CHAPTER 3
On a chilly November night in 1967, a crowd of more than 1,500 gathered at Baltimore’s downtown Federal Office Building plaza for a rally. The staff of the city’s Community Action Agency, led by their director Parren Mitchell, were launching a multistage demonstration to protest what they considered to be the woeful inadequacy of the federal government’s funding of the War on Poverty. Waving placards with such slogans as “No More Broken Promises,” “To C.A.A. with Love,” and “Don’t Mess with Poor People,” they cheered speakers who demanded the government significantly increase the resources it had committed to fighting poverty.1 Several days later, Mitchell announced the group’s next move. The hardiest among them would march from Baltimore to Washington, DC, and take their concerns directly to the nation’s lawmakers. On November 12, between 200 and 300 of “the city’s highest and lowest ranking veterans of the war on poverty,” according to a local journalist, set off on the forty-five-mile trek.2 Most wore sturdy boots and carried knapsacks, and Mitchell donned a thick green sweater and raincoat. Before they left, Mitchell reminded members of the CAA staff that they would have to forfeit two days’ pay to participate in the march; as employees of the city of Baltimore, they needed to be off the clock when they made their political statement. With all in agreement, they set off. They spent the night in a church along the way and reached Washington the next day.
Not everyone greeted their arrival with enthusiasm. A conservative congressional representative from Michigan sniped that if the protesters could march from Baltimore to D.C., they could certainly “walk to the employment office.”3 The comment reflected disdain for Black women with low incomes and mounting hostility to federal antipoverty efforts. But those who participated in the pilgrimage, predominantly African American women by all accounts, took great pride in the statement they were making. As city residents who had witnessed firsthand the benefits of the War on Poverty as service providers or recipients—and in some cases as both—they wanted their voices heard. Congress needed to understand how vital federal antipoverty efforts were. As Nellie Brewer, a CAA neighborhood aide, explained about her participation in the march, “I feel I should be here.… The program has helped me in many ways and I feel some responsibility for its continuation.”4
As African Americans secured jobs in the municipal government in rising numbers during the 1960s, many were determined to use their new positions within the state in pursuit of racial and economic justice. Those in antipoverty agencies and human-services departments in particular worked to engage and politicize African Americans and low-income residents, who had long been excluded from the political process. The workers also pressured locally elected officials to prioritize redistributive antipoverty campaigns as opposed to the trickle-down commercial redevelopment projects championed by the city’s business elites. Policies of the federal government informed and abetted the workers’ cause. Grants earmarked by Congress for the War on Poverty and other Great Society initiatives transferred federal revenue into the coffers of public agencies charged with fighting economic insecurity, the very agencies in which African Americans had growing influence. Perpetually insufficient in the opinion of many antipoverty activists, the grants nevertheless accorded service providers with a measure of autonomy from the predominantly white and male elected city officials. Federal legislation and grants also fueled efforts by service providers, sometimes working in collaboration with residents with low incomes, to both democratize decision-making and redistribute power and resources in the city. In other words, rather than employees simply putting in their hours, many workers in antipoverty and human-services agencies—the majority of whom were African American women—were deeply engaged in the political struggles of their era. And they made their mark on Baltimore’s municipal agenda by forcing reluctant elected officials to adopt redistributive responses to poverty and tend to the concerns of African Americans and low-income city residents.
Efforts by workers in antipoverty agencies and human-services departments contributed significantly to alleviating economic hardship. By seeking out and then enrolling needy residents in entitlement programs, staffing new programs, and improving old ones, they helped to reduce the poverty rate in the city. Their efforts also had gendered implications. Entitlement benefits and antipoverty services eased some of the responsibilities poor women bore for caring for their families. Access to health, sanitation, recreation, and other public services relieved women at least in part of the obligation of trying to provide such services on their own. And although economists and elected officials at the time hardly recognized the unpaid labor that women did for their families as economic activity, the expansion of the welfare state revealed it as such. The government began to pay employees—admittedly often very low wages—to do work that women previously did for their families and communities for free. The provision of new social services, as a result, was an important form of wealth redistribution that replaced some of the invisible caretaking labor that low-income women earlier performed and that was needed to keep Baltimore’s economy functioning.
“The Passion of the Time”: The Great Society and the Redistribution of Power
As African Americans, and especially Black women, increased their representation in the municipal workforce during the 1960s, many secured posts in antipoverty and human-services agencies. The workers entered government service during an intensely politicized era. Young African American activists from CORE and from newer organizations, such as U-JOIN, SNCC, and the Black Panthers competed with those in older and more mainstream organizations to set the Black agenda. Meanwhile, as women’s liberation movements gained momentum, many women across the city attempted to make sense of the implications of feminism for their lives and called attention to the legacies and persistence of sexism.5 Race-, gender-, and other identity-based struggles for justice were concurrent with spirited student protests in the city and impassioned demonstrations against the Vietnam War. And the antiwar protests and other battles led some of the city’s more progressive white Democrats to split from older Democratic clubs, establish new organizations, and fight for influence within their party.6 In such a context, it is hardly surprising that Clarence Blount, who headed the oversight board of Baltimore’s CAA and who also later served in the Maryland State Senate, recalled many municipal workers of the 1960s as being inspired by “the passion of the time.”7 For many, a city job in an antipoverty or human-services agency meant not just a paycheck but an opportunity to create meaningful change in the city on behalf of racial and economic justice.
