that new approaches and greater effort were needed to eradicate inner-city deprivation and blight. Kennedy’s CDC blueprint for urban reform was eagerly taken up by the foundation, which, realizing the limitations of War on Poverty organizational models (which the foundation itself had played such an important role in producing), agreed that “efforts to deal with depressed areas must be comprehensive and long-term; social, physical, environmental, and economic redevelopment efforts are all
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During his campaign for the White House in 1968, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon offered a program for “black capitalism” that would direct federal support and contracts to existing black businesses as well as fostering the creation of new ones. On March 5, 1969, shortly after assuming his position in the White House, Nixon broadened its scope to include all minority groups by issuing an executive order establishing the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE).
On May 12, 1968, in the wake of SCLC leader Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder the previous month, PPC demonstrators arrived in Washington and set up an encampment, known as “Resurrection City,” on the National Mall to reassert their commitment to the fight for racial and economic justice.
Poor People's Campaign
Not only was the media broadly critical of the PPC, but, as Gerald McKnight has explained, the FBI conducted a “sleeves-rolled up campaign” with “extra firepower” against the PPC at the behest of “Capitol Hill lawmakers and responsible government officials.”
Across the United States, HOLC agents, in league with local property and financial interests, instituted an ostensibly qualitative assessment practice that subdivided cities into numerous communities. This process, called zoning, made the racial homogeneity of a community a primary factor in its grading, critically linking a neighborhood’s racial composition and its property values.
Home Owners Loan Cooperation, 1933, Roosevelt administration
Any area with a concentrated black population, however, was invariably classed as “D” grade and was colored red on HOLC maps, giving rise to the term “redlining.”
As David Freund has explained, New Deal federal housing policies created a “state-regulated and state-funded system of home finance” that not only encouraged but, in fact, “explicitly required appraisers and lenders to maintain and further promote residential segregation.”
As Craig Wilder has explained, for African Americans everywhere, the redlining of their communities had a number of pernicious consequences: it decreased neighborhood property values, made it virtually impossible for blacks to obtain affordable home finance, and effectively restricted their scope for residential mobility to other redlined neighborhoods. Furthermore, zoning spurred disinvestment from redlined areas as businesses, jobs, capital—and even municipal services—abandoned the inner cities, turning the nation’s ghettos into virtual economic wastelands.
Furthermore, the report concluded, redlining (which branded ghettos “high risk” investment areas) converged with exploitative commercial practices to ensure that “the low-income consumer is often forced to rely for credit and loans on loan sharks or unscrupulous merchants whose credit charges are often considerably higher than the legitimate financial institutions to which he is denied access.”15 These businesses were a source of considerable resentment in many ghettos and became primary targets of looting and destruction during the widespread urban rioting of the mid- to late 1960s.
Seeking to maximize profits, ghetto landlords habitually overcrowded their properties, often severely. For example, Atlanta’s black ghettos occupied only 20 percent of the city’s residential land but housed nearly 45 percent of its population.
The problems that social welfare programs targeted would persist if the structural disadvantages that helped produce those problems remained unchallenged.
As prominent Black Power advocate and Westminster YTEP recruiter Tommy Jacquette argued in mid-1967, “With all the talk and meetings, and the expensive antipoverty machinery, we’re right where we were two years ago. What the white people call improvement is nothing but tokenism. It’s like the patient is in danger of bleeding to death but all the Man can think of is to apply a Band-aid.”
However, as much as Kennedy’s developing political platform was a calculated effort to enhance his prospects for the presidency by expanding his support base among poor, minority, and white liberal voters, it also reflected a deep, genuine, and growing personal concern with the social and economic impact of poverty and racism in the United States.
By emphasizing the need for greater black self-determination and for the creation of jobs, economic opportunity, and black business ownership, Kennedy’s CDC blueprint was expressly intended to appeal to the demands of urban black communities and militant radicals.
“We must,” Kennedy asserted, “work to try to understand, to speak and touch across the gap, and not leave their voices of protest to echo unheard in the ghetto of our ignorance.” Their alienation, he warned, came from “a frustration so terrible, an energy and determination so great, that it must find constructive outlet or result in unknowable danger to us all.”
With all the pieces seemingly in place, Senator Kennedy finally announced the creation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation (R&R) and its sister organization, the Bedford-Stuyvesant Development and Services Corporation (D&S), at a CBCC convention on December 9, 1966, just over ten months after his first tour of Bed-Stuy. While R&R’s board was composed almost entirely of local blacks, the D&S board was made up of the high-profile whites Kennedy had recruited.
Local male opposition to female leadership not only provided a useful common ground for Kennedy and his staff to occupy in their efforts to sideline CBCC’s female leaders and cement a working relationship with local black militants, but was also entirely compatible with Kennedy’s paternalistic brand of liberalism.
While black capitalism operated in the hope that the growth of black business would result in the amelioration of ghetto communities, Kennedy’s CDC strategy specifically directed business toward, and stimulated, urban rehabilitation.
“At a popular level,” historian Michael Flamm explains, “‘law and order’ resonated both as a social ideal and a political slogan because it combined an understandable concern over the rising number of traditional crimes—robberies and rapes, muggings and murders—with an implicit and explicit unease about civil rights, civil liberties, urban riots, antiwar protests, moral values and drug use.”
The economic philosophy of Black Nationalism means that in every church, in every civic organization, in every fraternal order, it’s time for our people to become conscious of the importance of controlling the economy of our community. If we own the stores, if we operate the businesses, if we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we’re developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind. Once you gain control of your own economy, then you don’t have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business.
Malcom X
Reinvigorated during the Black Power era, this masculinist strand of black politics—which bore striking similarities to the business-oriented and socially conservative politics of mainstream white conservatives—fit with both Kennedy and Nixon’s strategies, which sought to reify, not challenge, existing gender hierarchies.
The answer to the welfare crisis is jobs, self-sufficiency, and family integrity; not a massive new extension of welfare; not a great new outpouring of guidance counselors to give the poor more advice. We need jobs, dignified employment at decent pay; the kind of employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to the country, and most important, to himself—“I helped to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures. I am a man.” [. . .] The first domestic task of any administration must be [. . .] to create jobs and put men to work.
Bobby Kennedy
While electioneering, Nixon had similarly endorsed the need for “black ownership [. . .] black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and yes, Black Power in the best, most constructive sense of that often misapplied term.”
