Gender and American Culture

AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism

Tamar W. Carroll

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781469619897
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining three interconnected case studies, Tamar Carroll powerfully demonstrates the ability of grassroots community activism to bridge racial and cultural differences and effect social change. Drawing on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post–World War II New York City, Carroll shows how poor people transformed the antipoverty organization Mobilization for Youth and shaped the subsequent War on Poverty. Highlighting the little-known National Congress of Neighborhood Women, she reveals the significant participation of working-class white ethnic women and women of color in New York City's feminist activism. Finally, Carroll traces the partnership between the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), showing how gay men and feminists collaborated to create a supportive community for those affected by the AIDS epidemic, to improve health care, and to oppose homophobia and misogyny during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Carroll contends that social policies that encourage the political mobilization of marginalized groups and foster coalitions across identity differences are the most effective means of solving social problems and realizing democracy.

CHAPTER ONE

A Cauldron within Which New Ideas Can Be Tested Out

MFY and the Early War on Poverty

The New York Times heralded the launching of Mobilization for Youth in June 1962 with a front-page photograph featuring President John F. Kennedy announcing the federal grant that would fund the organization. Kennedy held his press conference at the White House Rose Garden while flanked by Attorney General Robert Kennedy and New York City mayor Robert Wagner, along with cabinet officials. “Using the Lower East Side area as a giant laboratory,” the Times explained, “project officials will seek to reform the social patterns of an entire community as a way of guiding youth into conforming with the accepted patterns of American life.” In their 600-page proposal, MFY’s directors promised to “bring together the actionist and the researcher in a joint program of social engineering.”1 With $12.6 million in funds to be distributed over five years from the federal government, the city of New York, and the Ford Foundation, MFY represented the early Cold War era’s faith in government intervention, expert knowledge, and social science research and planning.

Mobilization for Youth emerged during an era of technocratic liberalism, at the forefront of the federal government’s adoption of social science research and planning as a means of creating a better and more harmonious nation.2 The program’s founding reflected long-term concerns over juvenile delinquency and the country’s Cold War emphasis on domesticity and breadwinner-based masculinity at a time when married women with children were entering the labor force in increasing numbers.3 The growth of the civil rights movement had drawn attention to the widespread poverty among African Americans and Latinos, prompting the Kennedy brothers and the Ford Foundation to seek to improve conditions in the ghettoes of the urban North. Together, these forces generated support for MFY.

Initially, MFY designers Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin created a program emphasizing job training and enhanced social services. They explained that “the Cloward-Ohlin view of the sources and causes of delinquency is that poverty imposes handicaps upon the potential of young people for achievement, as does discrimination based on race and religion. . . . Efforts to prevent delinquency will succeed only if they provide young people with genuine opportunities to behave differently—especially through creative educational and exciting work programs—and if they involve residents directly.”4 Because Cloward and Ohlin conceived of juvenile delinquency as primarily a male phenomenon, the programs initially targeted only young men. According to Rosalyn Baxandall, who was employed as a community worker in one of MFY’s neighborhood service centers on Stanton Street in New York’s Lower East Side, “Everything was boys. Everything was boys. Everything was boys, and it really bothered me.”5

Quickly, however, MFY’s social workers found that it was low-income mothers who came into their offices seeking help as they contended with recalcitrant landlords, the mazelike city bureaucracy and its often demeaning welfare eligibility checks, and a school system unresponsive to their children’s needs. Influenced by the civil rights movement and by their participation in consciousness-raising groups sponsored by MFY’s social workers, these Puerto Rican and African American mothers took part in direct-action politics—including school boycotts, rent strikes, and sit-ins at the city welfare department—to demand that their needs be met and their rights as citizens be recognized. As Stanford Kravitz, an architect of the Economic Opportunity Act observed, their efforts “escalated long-festering problems into wide public view, so that discussion of them as critical national issues could no longer be avoided.” In doing so, MFY participants and staff “prepared the ground” for the establishment of the Community Action Programs (CAPs) of the War on Poverty, which was launched by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Like MFY, CAPs were agencies funded by public and private sources, dedicated to providing “services, assistance and other activities” in the effort to eliminate poverty. Importantly, CAPs had a mandate to involve poor people themselves in the planning and operation of programs directed at them. In accordance with Title II A of the Economic Opportunity Act, these programs were to be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served.”6 Precisely what this mandate entailed in practice remains a subject of great controversy: Was it practical or desirable to involve poor people in decision making about social programs? Did CAPs actually do this?