By accepting government jobs, municipal employees became part of the very system activists and other critics held largely responsible for some of the city’s persistent problems. For that reason, some African Americans eschewed government employment and appointments, asserting that they could achieve bolder change by working outside of the system. But people needed jobs, and even some of Baltimore’s most outspoken activists accepted municipal posts. Thus, despite their insider status, many antipoverty workers and municipal service providers were fiercely committed to making the state more responsive to residents who historically had been underserved by the government. Ultimately, city employees could not control the level of funding the federal, state, and city governments allotted to fighting poverty. They could, however, endeavor to alter power relations; ensure the city made full use of available federal antipoverty grants; identify needy residents to enroll in entitlement programs; and improve the quality and delivery of city services, many of which until very recently had been provided on a separate and unequal basis. When government workers failed to push hard enough, organized and assertive low-income residents pressed them to move faster and fight harder. Tensions between service providers and recipients persisted during the 1960s, but as the many protests Mitchell initiated indicate, solidarity emerged as well.
The method the federal government used to distribute revenue to the local and state levels enhanced the authority and clout of those waging Baltimore’s War on Poverty. Since the 1930s, Congress had transferred funds to lower levels of government in the form of categorical grants or grants-in-aid. Federal-level policy makers determined the specific purposes for which the money could be used and then transferred the funds. They used this method of distributing revenue to prevent elected officials on the local or state level from diverting federal funds for alternative uses and also to compel compliance with federal mandates such as nondiscrimination.8 The Johnson administration’s commitment to building a Great Society meant that municipal agencies in Baltimore gained access to many new categorical grants earmarked for antipoverty efforts. The availability of the grants gave administrators in anti-poverty and social services agencies a degree of independence from locally elected officials who controlled the local budgeting process and on whose largesse municipal departments had earlier largely been dependent.
Accessing categorical grants and then coordinating service delivery were not necessarily easy. City workers had to complete detailed and time-consuming applications, and in some cases the federal government made available grants to varying agencies for the same types of programs. Service providers complained of excessive red tape and redundancy, and some taxpayers complained of wasted federal dollars.9 Meanwhile, locally elected officials were not left out of the grant application process entirely. Before seeking federal funds, applicants generally had to secure the approval of elected officials as well as a level of local financial commitment for the program the grant would fund. Despite the requirements, the availability of antipoverty grants gave agencies staffed by growing numbers of African Americans—and in a few cases also headed by Black administrators—significant influence over setting the municipal agenda and controlling the use of millions of dollars of federal funds. Given the continuing influence of conservatives on the Baltimore City Council, it is certain that antipoverty efforts would not have received the level of funding they did had Congress simply channeled resources into city coffers with limited or no oversight.
The enhanced autonomy exercised by workers in antipoverty and human-services agencies greatly alarmed Baltimore’s lawmakers, who accurately identified the challenge to their authority the change represented. It also excited a bit of paranoia. As the War on Poverty got under way, Mayor Theodore McKeldin and members of the city council began suspecting that workers in municipal agencies were subverting mandated procedures and securing federal grants without the lawmakers’ knowledge. The specter of rogue grant writing by activist African Americans and do-gooder whites in antipoverty agencies and human-services departments jolted the white officials into action. In 1965, McKeldin sent a memo to all city department heads pointedly reminding them that his approval was required for all new municipal programs. The members of the city council did McKeldin one better. So concerned were they that workers were seeking unauthorized funds that they commissioned a private welfare agency to investigate the extent of the practice. Ultimately, the agency determined that while covert grant writing had indeed occurred, it was not as prevalent as the lawmakers feared. The findings must have come as a relief to the officials. Nonetheless, their suspicions reveal the extent to which the lawmakers worried that federally subsidized autonomy in antipoverty and human-services agencies and the increasing influence of African Americans in those agencies threatened the status quo. Not surprisingly, elected officials subjected antipoverty agencies to close scrutiny and frequent audits. They also, however, were cowed enough by the new political context to take the War on Poverty seriously.10
Aware that they were the cause of suspicion, activist employees nevertheless boldly championed community participation and also worked to make resident engagement meaningful rather than simply symbolic. Adding the voices of poor people with legitimate gripes against the city to already contested debates over public policy hardly had a calming effect on municipal affairs, and city workers sometimes found themselves caught in the middle of fierce battles. Residents pushed for fast and meaningful change, while city council members, outraged to have people on the city’s payroll fomenting discontent and by what historian Jon C. Teaford describes as “the unusual spectacle of government-sponsored rebellion,” tried to slow things down.11
Probably the most ardent proponents of community organization and participation within the municipal government were many of the administrators and staff members of the CAA. Although theoretically hired to coordinate and deliver poverty-alleviating services, many were dissatisfied with that narrow role. Political scientist Peter Bachrach, who studied Baltimore’s War on Poverty firsthand, argues that federal antipoverty legislation provided inner-city residents with what the Wagner Act had given workers during the 1930s; the laws gave federal sanction to and implied presidential endorsement of organizing efforts among those with limited power and influence. Not all staffs of CAAs across the nation pursued grassroots organizing in addition to service delivery, but under the leadership of Mitchell, the employees of the Baltimore agency seized the opportunity. As Mitchell asserted, although not necessarily designed for purposes beyond service delivery, “It’s possible to use an anti-poverty program for community organization and subvert [the intended goal].”12
