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| ISBN-13: | 9780520965645 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/11/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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Mainstreaming Black Power
By Tom Adam Davies
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Tom Adam DaviesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96564-5
CHAPTER 1
"A Mouthful of Civil Rights and an Empty Belly"
THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE FIGHT FOR RACIAL EQUALITY
In early June 1967, War on Poverty officials in Washington approved a $238,429 award to the Community Alert Patrol (CATPL), a black community group in South Central Los Angeles. Established in the aftermath of the infamous Watts rebellion in mid-August 1965, CATPL's fifteen-member team monitored the conduct of local law enforcement in an effort to combat police brutality, an issue that concerned local people and that had sparked the Watts riots. Unarmed, group members — many of whom were local youths with criminal records — were explicitly forbidden to intervene in police affairs directly. The group aimed to improve community-police relations, they explained, by acting as a "buffer" between the two. CATPL hoped to use War on Poverty funds to expand its operations by purchasing a garage and relevant equipment. This, in turn, would allow the group to provide local black youths with the chance to learn automobile repair trade skills, acquire valuable on-the-job experience, and earn an income servicing CATPL's patrol vehicles.
Once news of the award broke, surprised local officials and politicians were quick to criticize the decision. Republican senator George Murphy expressed disbelief that neither Mayor Sam Yorty nor the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had been notified of the application's approval. State governor and leading conservative Ronald Reagan implored Sargent Shriver, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) — the federal agency responsible for the War on Poverty — to block CATPL funding. Outraged at the lack of OEO consultation, Mayor Yorty complained directly to President Lyndon Johnson, lamenting the prospect of federal tax funds being used "to finance direct interference with the vital operations of our nationally heralded police force"— an objection echoed by LAPD chief Thomas Reddin. Many city voters agreed, and some saw CATPL as a dangerous experiment that undermined established authority. As one local citizen explained in a letter to Governor Reagan: "In order to keep peace with the Negro community the police officer will be forced to abide by the Community Alert Patrol — and the Community Alert Patrol will demand more and more power! Our whole system begins to crumble because of a few."
The furor over the OEO's decision had the desired effect. 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. This episode highlights a number of this book's key themes. First, it reveals black communities' commitment to using the War on Poverty and other public policies to combat racial discrimination and urban inequality. Second, it exemplifies the kind of political controversy generated by the War on Poverty. In Los Angeles, and in cities nationwide, conservative opponents identified the antipoverty program as another ill-considered liberal social policy devised by distant, interventionist Washington bureaucrats that wasted taxpayers' money. Last, the episode demonstrated the strength and success of white mainstream opposition to black activism and to the scope of public policy where it threatened established power arrangements or white privilege and authority. 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.
As this chapter demonstrates, the War on Poverty enabled challenges to established urban power arrangements that met this pattern of decisive white mainstream political resistance time and again. Ultimately, white mainstream politicians and groups, and the pressures they created, played the definitive role in dictating the boundaries of public policy and the potential for change.
The debates and controversy generated by the War on Poverty have done much to shape its reputation. At the time, opponents typically portrayed the War on Poverty as a costly failure that embodied the excesses of big government and paternalistic welfare state liberalism. In the decades since, ascendant conservatives have reinforced and popularized this powerful and persuasive critique of the antipoverty program as a misguided attempt to mitigate economic inequality. Only during the past decade have historians begun to undermine this dominant conservative narrative and its core assumptions by reassessing the War on Poverty's impact on inequality and on American society more broadly.
Scholars such as Peter Edelman have argued that, far from being a failure, the War on Poverty was remarkably successful given its meager funding. 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. Despite conservatives' best efforts to roll back the antipoverty program, Edelman explains, it has in fact proved highly resilient. Many War on Poverty programs and subagencies (albeit in different guises) remain in operation today, and they "continue to make a substantial difference in the quality of life of millions of Americans."
The significance of the War on Poverty, however, extends far beyond the question of its success or failure. As Edelman suggests, "the War on Poverty energized thousands upon thousands of people across the country and served as a stepping stone into politics, continuing activism, civic participation, and economic success." This chapter establishes how the War on Poverty made a vital and lasting impression on black community activism, mainstream engagement with Black Power, white voters' support for redistributive liberalism, and future landscapes of reform. In doing so, it sets out and explores a number of important ideas and themes that stretch across the book.
First, it outlines black enthusiasm for the War on Poverty and explores its relationship to historical shifts in conceptions of American citizenship shaped first by the New Deal welfare state and then by the apotheosis of a Cold War domestic consumer culture. Promising to help break the shackles of poverty, African Americans responded energetically to President Johnson's antipoverty legislation. Where the New Deal and postwar public policy had served white (and especially white male) interests primarily, African Americans claimed ownership of the War on Poverty. By engaging with the political question of how to meet African Americans' desire for economic citizenship, the War on Poverty established the political framework that the alternative policies discussed in chapter 2 challenged.
Second, the chapter identifies the War on Poverty's roots in urban minority social problems, shedding light on both how and why the antipoverty program became so thoroughly entwined with the black freedom struggle in ghetto communities across the nation. It helps to explain the War on Poverty's limitations by exploring the sometimes conflicting core assumptions of Cold War liberalism that guided War on Poverty planners and other administration policy makers — assumptions and limitations that, as chapter 2 reveals, vitally shaped alternative public policies put forward to meet African American aspirations for economic empowerment and urban improvement.
