King and the Other America by Sylvie Laurent

Author:Sylvie Laurent
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520288560
Publisher: University of California Press

The human services—medical attention, social services, neighborhood amenities of various kinds—are in scarce supply in this country, especially in localities of poverty. The traditional way of providing manpower for these jobs—degree-granting programs—cannot fill all the niches that are opening up. . . . The growth of the human services should be rapid. It should be developed in a manner insuring that the jobs that will be generated will not primarily be for professionals with college and postgraduate diplomas but for people from the neighborhoods who can perform important functions for their neighbors.17

King had perceived that human services jobs could not only tackle unemployment in dispossessed communities and provide them with much needed care, but they would also spearhead a “person-oriented society” which, borne out of a “revolution of value,” would cure the nation from its materialism. During their impromptu meeting at the HEW, NWRO activist specifically pointed to the lack of childcare services, which rendered the welfare policy’s work requirement unjust and immoral. They claimed that the social policies at play were about norm enforcement rather than poverty alleviation and were infused with underlying racialist aims. The “man in the house rule” was exposed as a racially coded and gender-discriminating provision. Poverty was not only framed as an insidious form of violence but also as an exploitative form of domination. One version of the campaign statement read that the poor were “the captives, the colonized of the colony, consigned to an island of abject poverty from the mainland of power and decision . . . the poor are trapped in poverty because they are voiceless and powerless; the most militant poor have resorted to retaliatory violence in their demands for economic justice . . . they have looted stores as they have been legally looted by the greed of the business world.”18

At the Department of the Interior, which activists visited on May 3, members of the Committee of 100 met with Secretary of Interior Steward L. Udall but focused their attention on Commissioner of Indian Affairs Robert L. Bennett. Native American spokesperson Mel Thom denounced the forced “Americanization” of native children, reviled a “paternalistic” and “colonialistic system,” and demanded the right to “separate but equal communities,” reservations free to self-govern—altogether a much more radical phrasing of the demands of the civil rights movement than the government was accustomed to. Moreover, on this day Native Americans were supported by Chicanos and black Americans, who expressed their common sense of invisibility and neglect. Reservations, barrios, and ghettos were exposed as an American shame, spaces of exploitation and oppression.

After a meeting with Dean Rusk at the State Department, where the committee asked chiefly for the protection of the land rights of “Spanish-speaking people” and Native Americans, Abernathy announced to the press that “the poor” were “no longer divided” and that the time had come for a “people’s power.” Portraying antipoverty programs as efforts toward domestic pacification, black, white and brown poor challenged the conventional views of the impoverished and showed an unprecedented united front.

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