CHAPTER 2

“A New Mood” Is Spreading: The Great Society as Job Creation

In 1960, the editors of the Afro-American sent a reporter to the offices of the Baltimore City Municipal Building and City Hall to do some investigative journalism. Four years earlier, civil rights leaders had wrangled from the city council Baltimore’s fair employment practices ordinance. Thereafter, municipal officials had repeatedly promised that the new law would be used to root out discrimination in municipal agencies. Most recently, the newly elected president of the city council had told a group of African Americans rather patronizingly, “I am convinced that there is discrimination practiced in the city government.… I believe [the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] should start with the city government. Clean house there before going out crusading.”¹ Having endorsed the same “good starting point” three years earlier, editors at the Afro-American had become increasingly impatient with the lack of results.² So this time they decided to take matters into their own hands by conducting an informal head count of African American city-government workers. Peering into offices in the municipal building and city hall, the Afro journalist sought Black faces in the sea of white. The municipal building investigation yielded only fourteen African Americans as compared to five hundred whites while the search to find Black workers in City Hall proved almost fruitless. Only the presence of a lone “colored messenger boy” prevented the paper from having to report it could find no African Americans at all in the seat of the city government.³ The paper’s editors expressed outrage. While their methods were hardly scientific and underestimated the actual number of Black municipal employees, their point was dead on. “When you have 32 percent of the population and no [or next to no] personnel employed in City Hall, you are in a bad way—and this is the situation facing the colored citizens of Baltimore,” an Afro-American editorial argued. “Not even the rosiest of rose-colored glasses can hide the fact that City Hall is shot through with racial discrimination and when it comes to jobs it is as if the colored citizens of Baltimore do not even exist.”⁴ The editors demanded immediate redress.

African American leaders in Baltimore had good reason to push hard for jobs in the municipal government. The public-sector workforce expanded steadily during the postwar era while the city’s manufacturing sector, although still a critical source of employment, was in decline. Moreover, public-sector employment, which the city’s civil rights activists had been monitoring and attempting to secure for Black workers for decades, served as potential partial solutions to three of the most pressing and ongoing problems that African Americans faced: rampant racial discrimination in the private-sector job market, the near total lack of Black influence over municipal policy-making, and the gross inadequacy of the historically separate and unequal public services to which African American residents had access. Black government workers would have stable jobs, could potentially influence policy, and could help improve service quality.

During the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms, which included the nation’s War on Poverty, were the engines behind continuing public-sector growth. In 1960, Black leaders had worked tirelessly to help John F. Kennedy win the presidency, and they supported Johnson’s subsequent bid as well. In turn, they closely monitored the implementation of the liberal Democrats’ reforms in their city, identifying new federal programming as sources of the jobs, political power, and services that they sought. They demanded African American influence over the city’s War on Poverty and pressured elected officials to comply with the federal mandate that residents with low incomes play key roles in antipoverty efforts. They also pressed hard for government jobs for Black workers. The efforts met with remarkable success. During the 1960s, Black representation on the oversight bodies of municipal agencies, while still low, grew to levels that would have been inconceivable during the 1950s. Meanwhile, the number of African Americans who worked for the city government mushroomed as that sector expanded due to the infusion of federal funds. Critics at the time and since have faulted Johnson for failing to include a full-employment guaranteed among his Great Society reforms.⁵ Such a measure might have served as an antidote to the worsening structural unemployment among Black men. Nevertheless, the Great Society itself was an engine of job creation that quickly became critical to the economic health of the city’s working- and middle-class Black families.

African Americans’ public-sector employment gains proved gendered, however. Black men certainly increased their representation in government workforces—and won more leadership posts than did Black women. Yet far more Black women than men entered the public sector; much of the job growth was in fields and employment categories typically dominated by women. New government positions—as well as the many new service jobs in the private sector in fields such as health care that the Great Society also helped to create—buoyed the economic fortunes of Black women, albeit unintentionally. Ironically, an administration that dubbed Black women matriarchs and blamed their supposed dominance in their families for high African American poverty rates, structurally transformed Baltimore’s economy in a way that favored women workers.⁶ To be sure, Black women became overrepresented at the bottom of public-sector hierarchies. And to the extent that they secured white-collar and leadership positions, both African American men and women gained the most authority in government agencies in which they dealt largely with other African Americans. White officials hardly ceded much ground in critical realms such as planning and finance. Nevertheless, African Americans’ increasing political influence and improved job prospects in the public sector were critical changes. The gains Black women made in the public sector were a primary source of their tremendous importance to the economic health of African American families and communities during the 1960s and the decades that followed. Despite important limitations, the successful campaign by Black leaders to win increasing influence for African Americans within the municipal government and to open public-sector jobs to Black workers stand as two of the most important victories of Baltimore’s civil rights movement.

“We Are Not Children”: The Fight for Maximum Feasible Participation

As Black leaders anticipated continuing their campaigns against employment discrimination into the 1960s, they fully appreciated the difference that federal civil rights legislation could make. Convinced that John F. Kennedy would be their best bet for meaningful change in the 1960 presidential election, they began mobilizing Black voters on his behalf. And they were quite mindful of the fact that despite their location below the Mason-Dixon line, they had the ability and thus the responsibility to do just that. “In Baltimore we don’t have to die for the right to vote,” NAACP activist Juanita Mitchell was known to remind Black city residents.⁷ The franchise was a powerful weapon in the battle against racism and economic injustice. As the election loomed, the leaders of multiple African American organizations coordinated a major voter-registration drive. The NAACP joined forces with volunteers from church groups and members of the Civic Interest Group (CIG), who the Afro-American described as “the sit-downers” because of their involvement in ongoing direct-action campaigns to integrate Baltimore’s lunch counters.