Born in 1922, Mitchell had grown up in Baltimore. His commitment to combating racial injustice had hardened when he was a young boy. At the time, his older brother, Clarence, was working as a journalist for the Afro-American. In 1931, Clarence traveled to Cambridge, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, to cover the case of a Black man accused of murdering his white employer. Clarence arrived in town just as white residents were setting aflame the lynched body of the accused. They then dragged him through the African American section of the town. On learning of the brutal crime, Parren committed himself to fighting racism. He participated in local demonstrations against segregation during the 1930s and early 1940s. After high school, he served in World War II and subsequently attended Morgan State College in Baltimore. He next combined his desire to continue his education with his determination to fight discrimination and successfully sued the segregated University of Maryland to gain admittance into a graduate program. After receiving a master’s degree in sociology, he returned to Morgan to teach and remained involved in civil rights efforts. He also served as executive secretary for the Maryland Human Relations Commission. Then in 1965 he assumed the leadership of Baltimore’s Community Action Agency. After later leaving that post, he became the first African American from Maryland to be elected to the U.S. Congress, and while there, he helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus. Over the course of his career, Mitchell used multiple strategies to fight racial and economic injustice, and while heading the CAA, he committed himself and his staff to community organizing.13 “My theory is this,” he explained. “If you organize the poor people and show them where they can get some services which were previously denied them, they’ll begin thinking politically.”14
Among the responsibilities borne by Mitchell and his staff was the coordination and oversight of the use of federal War on Poverty grants in the city by municipal departments and nongovernmental entities alike. Mitchell, his staff, and the members of the Community Action Commission, the governing body of the CAA, used their authority to compel maximum community participation. In 1965, the CAA issued guidelines for those seeking federal anti-poverty funding. All proposals had to demonstrate that there had been and would be “in-depth involvement of poor residents” at every stage of the planning and program implementation process.15 The guideline’s authors, including Madeline Murphy, an outspoken advocate for racial and economic justice and a columnist for the Afro-American, also described what they considered inadequate community participation. Clearly mindful of the strategies whites in the city often used to give the pretense of having included African Americans in decision-making, the authors explained, “Gathering of information from residents, incorporating this into the proposal and subsequent proposal review by poor residents do not constitute involvement of the poor per se.”16 Poor people had to play meaningful roles in programming conception and design. The mandate validated the conviction that low-income residents had important insights into the causes of and best ways to alleviate poverty. As community activist and municipal employee Elizabeth Ward later explained, “Maybe I don’t have a degree, but I knew I could do it better than the planners could. White people would always come in and say, what you need is this or that, and I’d just tell them, ‘Don’t tell me what I need; ask me what I need.’”17
Just as CAA staffers raised the bar on community participation for recipients of Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) grants, they held themselves to high standards. The staff of the CAA was largely African American and, although the city did not monitor employment by sex during the 1960s, undoubtedly predominantly female. Many on the staff, such as Martina Madden, Joan Foster, and Charlotte Clark, had grown up or lived in low-income communities.18 They ran forty neighborhood centers in designated action areas and offered a variety of educational, medical, vocational, recreational, and family services. They also used neighborhood centers to mobilize residents into political action, with elected representatives governing each center. Community organizing was hardly new in Baltimore, and some low-income residents were already politically engaged. Others needed encouragement. As Goldie Baker, a public-housing and community activist and resident, recalls, the staff members of the CAA neighborhood centers were important in bringing “people together … [and] telling them how to stand up, be strong and organize.” 19
CAA staffers employed multiple community-organizing strategies. They used their influence and resources to help low- income residents establish independent organizations, demand input in municipal decision-making, and pressure the city for more and better public services. CAA staffers assisted welfare recipients and their advocates establish Mother Rescuers from Poverty, a welfare rights organization. They also accompanied public-housing residents to a meeting with the head of the Department of Housing and Community Development and endorsed the residents’ demand for greater influence. The meeting led to the creation of a Resident Advisory Board. Residents also used CAA letterhead to pen complaint letters to multiple city officials. Improving living conditions in low-income neighborhoods was a top priority. Members of newly formed neighborhood councils demanded cleaner streets, intensified rat eradication efforts, better parks and playgrounds, and more youth programs and recreation centers.20 Although city officials sometimes accommodated them, the pace of change was far too slow for CAA staffers and residents alike. “Why must the requests and desires of inner city residents always be denied?” Mitchell complained to the traffic commissioner, whose staff had ignored requests that traffic signals be installed at several busy intersections that children had to cross to get to school.21 Despite serious obstacles, rarely if ever in the city’s history had so many low-income residents—particularly African Americans—believed change was possible.
