Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty

by Annelise Orleck

Overview

The inspiration for the PBS documentary premiering March 2023

The story of the revolutionary Black women welfare organizers of Las Vegas who spearheaded an evergreen, radical revisioning of American economic justice

This timely reissue tells the little-known story of a pioneering group of Black mothers who built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs.

In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck brings into focus the hidden figures of a trailblazing movement who proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty, providing job training, libraries, medical access, daycare centers and housing to the poor in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s. Orleck introduces Ruby Duncan, a sharecropper turned White House advisor who led the charge on the long war on poverty waged against the poor Black mothers of Las Vegas. According to Ruby, “Poor women must dream their highest dreams and never stop,” and she, with the help of Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, did exactly that.

A vivid retelling of an overlooked American history, Orleck follows the Black women who went on to lead a revolutionary movement against welfare injustice. These women eventually founded Operation Life, one of the first women-led community organizations in the nation and one of the country’s most successful antipoverty programs. They went on to gain national traction and garnered the respect of key political figures such as Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.

With a new prologue and epilogue that explore the race and labor movements paramount to the political climate of 2021, Orleck masterfully blends together history, social analysis, and personal storytelling in a story that is as enraging as it is empowering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807007976
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Pages:	392
Sales rank:	687,217
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.97(h) x 1.07(d)

About the Author

Annelise Orleck is a professor at Dartmouth College where she focuses on history, American radicalism, race studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She is the author of several books, including: Rethinking American Women’s Activism; Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty; and Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the U.S. She lives in Thetford Center, Vermont.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the 2023 Edition
Introduction

CHAPTER 1
From the Cotton Fields to the Desert Sands:
Living and Leaving the Delta Life

CHAPTER 2
“The Mississippi of the West”:
Jim Crow in Sin City

CHAPTER 3
“Bad Luck and Lousy People”:
Black Single Mothers and the War on Poverty

CHAPTER 4
“If It Wasn’t for You, I’d Have Shoes for My Children”:
Welfare Rights Come to Las Vegas

CHAPTER 5
Storming Caesars Palace:
Poverty and Power in Las Vegas

CHAPTER 6
Dragging Nevada Kicking and Screaming into the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 7
“We Can Do It and Do It Better”:
Revitalizing a Community from the Bottom Up

CHAPTER 8
Can Welfare Mothers Do Community Economic Development?:
The Triumphs and Trials of Operation Life

CHAPTER 9
Maybe We Were Fighting History:
The Legacy of Operation Life

Epilogue—A New Era for Las Vegas
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully written . . . Annelise Orleck reminds us that those at the grassroots ‘can do it and do it better.’”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

“What a lovely book of hope! With grace and with rigor, Orleck presents the War on Poverty from the field and the vantage point of poor mothers.”
—Nell Irvin Painter, author of Sojourner Truth

“A poignant counterpoint to the current culture of cynicism and despair. After reading Storming Caesars Palace, you’ll want to get up and do something to make the world a better place.”
—Hagar Scher, Chicago Tribune

“This book has become the revolutionary ‘Bible’ for Las Vegas organizers. I’m so proud to stand on the shoulders of Ruby, Alversa, Mary, Emma, Rosie, and Essie.”
—Minister Vance “Stretch” Sanders, director of Stretching for Change Foundation

“This amazing story is like a truly great novel, the revelation of a world unknown.”
—Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“This stunning book gives new meaning to the notion of history from the bottom up.”
—Alice Kessler-Harris, author of In Pursuit of Equity

From the Publisher

An up-close-and-personal account of nine strong-minded African-American women who became welfare-rights activists in Las Vegas. Historian Orleck (History and Women's and Gender Studies/Dartmouth) spent some 12 years following the determined women who in 1972 founded Operation Life, an antipoverty program that challenged the stereotype of welfare mothers as apolitical or apathetic. She recounts the early years of her subjects as the poorest of the poor in the cotton fields of the South, their postwar migration to Nevada in search of a better life for their children and their experiences at the bottom of the economic and social ladder in segregated Las Vegas. In the 1960s came Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, but its focus was on jobs for men, reports Orleck, and mothers receiving welfare found the system onerous and humiliating. Having learned through the Hotel and Culinary Workers Union the value of organizing to bring about change, they formed a welfare-rights group. After successfully fighting Nevada welfare cuts, the group of black mothers became active in the Democratic party and began lobbying, fund-raising and running for office. They turned to community development as well, in time building clinics, daycare centers and libraries in their rundown Westside neighborhood. Orleck's leading character is the powerful matriarch Ruby Duncan, who eventually advised Jimmy Carter on welfare and jobs programs, but she sees all the mothers of Operation Life as "poster women for a new model of welfare reform-from the bottom up." She argues that the history of Operation Life demonstrates "the rich potential of a poor women's movement for economic justice."A worthy history of the country's changingattitudes toward welfare and the various attempts to eradicate poverty.

Kirkus Reviews