Together Baltimore’s older and younger activists convinced the city’s board of elections to keep their office open late one night a week to allow residents who worked during the day an opportunity to register. They also provided babysitting services and bus transportation to the voter-registration office. Recent migrants were among the targets of the campaign. “I never had the chance to register before.… We couldn’t vote down home,” reported George W. Collins, a newcomer to the city.⁸ Although the Afro-American did not tally the total number of new voters activists added to the rolls, by Election Day more than 106,000 African Americans were registered, and Black residents made up 20 percent of the city’s voters. “Hip, Hip Hurrah!” cheered the editors.⁹ The paper predicted that the Baltimore city returns would decide the election in Maryland. And they did. Despite residual support for the Party of Lincoln among some Black voters, Kennedy’s “landslide in [the] city’s colored areas” was pivotal in helping the Democrat win the state. African Americans in Maryland gave Kennedy more than 58,000 votes in a state election that he won by 55,000. Although Black turnout was not as high as civil rights leaders would have liked, as in several other states, the Afro-American reported “the Colored vote” created “the margin of victory.”¹⁰

Despite early enthusiasm for the young president, Kennedy quickly proved a disappointment to Baltimore activists, who sought immediate redress for civil rights abuses and attention to urban issues. Johnson, who became president following Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, more successfully responded to African Americans’ concerns. When introducing his vision of the Great Society he pledged to create, Johnson married the goals of eradicating racial injustice and poverty. “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity,” Johnson argued in his 1964 State of the Union address.¹¹ Then, as the nation grieved its recently slain leader, Johnson brokered the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a remarkable achievement given the tremendous institutional power of southern defenders of white supremacy in the Congress. The voting-rights provision of the law proved woefully inadequate, however. In response to ongoing activism, Johnson also helped secure the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Activists in Baltimore hailed Johnson’s civil rights achievements and also his decision to declare a war on poverty as part of his Great Society programming. The fact that one in five Americans lived in poverty was a source of profound national disgrace, Johnson believed. Between 1964 and 1967, he and the Congress passed more progressive legislation than at any time since the New Deal years. Unlike many New Dealers, however, Johnson was convinced that poverty could be best defeated by national economic growth that was supposed to “lift all boats” rather than through wealth redistribution. Determined to combat poverty by offering Americans with low incomes “a hand up, not a handout,” the centerpieces of his antipoverty efforts were education and vocational training.¹² Congress did, however, also enact the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) that funded the War on Poverty and created Medicare and Medicaid. In addition, the federal government made permanent the Food Stamps program and established the Model Cities program. To coordinate the implementation of urban policies, in 1966 Congress created the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which established a cabinet-level position for a representative of cities. Ultimately, Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, although not all specifically urban policies, dramatically increased the amount of federal resources cities and their residents received.

Johnson’s Great Society programs sparked criticism from those to his political left who believed that poverty could not be alleviated without intentional federal job-creation efforts. As could already be seen in Baltimore, mechanization and deindustrialization were transforming urban economies in the industrial belt in ways that had dire implications, particularly for Black male workers. And the problems seemed likely to worsen. By the 1960s, American manufacturers faced far stiffer international competition than they had in the immediate postwar era, when much of Europe and Japan had been in shambles. Yet American markets remained open to imports due to Cold War commitments. U.S. officials had failed to plan for this inevitability, and U.S. manufacturers and their workers were paying the price.¹³ In search of lower labor and production costs to boost competitiveness and profitability, growing numbers of U.S. companies relocated to the outskirts of industrial cities or moved south within the United States or even overseas.¹⁴ Accelerating deindustrialization during the 1960s presaged the loss of entire categories of manufacturing jobs, and nothing appeared on the horizon likely to produce equivalent employment opportunities for men in rusting cities that were increasingly populated by African Americans. Training programs were fine, but cities such as Baltimore, which lost more than thirteen thousand factory jobs between 1963 and 1972, also needed new sources of employment. To those living in the shadows of shuttered factories, the prospect of vocational programs was a partial solution at best.¹⁵

Despite the warnings, Johnson remained committed to growth liberalism. He was also receptive to the idea that urban Black male unemployment resulted largely from African American cultural dysfunction rather than structural economic problems. That notion gained currency during the mid-1960s, fueled by the publication of a controversial report by Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy, Planning and Research Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Although himself a proponent of federal job creation, in “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Moynihan attributed high levels of African American poverty to a lack of education and job skills—and also to a “tangle of pathology” within Black families. Slavery and racism produced the pathology, Moynihan argued, and one of its most overt symptoms was matriarchal culture. Because Black men faced ongoing employment discrimination, Black women entered the labor market in larger numbers than white women. “This dependence on the mother’s income undermines the position of the father and deprives the children of the kind of attention, particularly in school matters, which is now a standard feature of middle-class upbringing,” Moynihan contended.¹⁶ He conceded that the patriarchal model prevalent among middle-class whites was itself a social construct. Nevertheless, because it was the norm, African Americans deviated from it at their peril. And the fact that many families already had, he argued, contributed significantly to their economic marginalization. The claim, which attracted widespread attention and outraged many African Americans, shifted the national conversation about Black poverty further away from economic changes, such as mechanization and deindustrialization, and toward supposed Black cultural dysfunction.¹⁷