Attention is then turned to how the War on Poverty helped transform the American political landscape. While President Johnson hoped the antipoverty program could improve the lives of millions of Americans, it engendered challenges to the nation's political equilibrium that he neither expected nor desired. These challenges were often bound up with poor black and other minority communities' battles for racial and economic justice. As one of the bill's supporters on Capitol Hill, Democratic representative Sam Gibbons from Florida, warned: "If you're scared what poor people will do when they get motivated and interested in their government then you ought to be against this legislation because it is going to bring them into the mainstream." By bringing the poor into the realm of politics, the War on Poverty precipitated a clash between established city power brokers and poor people that reverberated from local politics to the corridors of Congress. Conflict over the War on Poverty not only highlighted the desire for greater self-determination among inner-city blacks but also fueled racial identity politics among minority groups, illuminating the growing vitality of nationalism in the nation's ghettos. As later chapters demonstrate, the War on Poverty attracted and channeled nationalist organizing at the local level, making it a key site of Black Power's development in communities nationwide.
Finally, while the War on Poverty created a vibrant, diverse, and multiracial coalition of antipoverty supporters — including a wide range of religious, labor, civil rights, Black Power, and liberal interest groups — it also widened the fissures between conservatives and liberals, and eroded white working and lower-middle-class support for the Democratic Party. The War on Poverty fueled important debates about government, race and public policy, and economic justice, taxes, and the welfare state that played a vital role in the development of Black Power and in the late-1960s' rightward shift in, and subsequent realignment of, American democracy. As later chapters also demonstrate, these debates helped constrain political possibilities under black mayors such as Tom Bradley in Los Angeles and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta through the 1970s and beyond.
PUBLIC POLICY, ECONOMIC CITIZENSHIP, AND THE BLACK FREEDOM STRUGGLE
To understand how the War on Poverty became so entwined with the urban black freedom struggle, and the influential role it played in driving divisive political debate and shaping future policy reforms, it is necessary to (1) explore its roots in both contemporary crises and the New Deal liberal tradition on which it built; (2) outline the longer history of African American demands for economic citizenship and the ways those demands were shaped by previous public policy; and finally — where we now begin — (3) trace the unusual trajectory of the War on Poverty's emergence onto the nation's political agenda.
Whereas President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal three decades earlier had been a response to the Great Depression and the economic crisis and mass poverty it produced, the War on Poverty instead emerged during a period of unparalleled national abundance. The postwar economic boom produced an American society in the 1950s and early 1960s characterized by increasing domestic affluence, the inexorable rise of mass consumerism, and suburbanization. However, this increasing material comfort was not shared by all. By 1960 over forty million Americans — 22 percent of the population — lived a very different life, below the poverty line. 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."
Harrington's work, in particular, proved highly influential in Washington, impressing President John F. Kennedy and helping to establish poverty as a target for federal action. In late 1963, with the presidential election nearly a year away, Kennedy's advisers began to draw up possible domestic programs for the president's reelection campaign and took the first steps in planning what later became the War on Poverty. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963, however, saw the embryonic proposal pass on to the enthusiastic stewardship of his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who ordered the program's swift development. Soon after, on January 8, 1964, President Johnson used his first State of the Union address to tell the nation that his administration was declaring "unconditional war on poverty."
The War on Poverty's rapid rise was, generally speaking, most unusual. Unlike most social legislation, it was not the result of organized or publicpressure. Rather, it resulted primarily from a convergence of concerned professional academic elites and the activist inclinations of federal government liberals. In light of its relatively unheralded arrival, some conservative opponents saw the War on Poverty as proof positive of the creeping socialism of interventionist and interfering liberal policy makers intent on subverting the traditional values and foundations of American society. As the decade progressed, this kind of sentiment resonated with increasing numbers of white American voters who began to question the moral and political dimensions of liberal social spending.
For many African Americans, however, the arrival of antipoverty legislation was especially welcome. Statistical analysis confirmed the unmistakable intersection between race and poverty. 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.
In the early 1960s, from a total black population of just under 19 million, 3.6 million black men were unemployed, and 40 percent of those with jobs worked in low-skilled and low-paid industrial labor or service positions, effectively trapped there by insufficient education and the prejudice of employers and unions. Attending underfunded and underperforming schools, the vast majority of black youths were denied the necessary standard of education required to compete for skilled jobs in an economy witnessing rapid technological advancement. Worse still, those who found employment would more than likely be paid less than their white counterparts for doing the same job. African Americans who did attain four years of college education still faced earning less over their lifetimes than a white person with far less schooling. When President Johnson declared that the War on Poverty would produce better education and more job training and employment opportunities, then, his words understandably resonated among African Americans.
When first debated on Capitol Hill at the same time as the Civil Rights Bill, antipoverty legislation struck many black leaders as a much needed answer to the racial and economic problems besetting the nation's urban centers. 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." Failure to enact antipoverty legislation, he explained, could have dire consequences. "The alternatives are very clear — either help Negroes to become constructive, useful citizens or they will become destructive, disgruntled dependents." In agreement was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who celebrated the War on Poverty and civil rights legislation as "twins" and as complementary parts of the nation's attack on racial discrimination.
President Johnson did much to encourage African Americans' strong identification with the War on Poverty. In announcing the impending antipoverty bill, he explicitly identified the need to tackle black poverty. Shortly after a meeting between Johnson and civil rights establishment leaders, James Farmer, executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), told reporters that the president had "made it very clear that he feels the fight on poverty and illiteracy is a vital part of the fight against discrimination." African Americans across the nation shared Johnson's vision and seized upon the War on Poverty as a way to advance their struggle for greater self-determination, economic empowerment, and a better standard of living.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mainstreaming Black Power by Tom Adam Davies. Copyright © 2017 Tom Adam Davies. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsAbbreviations
Introduction
1 • “A Mouthful of Civil Rights and an Empty Belly”: The War on Poverty and the Fight for Racial Equality
2 • Community Development Corporations, Black Capitalism, and the Mainstreaming of Black Power
3 • Black Power and Battles over Education
4 • Black Mayors and Black Progress: The Limits of Black Political Power
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index