Given their different views on the importance of community mobilization in low-income neighborhoods, the staff of the CAA and the conservative members of the city council locked horns repeatedly. Remarkably, the CAA won some important battles. In 1967, Mitchell sought the council’s approval of Self-Help Housing, a program conceived of and planned entirely by low-income residents. The residents sought funds that could be used for property repairs and neighborhood upkeep. They also wanted to control hiring for the program. As Leander Douglas, the head of the Neighborhood Housing Action Committee, explained, the residents desired “a chance to work in our own communities.”22 The council balked. Revealing a level of condescension about low-income city residents that some of his fellow council members doubtlessly shared, Reuben Caplan complained, “There’s $330,000 involved in this program. It would be turned over to a group of people who have been unable to earn a living.”23 Eventually, however, only two council members voted against funding the program. The increasing importance of Black voting power—combined with the availability of federal funding for the initiative—tipped the balance of power in favor of the residents and their CAA supporters. The victory, while modest, was nonetheless monumental. Only four years earlier in Jim Crow Baltimore it would have been inconceivable that the city council would award low-income African Americans hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire themselves to combat neglect in their neighborhoods.24
The staff of the Model Cities project also exhibited a strong commitment to community mobilization. Elva Edwards, an African American social worker and native of Baltimore who joined the Model Cities project after a stint in the CAA, recalled, “Model Cities started from the streets. It was born there.”25 The Model Cities project in Baltimore did not become fully functioning until the 1970s. During the late 1960s, an informal staff worked out of the mayor’s office. Walter Carter, known by some as the Martin Luther King of Baltimore, served as the project’s community-relations specialist. Carter, a native of North Carolina and a social worker, was the chair of the city’s branch of CORE from 1961 to 1963. He led Freedom Rides to Maryland’s Eastern Shore and also spearheaded efforts to desegregate eating establishments along the state’s highways. In 1963, he was Maryland’s coordinator for the March on Washington. During the second half of the 1960s, much of his activism targeted housing discrimination. Like many civil rights activists of the time, he was painfully aware that residential segregation by race, and increasingly by class, was isolating low-income African Americans in neighborhoods and in a city with limited employment opportunities and paths to upward mobility. But he was also committed to improving conditions in the city. On assuming his post in Model Cities, like Edwards, Carter traveled through low-income neighborhoods and worked with residents to plan the next front of the city’s War on Poverty.26
African Americans, and Black women in particular, played important roles in fostering community participation in older municipal departments and in new federally funded antipoverty agencies. It also often fell to them to ensure that community participation meant more than mere tokenism. In the Department of Education, Pearl Cole Brackett, an African American former public school teacher, took the lead. Brackett was born in Washington, DC, in 1917 and moved to Baltimore as a young girl. She attended Morgan State College where she was president of the school’s chapter of Delta Sigma Theta. Because the University of Maryland was segregated, Brackett pursued graduate study at New York University and the University of Massachusetts at the expense of the state of Maryland. When in 1968, the school board hired Brackett as the assistant superintendent of community schools, she assumed the most senior position a Black woman had ever held in a school system in Maryland.27
Reflecting on her early years in the job, Brackett described sexism as a serious obstacle that she faced; some on her staff were reluctant to serve under a woman. Financial constraints quickly became a second, pressing concern. Brackett found it far easier to secure resident volunteers than funds for their proposals. By 1969, she had organized community councils composed of residents and professionals for each school in the program, which was itself directed by a citywide advisory board. Yet she lacked adequate resources. A grant from the state eventually enabled her staff and community residents to institute a multitude of programs. Community schools offered adult education courses, high school equivalency classes, job training programs, and child-care services for parents attending the schools. Some schools also housed social-service clinics and had staff able to conduct health screenings. Community councils installed lights on playgrounds so that recreational facilities could be used after dark. In addition, Brackett intentionally included law enforcement officials in the program. Police brutality was an ongoing problem in Baltimore, and Brackett hoped to ease tensions. Mincing no words, she argued, “The Police Department belongs in this project, so kids at an early age can see the police as someone to help them, not someone who is going to beat their brains in.”28 Despite the success of many community school activities, funding remained scarce, and some residents complained that their ideas did not result in programming. Other parents, however, remained enthusiastic. “I see great things coming out of community schools. I see links between fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, teachers, school staff and community and understanding like a hard clenched fist, communities working together to build great things,” explained one mother involved in the program.29
Brackett was not unique as a Black female administrator in a municipal department intent on realizing the potential of community participation. F. Eulalian Ferguson and Gordine Blount pursued the goal for the Department of Housing and Community Development, and they had counterparts elsewhere in the city government, such as the Departments of Welfare and Health.30 Meanwhile, pressure from activists and residents to make the government more responsive led Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro III, who replaced McKeldin in 1967, to hire Marguerite Campbell to serve as his community relations specialist. “Aggressive … in a very diplomatic way,” D’Alesandro later recalled, Campbell quickly earned a reputation for helping residents with low incomes cut through “bureaucratic red tape” and solve problems they had with the city government.31 Like other municipal employees, Campbell appreciated the limitations of what the War on Poverty could achieve. And like Carter of Model Cities, she was particularly worried that residential segregation precluded poor city residents from accessing economic opportunities available outside of the city. Nevertheless, she did her part to hold the city accountable to all of its residents and advocated on behalf of community participation.32
The presence of activist agency administrators and staffers promoting community involvement hardly quelled tensions between municipal workers and low-income residents. When they felt city employees were failing to deliver on the promise of the War on Poverty, residents pressed for greater representation and bolder action. And when they believed service providers disrespected them or treated them unfairly, they protested.33 Some of the most dramatic showdowns occurred between Mother Rescuers from Poverty and the staff of the Department of Public Welfare (DPW). Created in 1966 by Margaret McCarty, Daisy Snipes, and Zelma Storey, three African American women who were recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and Joan Berezin, a young white activist, Mother Rescuers quickly became the city’s most active welfare rights organization. Members raised numerous concerns about the DPW staff and the injustices inherent in federal and state welfare policies. As McCarty argued, “Welfare robs a person of his dignity and his rights. When you apply, automatically everything you say is assumed to be a lie. By the time you get on welfare, you just don’t think much of yourself. And once you get on the rolls there are ‘policies’ to keep you feeling that way.”34 Insensitivity on the part of DPW workers was part of the problem. “Investigators are trained to be nasty,” McCarty explained. “They just come to your home whenever they feel like it, one at the back door while another rings the front bell. They look everywhere. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?