Despite the disputes among liberal policy makers over the causes of Black male economic insecurity, most shared a blind spot for the employment concerns of Black women. Advocates of growth liberalism and proponents of such interventionist strategies as job creation believed that the best antidote to poverty, particularly in African American communities, was to provide men with the means to become breadwinners. Such an outcome, they anticipated, would restore men to their supposedly proper position of authority within their families, slow the pace of family dissolution, and reduce demand for welfare services. Historians Marissa Chappell and Robert Self describe this outlook as “breadwinner liberalism.”¹⁸ For the most part, policy makers and activists, both Black and white, failed to take women seriously as economic actors, and the War on Poverty reflected the bias. As initially conceived, for example, the first Job Corps training programs were intended only for men. Only intervention by women secured a federal commitment to including women in Job Corps programs from the start.¹⁹

Despite their serious inadequacies, Great Society programs nevertheless did create opportunities for African Americans such as those in Baltimore to seize a greater role in policy-making than they had ever had in the past. As had been the case since the 1930s when Franklin Roosevelt created the nation’s first urban policies, the infusion of federal funds on the local level had the potential to alter the balance of power in municipal affairs. New revenue led to contests over power as various interest groups vied to control the agendas of new or growing bureaucracies or the implementation of federal mandates. Most recently during the 1950s, the urban-renewal emphasis of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower’s policies had provided cities with resources that enhanced the ability of business leaders to push municipal planning in the direction of commercial redevelopment. In many cities, such efforts resulted in projects that often displaced large numbers of African Americans; efforts to remove “blight” led to the destruction of African Americans’ homes for which alternatives were frequently not provided. In fact, African Americans often referred to urban renewal as Negro removal.²⁰

In Baltimore, federal funding for urban redevelopment and highway construction wreaked havoc in some of the city’s Black neighborhoods and also helped business elites to exert increased influence over municipal affairs. To be sure, business leaders had long been powerbrokers in the city. During the 1950s, however, they had increased their influence. James Rouse, a local real estate developer later known for his urban commercial showplaces, such as Faneuil Hall in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore, helped found the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC). Rouse and other members of GBC identified downtown commercial redevelopment as the most significant ingredient for revitalizing Baltimore. During the mid-1950s, the group hired urban planners to draft a long-term plan for the city, and in 1958, the members of the city council adopted GBC’s proposal. In so doing, they rejected a plan they themselves had commissioned, which prioritized neighborhood over center-city revitalization. With the vote, members of GBC secured significant influence over municipal policy-making, influence they were not inclined to relinquish in the face of the new federal priorities of the 1960s.²¹

African American leaders, however, hoped to use the new federal priorities to move the city in a new direction. Unconvinced that urban renewal and trickle-down commercial revitalization strategies would adequately redress African American poverty, many Black leaders favored more redistributive approaches and championed “human renewal,” a phrase used to emphasize a focus on people rather than infrastructure. And Black leaders were determined to make their voices heard in municipal public-policy debates. In fact, they had already been demanding attention for their concerns and ambitions before the War on Poverty even started.

In 1962, the Health and Welfare Council of the Baltimore Area, Inc. (HWC) published an indictment of the city that they titled “A Letter to Ourselves.” In it, the white, liberal leadership of the private organization argued that Baltimore’s response to urban poverty was inadequate and proposed that the city formulate a new approach. They created a Steering Committee on Human Renewal to develop a long-term strategy. Only one member of the committee, Reverend Robert T. Newbold Jr. of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, was African American. While the HWC committee was formulating its plan, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Anticipating that new federal funds could make their “Plan for Action” a reality, committee members drafted their proposal to correspond to the federal law’s provisions.²²

Not long after the steering committee began its work, African Americans in Baltimore began protesting their near exclusion from the antipoverty planning effort. In February 1964, Reverend Herbert O. Edwards of Trinity Baptist Church complained to HWC about the committee’s composition. “The fact that the Negro represents more than 1/3 of the population of Baltimore City seems to have escaped the attention of those planning this far-reaching project,” he wrote. He accused HWC of doing what whites in Baltimore always did to marginalize Black views. “The ‘traditional approach,’…” Edwards explained, “is to make plans for the City of Baltimore in order to cope with its problems, ignoring the Negro Community until such time as you have decided what should be done” (emphasis in the original). Then, he predicted, the city would select a few African American representatives “and send them back to the Negro Community to tell them what to do. Surely you cannot be unaware of the past ineffectiveness of such a paternalistic approach!”²³ Melvin G. Roy, the president of the Eastside Community Committee, Inc., echoed Edward’s concern in a telegram to Mayor Theodore McKeldin. “Better results will accrue when we plan together with ethnic groups rather than plan for them,” Roy protested.²⁴ The pressure yielded some results. McKeldin, a racially liberal Republican who had served as the city’s mayor during the mid-1940s and as Maryland’s governor during most of the 1950s, had recently won reelection as mayor. He owed all of his political offices at least in part to Black support, and he quickly appointed six African Americans to an advisory committee on the antipoverty effort.²⁵ The issue, however, was hardly resolved.

