The Revolution Stalled:The Southern War on Poverty and Civil Rights Movement

• In Event: Confronting Exclusion and Inequality: Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract

Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was the centerpiece of his conception of equality of opportunity. It combined education and employment training policies with the community action program requiring the “maximum feasible participation of the poor.” Johnson’s poverty planners envisioned the program as a way to distribute federal financial resources to local communities and allow those people on the receiving end to have some say about how the money was used. The architects of the program intentionally provided for the creation of private non-profit community action agencies that were not entirely under control of local politicians. They believed it was a way around the “Southern problem,” the anticipated attempt of white racists in the south to segregate the program and deny access to African Americans. Ironically, I argue it was the Office of Economic Opportunity’s (OEO) policies that undermined their aims in part. The fate of the War on Poverty in the deep south is germane to any analysis of the problems in extending democratization and resources to subjugated communities.
Using archival and quantitative data, this paper analyzes the gestation and implementation of the War on Poverty in 119 community action agencies in five deep south states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Arriving in the interregnum between the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the War on Poverty was at the center of conflict between white Southerners intent on maintaining white supremacy and African Americans battling to tear down Jim Crow and gain equal citizenship and equality of opportunity. The black struggle for representation and control in community action agencies was one axis of this conflict. I analyze four types of community action agencies resulting from the conflict: white dominated; white coopted; black controlled; and black-white stalemate. I explain these outcomes across the five states in light of OEO policies and different patterns of civil rights mobilization. OEO understood community action in the south as an extension of the aims of the civil rights movement and sought integrated programs that often reinforced white control of local agencies. This was amplified by OEO policies for the creation of multi-county rural districts which were often gerrymandered to combine black majority counties with larger white majority counties thereby diluting ability of blacks to control governing boards and the distribution of resources. OEO’s policies conflicted with black aspirations for autonomy and control. As one organizer put the matter, “The black poor of Mississippi do not yearn to be ‘integrated’ by submission to the white power structure.” Black control of agencies was contingent on different patterns of black civil rights mobilization and the strength of local movement organizations, many of which emerged independent of SNCC, SCLC, CORE or the NAACP. I undertake analysis of specific cases with archival data to examine the emergence and strategies of these local movements in the African American struggle to gain control of southern community action agencies. This study revises our understanding of successes and failures of the War on Poverty in the South. The southern war on poverty was neither an abject failure that was irrelevant to upending white supremacy in the south nor a vehicle of black cooptation. In the conclusion, I consider the implications of the southern war on poverty for the political and economic inclusion of subjugated racial groups.

Author

• Michael K Brown, University of California, Santa Cruz