What’s in the icebox?’ is what they ask.”35 Throughout the late 1960s, Mother Rescuers engaged in many forms of protest—including a sleep-in in the DPW lobby—to pressure the agency’s leadership and staff to respond to their critiques. In some cases, they met with success. The sleep-in won Mother Rescuers permission from the Maryland DPW to set up shop in the agency’s Baltimore offices, where they provided support for those seeking assistance and monitored workers to ensure they were courteously following the law.36 While racial solidarity and sisterhood only inconsistently characterized the relationship between city workers and residents with low incomes, members of the two groups did join forces to press for change. Clarence Blount recalled that Mitchell and the staff of the CAA were especially adept at rallying residents to participate in demonstrations. The 1967 protest at the city’s Federal Office Building and subsequent march to Washington were but two examples of many.37 Employees of municipal departments also took to the streets to demand improvements in services and the nation’s welfare state. And despite confrontations and mistrust between the staff of DPW and AFDC recipients, members of the two groups also sometimes found common cause. In 1969, for example, an interracial group of eighty AFDC recipients and DPW staffers traveled to Maryland’s State House in Annapolis. In a series of meetings arranged by Geraldine Aronin, a white woman who was the Baltimore DPW’s community relations chief, the contingent made demands of two legislative committees and spoke with the governor to request increased welfare benefits and greater representation for low-income residents on the city’s and state’s welfare boards.38 Although their demands were inconsistently met, the cross-class, interracial organizing was sometimes successful and contributed to the momentum for democratizing decision-making in Baltimore.
African American men, such as Mitchell and Carter, also played critically important leadership roles in community organizing efforts and engaged in considerable activism in defense of the War on Poverty and on behalf of a more generous welfare state. Some whites were deeply committed as well. Most antipoverty warriors in Baltimore, however, were Black women. Some were service providers, some were service recipients, and others were both. Moreover, women in the city’s lowest-wage positions often had much in common with recipients of welfare-related services; they were sometimes nothing more than a training program, paycheck, or pink slip removed from the clients they served, if their low wages had not already qualified them for government benefits. As a result, they were intimately familiar with the hardship of those struggling to get by on limited means and clearly believed low-income residents deserved a voice in municipal affairs. Certainly, tensions continued to emerge. Nevertheless, the joint efforts by Black women with varying connections to antipoverty agencies on behalf of democratic decision-making and a more generous welfare state were an important dimension of 1960s activism in Baltimore. It also reflected staunch determination on the part of African American women to play a role in charting the course the city took to respond to urban problems.
“The Agony of This Kind of Existence”: Campaigns to Strengthen the Welfare State
As battles to increase democratic decision-making raged in the city, service providers also attended to the important task of improving service availability and delivery. Activist providers were outspoken in their critiques of both the War on Poverty and the welfare state. They were also innovative when it came to attempting to fix the system’s flaws. They worked hard to make sure the city made use of all available federal grants, tried to fill gaps in the safety net with new programs, and protested encroachments on funding. They also attempted to make service delivery more convenient and accessible.