By late 1964 the steering committee had completed its Plan for Action, and officials applied for federal antipoverty funds. Whites in Baltimore had planned the city’s war on poverty with very limited African American participation and with no involvement of residents with low incomes. Angered by the exclusion, Juanita Mitchell of the NAACP sent a telegram to Sargent Shriver, who was directing the nation’s War on Poverty. She requested that funds be withheld from Baltimore because those who would be affected by new antipoverty programs had had insufficient participation in the planning process. “We are tired of people planning about us and not with us,” she explained to a Baltimore Sun reporter. “We are mature and want to be partners with the city in all of its activities. We are not children.”²⁶

Revealing increasing ideological tensions within the city’s Black communities, Mitchell’s telegram angered conservative Black leaders and won the scorn of younger activists. The Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance immediately telegrammed Shriver to refute the NAACP’s claim. The ministers described the plan as “a bold and imaginative attempt by city officials, public and private agencies to make a coordinated and cooperative effort toward taking the slum attitude and outlook out of our culturally deprived citizen.”²⁷ Meanwhile, younger activists also took the NAACP to task. Robert E. Hinton Jr., a Morgan State student affiliated with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), wrote to the Baltimore Sun incensed that the “Black Bourgeoisie” who ran the NAACP had the gall to represent itself as the voice of poor African Americans.²⁸ Poor people themselves, Hinton intimated, rather than middle-class leaders, deserved the right to plan for their own communities. Ultimately, and no doubt chastened, the NAACP rescinded its request that funds be withheld. But despite the controversy, the point had been made: African Americans refused to be sidelined while whites conducted a war on poverty.

Federal legislation bolstered efforts in Baltimore to secure for African Americans and residents with low incomes influence over the local War on Poverty. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 created the Community Action Program and mandated the “maximum feasible participation” of low-income residents in antipoverty efforts. The legislation thus compelled elected officials to listen to poor people, and that is exactly what some of the architects of the War on Poverty intended. They recognized that many New Deal programs had not served African Americans well, and they wanted a different outcome for their reforms. In addition, some of the union leaders Johnson included in the planning hoped to politically mobilize low-income citizens and encourage democratic decision-making in policy planning and implementation. Their intention represented a stunning departure from past welfare-policy practices, which tended to figure recipients of government assistance as objects of pity, suspicion, or both. Whereas Eisenhower’s urban policies had enhanced the authority of business leaders in municipal planning, Johnson’s domestic agenda created opportunities for African Americans to win a greater role in shaping their cities’ futures.²⁹

“I Am a Citizen Who Has a Job to Do”: Democratizing Decision-Making

In Baltimore, the influx of federal funds to fight poverty raised the stakes considerably in ongoing struggles over political power and control over municipal planning that had long pitted civil rights activists against white municipal officials. By the mid-1960s, African Americans made up more than 40 percent of the city’s population. The number of African Americans on the city council had only grown by one since the 1950s, bringing the total of Black council members to a mere two. Together they constituted 9 percent of the body. Reapportionment compelled by the 1960 Census ended with the decision by elected officials to shrink the size of the council and redraw district lines. Keenly aware of the import of redistricting, African Americans pressed for opportunities to win more representation and met with some success. In the 1967 local election for seats on the newly constituted body, Black candidates, including the first woman to be elected to the council, won four seats. The African Americans served alongside fourteen whites and under a white council president, however. In addition, at least ten of the white victors had reputations as racial conservatives.³⁰ Even though African Americans had doubled their number on the council, they remained grossly underrepresented and outnumbered.

As an additional route to achieving some influence over policy-making and service delivery, Black leaders had long sought positions for African Americans on the oversight bodies of government departments. The efforts had not yielded much. In 1965, African Americans composed only 5 percent of the members of municipal boards and commissions. With minimal official representation, Black Baltimore had almost no formal means of influencing policy-making and agenda setting in the city. Not surprisingly, African American leaders set their sights on making sure the city complied with maximum feasible participation.³¹

Although the city would have to abide by federal mandates if it accepted federal funds for antipoverty efforts, ultimately decisions concerning the organization and leadership of Baltimore’s War on Poverty fell to elected officials. The members of the city council, most of whom were staunch defenders of the racial status quo, were hardly inclined to hand authority over to Black residents. Although in February 1965 council members did create a Community Action Agency (CAA) to carry out the local War on Poverty, to maximize the council’s control, they subsumed the agency within the municipal government. As a result, all of the CAA’s programming and all appointees to the Community Action Commission (CAC) that would oversee the CAA would require council approval.³²

The council’s decision served as a rebuke to the members of a new organization in the city. Members of Baltimore’s chapter of SDS had recently founded the Union for Jobs or Income Now (U-JOIN). The organization included students from Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College, and Morgan State College. Several labor unions also lent their support to U-JOIN, and community activist Walter Lively headed the organization. An African American from Philadelphia, Lively earlier had helped to create chapters of the NAACP and CORE in his hometown. He had also been an organizer of the 1961 Freedom Rides.³³ Baltimore native and Morgan State student Robert “Bob” Moore, who later became a prominent activist and labor leader in the city, was also an early member of U-JOIN. He, Lively, and other members of the organization described the HWC’s antipoverty program as “welfare colonialism” and drafted an alternative proposal that called for the creation of a nonprofit, nongovernmental antipoverty agency.³⁴ They also suggested that almost all members of the organization’s governing body be community residents with low incomes or representatives from organized labor. In addition, U-JOIN argued, “To guarantee that decision-making will originate with the poor and not with the professionals,” the administrative staff of the agency should be “subordinate” to the decision-making body (emphasis in the original).³⁵ Not surprisingly, the city council had rejected the proposal.