While much has been written about Mobilization for Youth and its influence on the War on Poverty, we know far less about the grassroots members who pushed and enabled the organization to mount its most significant campaigns against racism in city schools, slum landlords, and discriminatory and inadequate welfare provision.7 Scholars have focused on Ohlin, Cloward, and Cloward’s partner, Frances Fox Piven, as the intellectual architects of MFY and the subsequent welfare rights movement that MFY helped spur. For example, in his 2007 comparative study of MFY and HARYOU-ACT, a sister CAP demonstration project in Harlem, sociologist Noel Cazenave used a framework of elite competition to demonstrate how Ohlin, Cloward, and other “elite, activist” social scientists “helped reshape democratic processes” through their support of the civil rights movement and, especially, by encouraging the “citizen participation revolution.” Cazenave argues that CAPs in the War on Poverty succeeded in dramatically expanding democratic practices beyond the election of political representatives, but he credits social scientists rather than community participants themselves for making these changes. Cazenave concludes that “although community residents were enlisted as troops in the battles initiated by MFY professionals, the chief combatants were elite professionals.”8

In contrast, my own research on MFY focuses on the relationships between neighborhood residents or clients and the frontline social workers and lawyers employed by MFY. What role did “the troops” actually play in setting the organization’s agenda? Although the documentation on MFY is vast, most of the organization’s records were written by administrators or supervisors. Therefore, my research strategies have included reading the official archives “against the grain,” looking for neighborhood residents’ presence in the extensive newspaper coverage of MFY, and conducting oral history interviews with both frontline MFY workers and neighborhood residents.

What I found was that between 1962 and 1964, paraprofessionals and mothers reshaped MFY’s program to reflect the needs of low-income Puerto Rican and African American women in the Lower East Side. MFY programs originally operated under an outdated gender model, targeting women primarily as mothers of potentially or actually delinquent youth. In reality, the mothers’ involvement in battles to integrate and improve the quality of education in their children’s schools connected these low-income women to the broader citywide civil rights movement and radicalized them and the frontline MFY staff. Together, they in turn pushed MFY’s board to support their school boycotts, rent strikes, and welfare rights organizing. By articulating their grievances and joining in interracial and cross-class protest movements, residents of the Lower East Side practiced “maximum feasible participation of the poor.”

These women followed in the tradition of participatory democracy initiated by a civil rights leader well known for her work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Ella Baker, the standing president of New York City’s branch of the NAACP. Living in Harlem in the 1950s, Baker encouraged African American and Puerto Rican parents to take control of their movement. Rather than depending on professionals and civil rights leaders, she urged them to call for school integration and more parental involvement in educational policymaking. Baker believed in the primacy of self-determination, that lasting social change occurred only when oppressed people analyzed their own situation, recognized their own power, and used it. This meant direct action such as pickets and demonstrations, considered the best form of political participation for marginalized groups who otherwise cannot influence policy decisions. Inspired by the civil rights movement Baker helped build, Lower East Side residents and MFY staff interpreted maximum feasible participation as a mandate for increasing participatory democracy through consciousness-raising, group education, and social protest.9