Even as they operated from within public agencies, many service providers harbored deep suspicions regarding the government’s commitment to fighting poverty. As their engagement in protest evinces, few appeared to believe that Johnson’s inadequately resourced War on Poverty could accomplish enough. Carter and Campbell were among those who called attention to the dire and long-term implications of ongoing residential segregation. Meanwhile, Mitchell and many on the staff of the CAA also protested the toll the president’s commitment to fighting the Vietnam War took on levels of antipoverty funding.39 Moreover, the lack of a job-creation component in federal poverty-fighting efforts led CAA staff and residents to propose grant-funded programs intentionally designed to employ community residents. In 1966, for example, the CAA partnered with U-JOIN and the Baltimore Neighborhood Commons, Inc., on a playground-building initiative that would have a staff of a hundred. The following year, the CAA embraced a jobs drive as one of its key initiatives. Because the federal government was not creating enough jobs, CAA staffers and community residents attempted to at least use their small-scale initiatives to fight unemployment.40
Some administrators and employees of DPW were also openly critical of the welfare programs they themselves staffed. And although it may have come as a surprise to some welfare rights advocates, among the critics was Esther Lazarus, DPW’s Baltimore director. A white native of the city who had joined the department’s staff during the Great Depression, Lazarus, the only woman to head a municipal department, was intimately familiar with critiques of the welfare system—and she agreed with many of them. Concerned that benefit levels were too low and welfare workers too intrusive, in 1967, she asserted, “I believe strongly that, if welfare gave a really adequate family grant, people would be able to arrange their lives better than we could arrange it for them.”41 Like welfare rights advocates, Lazarus also expressed concern that the welfare system—from the courts to service agencies—compromised the dignity of low-income recipients. As a solution, Lazarus advanced the controversial position that Congress should get rid of the AFDC entirely and instead simply guarantee all Americans a minimum income. “Instead of all this effort we expend trying to make people prove their need, we should have a declaration of income and then set a standard below which no one should live,” she declared.42
Others on the staff of DPW shared Lazarus’s frustration with the miserly nature of the American welfare state and the treatment received by welfare recipients and tried to raise public awareness. Barbara Mikulski, a white social worker employed in the community relations division of DPW, was among them, and she was also the advocate who became the most famous. Mikulski went on to serve on the Baltimore City Council, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the U.S. Senate. Although Mikulski helped to create and then rode into office on a wave of white ethnic pride, her political ascent was not a product of race-baiting. Instead, she consistently attempted to build racially diverse coalitions around economic issues, an effort she pursued at DPW. During the late 1960s, she was a critic of the welfare system, which she fully appreciated inadequately met the needs of low-income African Americans and whites alike. In 1969, for example, she made a joint presentation with a welfare recipient and did not sugarcoat her message. “Public welfare keeps families in poverty,” she stated. Welfare payments did not raise recipients’ incomes even to the poverty line, and intrusive surveillance policies, such as unannounced home visits, led to family breakups, she argued.43
Others at DPW also agreed. Roger Brown, an African American social worker, described the unfortunate tensions that often divided service providers and recipients. “We represent the system. We’re the guy that’s saying ‘No, No, No, No.’”44 And Edmond Jones, an African American DPW social service director, shared Mikulski’s and Brown’s critique. “Even if a recipient somehow kept every expense within the allotted grant,” he explained, “[the recipient] would have a maximum of $5 a month left over. If one child became ill and had to be rushed by cab to a doctor that would be it.… Anyone ought to be able to see the agony of this kind of existence.” Jones also called into question the sincerity of the federal government’s commitment to reducing hunger. The nation’s Food Stamp program “was never intended really to aid welfare clients,” he argued. “It is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and it is designed actually to aid farmers and the national economy, not to relieve the burdens of the poor.”45
Even as they were critical of the systems that they staffed, activist anti-poverty and human-services workers attempted to use the limited influence they had to make improvements. Although they never engaged in the level of activism for which the staff of the CAA and DPW became notorious, employees of the Department of Health were particularly successful at finding and securing federal grants to ease hardship. They also tried to devise methods the city could use to coordinate service delivery so as to avoid having multiple agencies offering duplicated or piecemeal programming. In 1968, Dr. Matthew Tayback, a white man who was the city’s deputy health commissioner, urged elected officials to create a single agency “to work with appropriate Federal and State offices so Baltimore may better receive an appropriate share of funds allocated for the nutrition of children.”46 Tayback estimated that an alarming 55,000 infants and children in the city could benefit from programs intended to combat malnutrition. Yet the city was failing to make full use of available aid. Baltimore also lacked a free milk program, and underserved children who qualified for free school lunches were not receiving them, Tayback protested. “To get the best for the city,” he argued, Baltimore could leave no funding source untapped.47 His alert prompted action; the city sought new nutrition grants and attempted to coordinate delivery. Tayback also helped the city secure funds from the federal government for health care services, including a program for low-income expectant mothers.48 Efforts by the staff of the Baltimore Health Department won their agency a reputation among city officials for “aggressively pursuing the federal dollar.”49
While some city employees helped to bring new welfare services to Baltimore, others worked to ensure that all who qualified for such entitlement programs as AFDC and Food Stamps found their way onto the rolls. Although the city’s rapidly expanding pool of welfare recipients angered some taxpayers and elected officials in both the city and the state, many DPW workers took considerable pride in securing critical benefits for residents who needed them. Meanwhile, DPW employees also fought welfare-funding reductions—independently as well as with recipients. In 1968, more than a hundred welfare workers signed a petition protesting state-level cuts. Beatrice Langford, the supervisor of the DPW training department, initiated the petition drive. “The ways of the State can be inscrutable, if not bungling and inhumane,” she complained.50 In addition, in 1968, DPW staffers and welfare-service recipients joined forces and inundated the mayor and state officials with letters in an unsuccessful bid to win resources for a demonstration project in which they were involved.51
Other municipal employees also attempted to improve the ways their agencies delivered services. In the mid-1960s, many began to argue that the city should replace large, impersonal, centralized office buildings with smaller outposts modeled on CAA neighborhood centers. Supporters believed decentralization would make government agencies more accessible and convenient. They also hoped community residents would be able to win increased authority over decision-making in decentralized locations and that agency staff members would become more empathetic if they worked in the neighborhoods where their clients lived. By the end of the decade, many city agencies, including the Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare had adopted decentralization at least in part. Even the Baltimore Police Department created community-relations centers, and D’Alesandro began organizing mayor’s stations around the city. Decentralization was hardly compensation for the inadequacy of antipoverty funding and welfare benefits. Nonetheless, it represented an attempt by agency administrators to alter the power relationship between service providers and recipients. Instead of compelling residents to travel to distant, impersonal central offices, city workers moved to be closer to those they were hired to serve.52
Efforts by workers in antipoverty agencies and municipal departments to bring new programs to Baltimore and strengthen the welfare state sometimes led to showdowns with elected city officials. Conflict between the staff of the CAA and members of the Baltimore City Council were most frequent. In some cases, the council simply rejected CAA proposals. Such was the fate of plans to create food cooperatives and credit unions.53 In other cases, the council engaged Mitchell and his staff in protracted wrangling over proposals. It took two years to open Legal Aid offices in the city, for example. Not surprisingly, conservative council members were hardly inclined to approve a request likely to ensnare the city in legal battles brought by low-income residents.54 Ultimately, Mitchell and other advocates of Legal Aid prevailed—at least in part. They had hoped for ten neighborhood Legal Aid offices, but the city council approved only two. It was still a victory. “We had to fight to get this,” declared Tilghman G. Pitts Jr., chair of the Legal Aid board, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the first office in 1967.55 And the importance of the victory grew over the next years. In 1968, the board of Legal Aid granted their attorneys permission to represent at no cost “neighborhood groups, tenant groups, welfare protest organizations, and civil rights groups in slum neighborhoods.”56 Organized low-income city residents gained a new and important tool in their efforts to fight poverty and injustice in Baltimore, and Mitchell and the staff of the CAA deserved much of the credit.