Ultimately, the task of nominating the CAC’s members fell to McKeldin, and the mayor did not relish handing power over a municipal agency to people likely to be hostile to the city government any more than the members of the city council did. Many of the nation’s mayors shared his view. In fact, McKeldin had already written a letter to President Johnson on behalf of the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Conference of Mayors expressing concern about the War on Poverty. He urged the president to rein in the enthusiasts of community participation.³⁶ And in his own city, the mayor took steps to circumvent community involvement. Although he nominated five African Americans to the CAC, he gave whites the majority with six seats and the chairmanship. In addition, none of the nominees were residents of the action area where antipoverty efforts would be targeted.³⁷

Reflecting the divisions within Baltimore’s African American communities, some Black leaders applauded as a win the mayor’s appointments, while others deemed them entirely unacceptable. Among those declaring victory was the leadership of the BUL, whose officials had been working for decades to increase Black representation on public boards and commissions—with very limited success.³⁸ The leadership of U-JOIN, alternatively, did not view the composition of the CAC as a victory at all and instead urged city residents with low incomes to protest at city council meetings to fight their exclusion. They did. And ultimately Baltimore’s CAC grew to include more low-income members than required by federal law.³⁹ Activists had made community participation a reality in Baltimore.

In the wake of their success securing influence over the CAC, African Americans and residents with low incomes began demanding seats on additional municipal boards and commissions. The efforts reflected a growing confidence among marginalized groups and a belief that they deserved to be listened to and treated with dignity. It also likely reflected an unprecedented conviction that officials in the city of Baltimore, and perhaps even the state of Maryland, might actually prove responsive to their concerns. And change was indeed under way. In 1963, the leaders of Baltimore’s mainstream civil rights organizations had faced an uphill battle when they pressed Maryland officials simply to appoint a second African American to the state’s welfare board. Three years later, thirty-five members of a new welfare rights organization crashed a meeting of Maryland’s legislative council to demand representation on the welfare board. The request was granted.⁴⁰ Residents of public housing also met with success in battles with the city for inclusion in housing-related decision-making. Baltimore was one of the first cities in the nation to establish a Resident Advisory Board, and as activist Shirley Wise recalled, the victory “gave [residents] their true rights to sit at the table with the decision-makers and effect some changes in their community.”⁴¹ Poor residents also fought for representation on the policy-making body that oversaw the city’s Model Cities program, an initiative launched in Baltimore during the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, nearly two-thirds of the membership board had been elected by residents.⁴²

The leadership of some municipal departments also proved receptive to demands for community participation. Officials in the Department of Health agreed to create a Parents’ Advisory Council at a community health clinic. More remarkably, in 1967 the white superintendent of the Baltimore City Public Schools and the mostly white members of the school board explained their support for demands by African Americans for community involvement by echoing rhetoric more typically heard from civil rights advocates. The superintendent and board explained they did not want the school system to become “another form of paternalism.”⁴³ During the second half of the 1960s, African Americans and residents with low incomes secured limited but unprecedented influence over policy-making in the fields of health, education, and welfare, a democratization of decision-making few could have imagined possible at the dawn of the decade.

The adoption of community participation opened opportunities for women, and particularly Black women, to exercise leadership in a city run almost entirely by white men. By the end of the 1960s, Black and white women together accounted for only 16 percent of the members of municipal oversight bodies. Over half of the city’s fifty-one boards and commissions had no female representation whatsoever, and twelve had only a single woman. But in 1968, almost half of the community representatives on the CAC were women, and in 1969, eight of the ten women on the Model Cities’ thirty-member Policy Steering Committee had been elected by community groups. Residents of low-income neighborhoods put women into policy-making positions at a far higher rate than the city’s mayors did. Although outnumbered by men on all boards and commissions—including those overseeing agencies that served predominantly female clienteles—women had seized opportunities to shape public policy. Those involved felt the changes keenly. As Margaret McCarty, the head of Baltimore’s welfare rights organization Mother Rescuers from Poverty, explained, “I’m a citizen who has a job to do, instead of a poor forgotten colored woman, like some of our people feel.”⁴⁴

Despite the remarkable changes under way, white leaders in Baltimore maintained a tight grip on power. In January 1968, for example, a coalition of groups that included CORE, U-JOIN, SNCC, Mother Rescuers from Poverty, and the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance sent a letter to the mayor. “We demand that half of the members of all boards and commissions be Black to reflect the racial make up of the city; that no white individuals be appointed until the composition of these boards is at least half Black and at least half of the chairmen of these boards and/or commissions are Black,” group members wrote.⁴⁵ Meanwhile, aware that their perspectives were universally relevant, welfare recipients pressed for representation not just on poverty-related bodies but on “all policy-making and advisory boards, state and city.”⁴⁶ Such efforts made little headway. Under duress, white officials had granted African Americans and low-income residents an increased level of influence over agencies responsible for poor people or over departments that provided such services as health and education, for which whites could seek private or suburban alternatives. But the officials were not willing to go much further than that.