“The unfinished business of social change and social progress”: MFY’s Beginnings

In the late 1940s through the 1950s, headlines focused on New York’s youth gangs, the colorfully named “Egyptian Kings, Dragons, Beacons, Imperial Knights, Fordham Baldies, and Comanches” among others, totaling 125 citywide according to Time magazine. The gangs’ “thoroughly senseless” street violence threatened public safety and the city’s reputation for racial liberalism and integration, as young men organized to protect their traditional turf in neighborhoods facing an influx of African American and Puerto Rican residents.10 In July 1957, New Yorkers’ concerns over juvenile delinquency reached a fever pitch after the widely publicized stabbing death of disabled fifteen-year-old Michael Farmer, son of a New York City firefighter. While going for a swim at the Highbridge Park pool in Washington Heights, Farmer found himself caught in the middle of a territorial dispute between Irish (Jesters) and Puerto Rican and African American (Egyptian Kings) youth gangs. Farmer’s murder captured the public imagination because of his disability (caused by childhood polio), his presumed innocence as a non-gang member, and his whiteness.11

The Farmer case may have focused citywide attention on the gang problem, but local activists were already aware of the issue. Helen Hall, head of the Henry Street Settlement House in the Lower East Side, had long kept a watchful eye on youth violence. Often described as brilliant and dedicated, Hall was chosen to head the settlement in 1933 by Henry Street’s founder, Lillian Wald, who established the first visiting nurses program in the country and who developed Henry Street into a renowned center for innovative social work and leadership in progressive reform. Well-educated, tall, attractive, and with an “imposing” personality, Hall was a skillful political agent.12 In 1954, she had spearheaded the formation of the Lower Eastside Neighborhood Association (LENA), a coalition of “outstanding social and welfare leaders, educators, judges, law enforcement agencies, clergymen and public spirited citizens” who shared concerns over “the mounting tension among the young people of different racial groups” and “worsening living conditions” in the neighborhood, measured in part by the juvenile delinquency rate of 64 offenses per thousand compared to 44.2 per thousand citywide.13

The built environment and the population of the Lower East Side had changed rapidly during the 1950s, contributing to this social and racial stratification. Public and private investment in the suburbs and corresponding disinvestment in the urban core drew many Jewish and Italian residents out of the city and into new neighborhoods in Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey. Both official policies and unofficial practices of racial segregation in the massive new private and public housing projects built under urban renewal left Puerto Ricans and African Americans increasingly isolated.14 Digna Sanchez moved with her family from Puerto Rico to New York City in 1950 and settled in the Lower East Side when Sanchez was about four years old. She remembered the apartment on Norfolk Street where they first lived, “a walk-up tenement, with the bathroom in the hallway and bathtub in the kitchen.”15

The Sanchez family’s building had been previously inhabited by Jews from Eastern Europe, but those tenants had since relocated to the newly constructed housing cooperatives built by the garment workers’ unions. From the 1930s into the 1950s, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) built housing projects for members’ families, financed in part by public subsidies. The 1953–56 construction of the largest, the East River Houses, required the clearance of thirteen acres of slums and resulted in 1,672 units in four buildings, the tallest reinforced concrete apartment structures in the United States at that time.16 Soon, these co-ops became white ethnic “islands” set apart from the surrounding neighborhoods, and this residential segregation increased ethnic and racial tensions.17

In addition to the moderate-income housing cooperatives that were initially inhabited by Jewish and Italian garment workers and their families, the Lower East Side was transformed by the construction of high-rise low-income public housing (“tower in the park” projects), ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps and Figures
• Preface: Making History
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 / A Cauldron within Which New Ideas Can Be Tested Out: MFY and the Early War on Poverty
• 2 / A Grand Cooker of a Scene: MFY’s Outgrowths
• 3 / Everything Then Made Sense: Bridging the Neighborhood and Women’s Movements
• 4 / It Was Talking about My Life: Developing Working-Class Feminism
• 5 / Turn Anger, Fear, Grief into Action: ACT UP New York
• 6 / It Saved My Life: Creating Queer Politics
• Epilogue: ACT UP Will Be Here Again
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index