“The Wind Whistling Through the Walls”: Welfare Services and Gendered Caretaking
The new antipoverty and social welfare programs that municipal workers and residents with low incomes helped to secure in Baltimore, in addition to improved access to entitlement programs, alleviated hardship for many in the city. The changes also produced gendered outcomes that proved particularly important for women. In fact, ultimately, the Great Society benefited women in two very significant albeit unintended ways. First, federal spending created many jobs that women were more likely than men to fill. And second, new programs made available from the state services that women had earlier attempted to provide for their families on their own. The increased availability of public provisions—in health care, nutrition, and recreation, for example—replaced or mitigated some of women’s gendered caretaking obligations. At the same time, civil rights legislation that outlawed segregation opened access to new or better services than had previously been available to African Americans, also alleviating caretaking labor. The ramifications for women with low incomes were particularly significant because they were the least able to purchase labor-reducing services in the private sector.
In the mid-1960s, while conducting a home visit, a social worker from DPW witnessed firsthand the level of the usually invisible labor that poverty extracted from poor women. While chatting with an AFDC recipient in her well-maintained but rundown home, the social worker learned that the client had made all of her children’s clothing by hand. She also had sewn the curtains that hung in her windows. Gifts of food from family and friends supplemented her welfare check and helped her to scrimp by. But her dependence on gifts reflected the inadequacy of her means to stave off hunger. A washboard in her tub indicated that she did her family’s laundry by hand, sparing the expense of a laundromat. And her children’s sleeping quarters revealed the extent of her ingenuity—and also the lengths women went to on behalf of their families. Her two children had their own beds because she had sawed a single mattress in half.57 Great Society programs were hardly an adequate antidote to the hardship the welfare recipient and others like her faced. They could and did, however, prove a source of some relief that alleviated some of the caretaking obligations low-income women bore.
Dramatic improvements in the availability and accessibility of health insurance and health care services during the 1960s were a tremendously important source of relief for not just the ill but also the mothers, daughters, and other women who cared for them. When introducing Americans to the Medicare program that his administration created, President Lyndon Johnson noted, “Every American family will benefit by the extension of social security to cover the hospital costs of their aged parents.”58 Medicare also had specific implications for the adult daughters of aging parents, as they were often the health care providers who filled in when professional care was too expensive. The introduction of Medicaid produced similar outcomes for mothers and wives. In 1966, welfare officials in Baltimore estimated that Medicaid was going to extend health coverage to two hundred thousand city residents, doubling the number who had access to some medical services under the state’s indigent-care program.59 Both the ill and those who previously cared for them at home were the beneficiaries.
Meanwhile, legal desegregation made more medical facilities in the city available to African Americans, and federally funded public health programs that were part of the War on Poverty also increased access to medical care. The decision by city officials to adopt some community-based health services provisions and to include residents in decision-making bodies also made medical services more accessible and accountable. As one mother explained about a neighborhood pediatric center, “We can walk here.… They have good doctors here, and everything you need is right here.”60 By 1968, three hundred thousand city residents, about a third of the population, were assisted by public health programs. But serious problems with health care availability persisted. The city relied on sixteen sources of federal, state, and local funding to provide for public health. Each funding source had its own set of standards for implementation, and as a result, Tayback of the health department complained, service delivery was “confusing” and in some cases “inefficient.”61 Nevertheless, the greater access to health insurance and medical services relieved not only physical suffering but also the tremendous pressure earlier borne by women to compensate for inadequate state support, segregation, and low incomes.