Though limited in scope, the influence African Americans and low-income residents won represented an important threat to the status quo. In 1966, the Afro-American reported that there was a “new mood creeping slowly through the Black ghetto of Baltimore like sunlight at early dawn—a mood that demands rights and respect and a chance for a decent life as the natural birthright of all.”⁴⁷ Many African Americans, women, and low-income residents took the promise of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the maximum feasible participation mandates of the Equal Opportunity Act to heart. They demanded and won a voice in the decision-making bodies that were waging the city’s war on poverty. In so doing, they challenged the near monopoly white men had historically maintained over policy-making in the city. And it seemed pretty clear that armed with federal funds, they intended to use their new influence to shift the focus of municipal policies away from the trickle-down commercial revitalization projects long touted by the business community and toward efforts to redistribute power and wealth in the city.

“Some Progress Has Been Made”: The Great Society as Job Creation

Even as they waged battles in the city over community participation, civil rights leaders hardly relented on their campaign to open job opportunities to African Americans. And as became evident during the mid-1960s, although Johnson’s Great Society measures did not include full-employment legislation, new federal programs created a considerable number of new public-sector jobs, and federal funds also helped to swell the staff of existing municipal agencies. In addition, federal funding also triggered job creation in the private sector. The introduction of Medicare and Medicaid, for example, increased local demand for health care and also for health care providers.⁴⁸ The government expansion boded particularly well for Black workers. The use of moral suasion on private employers to combat discrimination had led only to modest results through the early 1960s. Exerting the heft of Black voting power yielded better results in the public sector, where hiring practices were open to public scrutiny. And the size of the African American population in Baltimore was still on the rise. During the 1960s, Black leaders used the growing importance of the Black electorate to win municipal jobs for African American workers and applied pressure on federal and state officials and agency heads for equal employment opportunities as well.

Although the size of the public sector had been increasing for much of the twentieth century, the 1960s was a period of particularly rapid growth. During the 1950s, Baltimore’s municipal government had increased by approximately 7,000 positions. It nearly doubled that growth during the 1960s. During the decade, the city workforce grew by about 13,000 positions to reach a total of about 35,000 jobs. Meanwhile, state and federal agencies with offices in or near the city expanded their workforces as well. By 1970, the state and federal governments employed 16,900 and 16,200 Baltimore workers, respectively.⁴⁹ The growth of the public sector during this period of industrial decline dramatically reconfigured Baltimore’s labor market. In 1960, 27.8 percent of Baltimore’s workers labored in manufacturing jobs. By 1970, the percentage was 25.6, and by 1980 it had plummeted to 15. Meanwhile, government employees made up 15.1 percent of city workers in 1960, 18.7 percent in 1970, and 20.8 percent in 1980.⁵⁰ Although manufacturing job losses outpaced the expansion of the public sector, the growth in government jobs helped to compensate for industrial decline.

Breaking into the municipal workforce—and especially its upper echelons—was not going to be easy. The city was a notorious discriminator.⁵¹ Yet the jobs were worth the fight. They were often full time and stable, lacking the insecurity of domestic, low-wage service and day-laboring work and the periodic layoffs associated with factory jobs. The public sector also provided employees with better workplace protections than were available to African Americans generally. And some public-sector jobs came with fringe benefits, such as pension plans and health insurance. Civil rights advocates certainly never abandoned the fight for private-sector jobs. But mindful of the perks associated with government employment and because the public sector was expanding, activists intensified the pressure on officials to win government jobs for Black workers.

Although born toothless because the city council had stripped it of enforcement power, the municipal EEOC became a critical tool for increasing Black public-sector employment. During the early 1960s, African Americans gained increased authority within the EEOC, which Black city council member Walter Dixon helped win some enforcement powers and was renamed the Community Relations Commission (CRC).⁵² The CRC remained responsible for combating discrimination in both the public and private sectors, but ultimately the commissioners more effectively redressed the employment practices of the city government. In order to improve African Americans’ representation in the municipal workforce, both CRC officials and activists needed reliable statistics. In 1964, CRC staffers conducted a comprehensive survey of African American municipal employment. They found that at a time when African Americans accounted for more than 40 percent of the city’s population, Black workers made up only a little over a quarter of the workforce. (Had they included employees of the Department of Education, the figure would have been somewhat higher.) They also discovered that African Americans were concentrated in only a handful of agencies. Ninety percent of the city’s Black classified employees—those in civil service rather than at-will laboring positions—worked in only five city departments: Education, City Hospitals, Health, Parks and Recreation, and Fire. In addition, Black workers made up 41 percent of the employees of the Department of Public Welfare and the majority of the staff of CAA. In contrast, sixty-two city departments, most significantly those that controlled the city’s finances and planning, had no or minimal numbers of African Americans on their payrolls. Thus, the CRC staff concluded, “While some progress had been made in some city agencies in the employment of Negroes, there was a dismal lack of progress and concern by other agencies, and/or those who run them.”⁵³

