This article explores three distinct community action agencies (CAAs) created as part of the War on Poverty in Los Angeles and their connection to movements for cultural and economic empowerment. The city’s “official” War on Poverty agency eventually collapsed under the weight of intransigence by city officials, differences among black leaders and civil rights activists, and divisions between blacks and Latinos in part fueled by the Black Power and Chicano movements. Meanwhile, African Americans and Latinos used the inspiration of those movements and the support of labor unions to establish separate CAAs outside of the domain of the “official” War on Poverty agency. Those ethnically distinct “community unions” provided a sense of racial/ethnic/cultural pride and solidarity for Latino and African American neighborhoods and communities in Los Angeles. This article demonstrates how the shifting boundaries of race shaped the development of the War on Poverty in Los Angeles and that the War on Poverty encouraged movements for cultural and economic empowerment.
and Jack D. Forbes, “The Early African Heritage of California,” in Lawrence B. De Graaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, eds., Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
2.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
3.
Gareth Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
4.
and Judith Russell, Economics, Bureaucracy, and Race: How Keynesians Misguided the War on Poverty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
5.
For an insightful look at the growth of the Los Angeles NAACP in the 1940s, see Josh Sides, “Rethinking Black Migration: A Perspective from the West,” in Scott E. Caspar and Lucinda M. Long, eds., Moving Stories: Migration and the American West 1850-2000 (Reno: Nevada Humanities Commission, 2001), 200-204.
6.
and Gregory Payne and Scot Ratzan, Tom Bradley: The Impossible Dream (Santa Monica, CA: Roundtable Publishing, 1986), 58-61.
7.
On African American suburbanization, see Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
8.
and “Citizens Mobilize to Fight Prop 14,”Los Angeles Sentinel, August 6, 1964.
9.
and Dale Rogers Marshall, The Politics of Participation in Poverty: A Case Study of the Board of the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency of Greater Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 15-15.
10.
and Gillis Long to Larry O’Brien, August 30, 1995, White House Central Files (hereafter WHCF), Box 25, “HU2/ST5 8/24/65-9/11/65.” It was at this time that Yorty started a file on Brookins, highlighting his “connections” to the Left. See Watts Disturbances, Box C-1925, Yorty Collection, Los Angeles City Archives.
11.
City Council Minutes, 8 July 1965; and James S. Mize, Chief Deputy of the Board of Supervisors to Mayor Sam Yorty, 15 July 1965, Los Angeles City Council File #107082, Supplement #10, Los Angeles City Archives.
12.
“Mills Backed on Poverty by Pastors; Debate Recall,”Los Angeles Sentinel, July 22, 1965, A1-A1, 11-11.
13.
and Robert Blauner, “Whitewash over Watts: The Failure of the McCone Commission Report,” in Robert M. Fogelson, ed., Mass Violence in America (New York: Arno Press, 1969).
14.
See also David O. Sears, “Political Attitude of Los Angeles Negroes,” in Nathan E. Cohen, ed., The Los Angeles Riots: A Socio-Psychological Study (New York: Praeger, 1970), 700-700.
15.
The term “racial nationalism” is from Gary Gerstle’s brilliantAmerican Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
16.
See also CBS Reports: Watts, Riot or Revolt, prod. Jack Beck, originally aired December 7, 1965 (New York: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2000).
17.
and “Collins’ Proposal Rejected,”Los Angeles Sentinel, August 26, 1965, A1-A1, A8-A8.
18.
Joseph A. Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 63-64.
19.
Collins to LBJ, n.d., WHCF, Box 25.
20.
and Myrna Oliver, “Watts Activist Ted Watkins, Sr. Dies at 71,”Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1993, B-1-B-1, 4-4.
21.
On the UAW’s involvement in the War on Poverty and its concomitant representation of a new constituency, low-wage disenfranchised workers, see Vernon Coleman, “Labor Power and Social Equality: Union Politics in a Changing Economy,”Political Science Quarterly103, no. 4 (Winter 1988-89): 687-705.
22.
Quoted in “Watts Union Workers Form Action Committee,”Los Angeles Sentinel, August 26, 1965, 4A-4A.
23.
and Harry Bernstein, “Labor-Backed Group in Watts Given 260,806,”Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1967, II-1-II-1, 3-3.
24.
Los Angeles City Council File #104020, Supplement 11, Los Angeles City Archives; and “The Watts Labor Community Action Committee,” brochure, in “Watts 1960s” folder, Southern California Library for Social Research.
25.
Robert Perrin to Seymour Brandwein, Dept. of Labor, November 1, 1966, WHCF, LBJ Library; and “Staff Report of Actions Taken,” August 18, 1967, Ramsey Clark Papers, Box 76, “Watts August 1965,” LBJ Library.
26.
and Robert Bauman, “From Tuberculosis Sanatorium to Medical Center: The History of the Olive View Medical Center, 1920-1989” (unpublished master’s thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1989), 210.
27.
See also William L. Van DeBurg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
28.
and U. S. Census Bureau, U.S. Census of Population, 1960. Subject Reports. Persons of Spanish Surname. Final Report PC (2)-1B (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963).
29.
and Elizabeth Sutherland Martinez and Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez, Viva La Raza! The Struggle of the Mexican-American People (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974).
30.
and Raphael Sonenshein, Politics in Black and White: Race and Power in LosAngeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85-85.
31.
See also Acuña, A Community under Siege, 132-133.
32.
See Pycior, LBJ and Mexican Americans, 153-163.
33.
and Greenstone and Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics, 211-212.
34.
and Greenstone and Peterson, Race and Authority in Urban Politics, 211-212.
35.
and Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 178-182.
36.
See also Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999), 208-215.
37.
See Isidro D. Ortiz, “Chicano Urban Politics and the Politics of Reform in the Seventies,”Western Political Quarterly37, no. 4 (December 1984): 564-577.
38.
See also Acuña, Occupied America, 403-403.
39.
Quote is from Chávez, Eastside Landmark, 39-39.
40.
“The East Los Angeles Community Union,” Community Development Corporation Oral History Project (New York: Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, 2000).
41.
and Chávez, Eastside Landmark, 35-37, 59-64.
42.
and Marín, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio, 187-195.
43.
“The East Los Angeles Community Union.”
44.
Chávez, Eastside Landmark, 39-45, 87-88.
45.
The board member quote is from Marín, Social Protest in an Urban Barrio, 179-179. The Lizzaraga quote is from “The East Los Angeles Community Union.”
46.
Quote is from UAW Report, quoted in Chávez, Eastside Landmark, 29-29.
47.
Chávez, Eastside Landmark, 259-264.
48.
For a similar multiracial perspective on the War on Poverty in another community in the West, see the excellent article by William Clayson, “ ‘The Barrios and the Ghettos Have Organized!’: Community Action, Political Acrimony and the War on Poverty in San Antonio,”Journal of Urban History28, no. 2 (January 2002): 158-184.