Federal nutrition programs were also among the Great Society initiatives that helped to ease caretaking responsibilities. During the 1960s, low-income women in Baltimore repeatedly protested the quality of food they could provide their families on limited budgets. In 1966, for example, members of Mother Rescuers from Poverty prepared a meal for Baltimore’s Mayor McKeldin that represented the types of food AFDC recipients were constrained to offering their families. The featured entrée was Spam, a low-cost canned-meat product consisting of pork mixed with ham. The mayor politely refused the offer.62 Meanwhile, concern about food quality and affordability led some women to work with CAA employees to plan the creation of food cooperatives. Although the city council rejected the proposal, antipoverty warriors did manage to carry out a buy-in-bulk program in an effort to make food more affordable. Meanwhile, the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panthers did execute the food cooperative idea. The Food Stamp program, which the Johnson administration made permanent, and other nutrition programs created as part of the War on Poverty provided some relief to women concerned about and responsible for their family’s nutritional needs. Although federal programs failed to fully respond to the problems women with low incomes faced, even structurally flawed programs such as Food Stamps alleviated to some extent women’s fears that they would not be able to provide for their families. So too did school lunch and milk programs and nutritional programs aimed at older Americans.63
Increases in federal funding for programs that served elderly Americans and youth further eased gendered caretaking responsibilities. During the 1960s, older African Americans, and Black women in particular, were over-represented among the city’s poor residents. Those who earlier had worked as domestic workers or in other precarious jobs had been excluded from participation in the nation’s top-tier Social Security program, and so they typically qualified only for a less generous benefit. Black family members no doubt tried to compensate financially for the income gap that left many older African American in far tougher straits than most white seniors, and many women surely also provided caretaking support. War on Poverty funding that enabled antipoverty agencies and municipal departments to increase not only medical and nutrition programs but also recreation and housing services for older Americans eased hardship and likely also relieved women of some of the stresses involved in caring for older relatives.64
Meanwhile, federal grants enabled city employees to provide new programs for children and youth. To be sure, some officials’ enthusiasm for recreational programming and other War on Poverty initiatives stemmed from an interest in preventing “riots.” Nevertheless, as was the case with nutritional services, youth programming was a top priority among women with low incomes; mothers frequently voiced the concern that youth deprived of recreational services and structured activities would end up in trouble. War on Poverty funds subsidized considerable programming for children. Head Start and other early-childhood educational programs granted women some child-care relief while enabling them to give their children access to educational resources many families could otherwise not afford. Grant-funded programs carried out by the city’s public library system, museums, zoo, and symphony orchestra created enriching activities that families independently might not have been able to provide. CAA neighborhood centers, community schools, and other entities used federal funds to provide children with opportunities to take African dance classes and music lessons, participate in fashion shows, and engage in a wide range of extracurricular activities. Meanwhile, federally and locally sponsored recreation programs and summer camps relieved mothers of not just supervisory responsibilities but also of the worry of finding safe places for their children to play.65
The introduction or improvement of other municipal services during the 1960s also helped alleviate women’s caretaking responsibilities. As city resident Aloha Burrell complained, she had “worn out a dozen brooms” doing work that should have been performed and paid for by the city.66 Not surprisingly, the quality of sanitation and housing services available in their neighborhoods was of considerable concern to mothers worried about health and safety. Self-help initiatives such as the Afro-American’s annual Clean Block campaigns continued through the decade—in some cases subsidized by federal rather than private funds. And the CAA’s community-run Self-Help Housing program responded to residents’ determination “to expedite and supplement existing City services to improve housing and environmental conditions.”67 New programs and improved services were hardly an adequate response to decades of neglect and the ongoing problem of residential segregation. Even modest improvements, however, helped to make neighborhoods and housing complexes cleaner and at least partially alleviated the responsibilities women assumed to keep their family members safe.68
The relationship between the provision of public services and women’s caretaking roles casts welfare-state expansion and the Great Society in a new light. Because care work is economic activity, to the extent that new services replaced unpaid labor, it was a form of wealth redistribution. The state rather than women wearing out brooms assumed a measure of responsibility for the well-being of its citizens. To be sure, in cities like Baltimore, the municipal government often paid African Americans who carried out the new public services wages that kept the workers themselves in or near poverty. Meanwhile, policy makers hardly acknowledged the economic transactions under way, and the gendered caretaking responsibilities that women continued to perform remained invisible in national accountings of economic activity. Nevertheless, even if inadequately, the state did assume as public responsibility the provision of some of the caretaking labor earlier performed by women.
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In her eloquent account of the War on Poverty in Las Vegas, Annelise Orleck describes the battles low- income African American women waged against elected officials to secure federal funding for antipoverty efforts.69 In Baltimore, some among the largely African American and female staffs of the CAA, the Model City program, and municipal human-services providers waged similar fights, sometimes in solidarity with activists and low-income residents. The government workers used their positions within the state to increase democratic participation in decision-making and improve the welfare state, while activists and residents pushed from outside of the system. Grants from Congress earmarked for antipoverty efforts provided the anti-poverty workers and service providers with a degree of independence from elected city officials, which allowed them to pursue a revitalization plan for the city that did not center on downtown commercial revitalization. The War on Poverty, despite its many limitations, enabled Black Baltimoreans and women to exercise unprecedented influence over the municipal agenda, an outcome of grave concern to conservative members of the city council. But government jobs hardly guaranteed workers a living wage, a problem public-sector unions stood ready to address.