In light of their findings, CRC staffers demanded greater oversight of hiring practices and the right to investigate all instances in which African Americans were passed over for promotions in the municipal government. City officials rejected the request. Nevertheless, thereafter, the CRC closely monitored employment practices and pressured agency directors with poor minority hiring records to make improvements. The CRC soon began receiving support for its efforts from the Employment Subcommittee of the Mayor’s Task Force on Equal Rights. McKeldin created the task force in 1966 as a proactive measure following the announcement by CORE that it had chosen Baltimore as a “target city” because of the city’s poor civil rights record.⁵⁴ By 1967, the employment subcommittee included some of the most outspoken critics of the city’s minority-hiring practices. Reverend Marion Bascom, the chair of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, was one such prominent critic. Bascom was the pastor of the influential Douglas Memorial Church, and he played an important role in desegregation battles in the city during the 1950s and 1960s. He and others on the committee declared their intention to make the city government a “model” employer.⁵⁵

To achieve their ends, activists picketed city agencies with poor minority-hiring records, and in 1967, an election year, they made minority hiring a campaign issue. A coalition of groups accused the personnel director and members of Baltimore’s Civil Service Commission (CSC) of racism. Bascom threatened a mass protest by the members of “two or three hundred groups” if immediate action was not taken.⁵⁶ The challenge produced immediate results. Democratic mayoral candidate Thomas D’Alesandro III, the son of the D’Alesandro who had sabotaged the EEOC during the 1950s (and the brother of future speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi), promised “a top-to-bottom review and revision” of the city’s civil service system if he was elected.⁵⁷ His Republican opponent also pledged to make significant changes. Leon Sachs, a leader of Baltimore’s Jewish community who had been critical in the city’s fair-employment campaign years earlier, summed up the situation well. Access to city jobs had become “a festering sore in race relations in our community and call[ed] for immediate therapy.”⁵⁸ Elected officials needed to make serious changes, or they would face the wrath of the Black electorate.

The political pressure worked. Following the 1967 municipal election, Black city council member Robert L. Douglass introduced a resolution that called for the city to revamp the CSC’s procedures. Newly elected Mayor D’Alesandro, whose earlier work on behalf of open housing had won him considerable African American support, followed through on his campaign promise to address civil service issues. Determined to make application procedures accessible to “low-income, low-skilled persons,” the mayor proposed revisions to the City Charter to change civil service procedures.⁵⁹ He also attempted to secure administratively those reforms he could not get through the city council. In addition, he appointed several African American men to high-level positions. For its part, the CRC entered into agreements with departments or agencies to compel improvements in minority hiring and adopted affirmative action–type strategies to increase minority hiring. Meanwhile, angry that white suburbanites held many of the municipal government’s highest-paying jobs, city activists also pressed officials to limit eligibility for municipal employment to Baltimore residents. In 1969, the city council passed a hiring-preference ordinance. The measure was challenged and repealed, however, and the issue remained a source of contention throughout the 1970s.⁶⁰

Although they did not neglect women entirely, the staff of the CRC and many local activists concerned with using public-sector employment to combat unemployment frequently concentrated their efforts on agencies with predominantly male staff members. Concerns about police brutality were perennial, and activists continued to target the Baltimore Police Department to win better African American representation. They were also especially attentive to the hiring and promotion practices of the Departments of Highways, Public Works, and Sanitation, agencies with few female employees.⁶¹ The attention paid to Black male employment concerns made sense given the devastating impact mechanization and deindustrialization were having in the private sector. Yet African American women had valid employment concerns that also warranted redress, but they received little attention.

Efforts to improve Baltimore’s record of minority hiring were remarkably successful. By 1970, almost 40 percent of municipal employees—as compared to about 25 percent six years earlier—were African American. Including the Department of Education in the calculation raised the percentage to 50. African Americans’ representation in the municipal workforce had surpassed their percentage in the city’s population. In just five years African Americans had made tremendous gains in one of the few sectors of Baltimore’s economy that was experiencing growth.⁶² And despite widespread concerns about Black male unemployment, Black women ultimately won a greater share of municipal jobs than did Black men. In fact, by the end of the 1960s, African American women made up the largest demographic group in the city workforce, outnumbering not only Black men but also white women and white men. Nearly a third of all municipal employees were African American women.⁶³ Many of the jobs Black women filled resulted from federal-level spending on antipoverty services. Ironically, an administration that had produced the problematic “Moynihan Report” had fundamentally transformed labor markets in deindustrializing cities such as Baltimore in ways that advantaged women and did little to combat structural Black male unemployment.

Although Black women made unprecedented job gains in the municipal government, race- and sex-based discrimination persisted. White men and in a few cases Black men served in most leadership roles; white women filled many professional positions; and African American women and men predominated in the lowest-paid jobs.⁶⁴ Training programs reinforced gendered and racialized employment patterns. “When you’re offered job training, it’s always something with ‘aide’ behind it,” African American welfare rights activist McCarty complained in 1969. “I suppose some kind of job beats nothing, but it tells you what people think of you when they only think of your being a nurse’s aide when you could be a nurse or teacher’s aide when you could be a teacher.”⁶⁵ In the mid-1960s, the concentration of Black workers in low-level positions contributed to a Black-white earnings gap in the municipal workforce of $2,000 per year.⁶⁶ Yet low-wage positions in human-services agencies could serve multiple productive roles. As historian Rhonda Williams notes, African American women with low incomes became increasingly assertive in the demands they made of the state. “[Antipoverty] jobs,” Williams contends, “further validated poor black women’s concerns and empowered them to speak; after all, they believed they had the federal government behind them.”⁶⁷

