Abstract
The welfare rights movement and the people who joined it are paradigmatic of those who have often been left out of civil rights history.1 Studying the South and North, scholars have begun to challenge the familiar narrative of civil rights by elaborating on the class bases of activist politics, the gender dynamics within leading movement groups, and their ideological and strategic complexity.2 We have begun to reconceptualize the term “civil rights” to include economic redistribution and macroeconomic planning, among other issues that have often been written out of the boundaries of movement history.3 By widening our lens to include a greater range of political activity, we have illuminated the artificial distinctions that have shaped much writing on post-1945 social movements. These include distinctions between civil rights and economic rights, between the South and North, and between a supposedly innocent early stage of movement work (in the 1950s and early 1960s) and a disruptive and ultimately tragic later stage.4
This whole society is run on credit, especially for the rich man. So why can’t we have it. The poor need it more than the rich.
—Etta Horn, Chair, NWRO Committee on Ways and Means
Give us Credit for Being American.
—NWRO slogan
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Welfare rights has not been left out of the literature on modern black women’s history or the history of poverty policy. For the former, see Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W W Norton, 1999), esp. 223–242;
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985);
Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Press, 1984), 312–13, 326. For the latter,
see Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 106–108,
and James Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–1980 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 153, 180, 195.
More recent scholarship that both expands the range of political activity covered and sheds new light on the black civil rights movement in the South includes: Jennifer Frost, An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2001);
Gail Williams O’Brien, The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War Two South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (UNC), 2000);
Pete Daniels, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2000);
Timothy Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1999);
Nancy Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (New York: Routledge, 1998);
Nell Irvin Painter, The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: The Life and Times of a Black Radical (New York: W. W Norton, 1994);
James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage Press, 1994);
Robin Kelley, “Congested Terrain: Resistance on Public Transportation,” and “Birmingham’s Untouchables” in his Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 55–100;
John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1994);
Charles Payne, Yve Got the Light of Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
James R. Ralph, Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993);
Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1990);
and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, with David Garrow, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).
For correctives, see Charles Hamilton and Dona Cooper Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987),
and Thomas F. Jackson, “Beyond Civil Rights: African-American Political Thought and Urban Poverty, 1960–1973” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1995).
Such contrasts have appeared in a range of journalistic, first-person, and scholarly accounts. See, for examples, Vincent Cannato, The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York (New York: Basic Books, 2001), esp. 189–227;
Thomas Edsall, with Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992);
Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991);
Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990);
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1987);
Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1984).
Such a contrast is suggested by the chronological and thematic boundaries of Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988)
and is implicit in the sense of tragedy that informs August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975).
Felicia Kornbluh, “A Right to Welfare? Poor Women, Professionals, and Poverty Programs, 1935–1975” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2000), 1–34.
On these boycotts, see St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), 293–296; Sleeper, Closest of Strangers, 48–50.
For a historical overview of gender and consumption, see Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
For theoretical treatments of consumption as work that women perform, see Laura Balbo, “Crazy Quilts: Rethinking the Welfare State Debate from a Woman’s Point of View,” in Women and the State, Anne Showstock Sassoon, ed. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 45–71,
and Batya Weinbaum and Amy Bridges, “The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism, Zillah Eisenstein, ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 190–205.
See, for examples, Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 68–70; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 22–23. On the problematic and political claim of African American women to “ladyhood” at the turn of the twentieth century,
see Kevin Gaines, “Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality, 1885–1941,” American Historical Review 201:2 (April 1997): 378–387;
Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1996);
Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Giddings, When and Where I Enter, 49, 178;
Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 147–148.
David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families (New York: The Free Press, 1967).
Other important studies include Federal Trade Commission, “Economic Report on Instalment Credit and Retail Sales Practices of District of Columbia Retailers,” excerpted in Consumerism: Search for the Consumer Interest, David Aaker and George Day, eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1971), 374–381,
and Eric Schnapper, “Consumer Legislation and the Poor,” Yale Law Journal 76 (1967): 745–792.
Ibid., 37, 41. Of course, high levels of consumption were not unique to Puerto Rican and African American migrants to U.S. cities. For one telling comparison, see Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 142–148.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage Press, 1992—originally published in 1967), 18. For further discussion of Black Power and the colonial analogy, see Katz, The Undeserving Poor, 55–57. For theories of colonialism from the political left of the late 1960s,
see Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967).
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: Quill/Morrow, 1984—originally published in 1967), 94–95.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 38.
Ibid., 116. His increasing emphasis on consumer practices was part of a larger economic turn in King’s thinking. Like NWRO members, King in 1967 argued that it was imperative either to create full employment or to ensure all citizens adequate income. “We have left the realm of constitutional rights,” he wrote, “and we are entering the area of human rights” (ibid., 130). For evidence from other civil rights leaders, see Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 103, 172, 255, 269; Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 187, 234, 262.
On postwar gender relations and consumption, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 162–182.
Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz, biographers of NWRO Executive Director George Wiley, grant Jones, an African American welfare recipient, exclusive credit for the credit card campaign. Jones had organized previous campaigns to meet the needs of low-income consumers of color. These included successful challenges of the Philadelphia health department’s practice of ignoring the quality of food sold in grocery stores in all-black neighborhoods, and of the telephone company’s routine practice of charging higher deposit fees for telephone service to low-income people than they charged to the wealthy. Kotz and Kotz, A Passion for Equality: George A. Wiley and the Movement (New York: W W Norton, 1977), 235–236. Tim Sampson remembered the VISTA volunteers being involved in the origins of the campaign (Sampson telephone interview, February 12, 1996).
Also see discussion of the Philadelphia credit campaign in Larry R. Jackson and William A. Johnson, Protest by the Poor: The Welfare Rights Movement in New York City (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and the Rand Corporation, 1974), 41. Roxanne Jones was later elected to the Pennsylvania State House, where she served until her death in 1996.
On Brooklyn, see Jacqueline Pope, Biting the Hand That Feeds Them: Organizing Women on Welfare at the Grass Roots Level (New York: Praeger Press, 1989), 105–110. On New York City as a whole, see Isidore Barmash, “3 Big Stores Agree on Extending Credit to Relief Recipients,” New York Times, July 23,1969, 1; Jackson and Johnson, Protest by the Poor, 41.
For a record of lawyers’ efforts to encode income discrimination in constitutional doctrine, see Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law (Mineola, N.Y.: The Foundation Press, 1978), 1098–1136;
Aryeh Neier, Only Judgment: The Limits of Litigation in Social Change (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), 127–140;
and Martha Davis, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960–1973 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). For efforts to theorize income discrimination, and the concomitant public obligation to provide subsistence,
see Frank Michelman, “The Supreme Court 1968 Term—Forward: On Protecting the Poor Through the Fourteenth Amendment,” Harvard Law Review 83:7 (1969): 7–59;
A. Delafield Smith, The Right to Life (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1955).
Coupons for consumer goods would have facilitated the kind of benefit-based organizing that Tim Sampson learned from Fred Ross of the United Farm Workers. For a critique of this kind of organizing, see Lawrence Neil Bailis, Bread or Justice: Grassroots Organizing in the Welfare Rights Movement (Boston, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2003 Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, with Matthew Countryman
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kornbluh, F. (2003). Black Buying Power: Welfare Rights, Consumerism, and Northern Protest. In: Theoharis, J., Woodard, K. (eds) Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8250-6_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-8250-6_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-312-29468-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8250-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)