And not all African American municipal employees labored in menial posts. Over the course of the 1960s, white-collar public-sector employment served as an anchor of Baltimore’s Black middle class. Activists had more success winning leadership positions for Black men than women. And most of the positions were managerial jobs within rather than at the helm of municipal departments. Nevertheless, Black men won high-level jobs in humanservices and antipoverty agencies, including the Departments of Health and Education, the Baltimore City Hospitals, the CRC, the CAA, and the Model Cities program.⁶⁸ In addition, in 1968, D’Alesandro hired George Russell to fill the post of city solicitor, the most senior position an African American had ever held in the Baltimore city government. The mayor also hired F. Pierce Linaweaver to head the Department of Public Works.⁶⁹

While African American men made slow but steady progress in the upper echelons of the civil service, Black women secured fewer high-level positions. By 1969 Black and white women together made up less than 9 percent of Baltimore’s 202 officials. Thirty-five of the city’s forty-seven agencies had no women in top positions at all, and of the remaining twelve, ten had only one female administrator. White women were much more likely than African Americans to hold senior posts. Still, Black women secured important positions in the Departments of Education, Welfare, and Housing and Community Development as well as in the mayor’s office.⁷⁰

“No More Tokenism”: The Battles for State and Federal Jobs

Fights for jobs for African Americans played out in the state and federal governments as well with similarly gendered outcomes. During the 1960s, federal aid contributed to the expansion of the state’s public workforce. Between 1962 and 1967, Maryland’s payroll grew by nearly 11,500 jobs, and state officials opened close to 18,000 positions over the next five years.⁷¹ While only a fraction of the new jobs were in Baltimore, the state of Maryland nonetheless became an important local employer. Ultimately, Black workers did not make as much headway into state employment as they did into the municipal workforce. African American political pressure did not produce the same results at the state level as it did in Baltimore. The Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations monitored minority hiring, however, and activists maintained pressure on state officials. By 1970, African Americans made up close to 20 percent of Maryland state employees.⁷² As in the municipal government, most of the job gains at the state level were in a handful of agencies, largely in the human services, and Black women outnumbered Black men. African Americans were concentrated in the lowest levels of employment, and the relatively small number of professional and leadership positions they achieved were largely in human-services departments or agencies. As a result, Black workers as a group earned less than white workers did. Those holding leadership positions in human-services agencies generally earned lower salaries than those paid to other government administrators, which contributed to the discrepancy and reflects the price Black men paid for the devaluation of “women’s” labor.⁷³

Baltimore’s federal workforce also grew during the 1960s. Much of the expansion occurred at the Social Security Administration. Both local and national civil rights activists closely monitored the federal government’s employment practices, pressed for the enforcement of antidiscrimination and affirmative-action measures, and demanded that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission monitor compliance. Activists had been tracking Black employment at the SSA for decades and had important achievements to show for it. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1963, frustration about ongoing discrimination prompted the president of the Baltimore NAACP, Lillie May Jackson, to send a letter of protest to President Johnson. The move produced results. NAACP and SSA officials met, and the agency agreed to conduct an internal investigation into its employment practices. Nevertheless, problems persisted. In May 1964, frustrations peaked, and activists and SSA employees took what they believed to be an unprecedented step: they picketed a federal agency. Harts Brown, who worked at the agency at the time and also volunteered as a coach for African Americans prepping for the federal civil service exam, was among the approximately one hundred who demonstrated. The professionally clad protesters, many of them women, carried placards reading “No More Tokenism” and “Stand Up for Freedom” and marched on the sidewalk in front of the agency.⁷⁴ The ongoing pressure appears to have had some effect. In 1969, the Afro-American reported that African American representation in the SSA workforce had reached 30 percent.⁷⁵

By the end of the 1960s, a decade-long campaign by civil rights leaders to push open the door to public-sector employment for large numbers of African Americans had yielded impressive results. In 1970, African Americans made up more than 50 percent of the city’s residents employed by the state and federal governments. State and federal workers accounted for almost 15 percent of employed African Americans in the city. When combined with job gains in the municipal government’s labor force, over a quarter of all employed African Americans in Baltimore worked in the public sector. The numbers for Black women alone were even more impressive. In 1950, about 12 percent of African American women held government jobs in Baltimore. By 1970, the number had nearly tripled; almost one out of three Black women worked for the city, state, or federal government. Meanwhile, a smaller but still important 20 percent of Black men worked for the government.⁷⁶ The shifts in Baltimore corresponded to national trends. Nationwide, the percentage of Black women employed in the public sector rose from 10 percent to 24 percent between 1950 and 1970. During the same two decades, Black men increased their representation in government employment from 10 percent to 19 percent.⁷⁷ Discrimination certainly persisted. Nevertheless, during a decade often associated with deindustrialization, the hard-won public-sector job gains that Black women and men achieved during the 1960s helped to account for the rising economic security of African American families in Baltimore. Meanwhile, not only the African Americans and residents with low incomes serving on the boards and commissions of municipal agencies but also many new government workers were determined to use their new influence within the state to fight poverty and inequality in Baltimore.