Abstract
The 1960s are commonly remembered as the era of the civil rights and black power movements, dominated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. In Power to the Poor, Gordon Mantler tells a much more complex story of multiracial organizing and coalitions, thick with detail about strategy debates, tenuous alliances, and visionary movement building among civil rights, Chicano power, American Indian, antiwar groups, and welfare rights groups. As labor studies scholars know, movements are never about just one charismatic leader. We know about King and Cesar Chavez as figureheads for the black and Chicano freedom movements but also about hundreds of other lesser-known activists and organizations that were instrumental in the efforts to build a broader movement.
Mantler challenges the common perception that King’s Poor People’s Campaign was the “Little Bighorn of the civil rights movement” (p. 5) because it failed to win its demands. He also rejects the view that multiracial class-based movements to fight poverty were undermined by emerging identity politics. While some historians saw the black power and Chicano rights movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s as opposition to the broader coalition against poverty that may have emerged out of the Poor People’s campaign, Mantler argues the opposite: “identity politics did not represent an abandonment of coalitional politics but actually was a necessary element of coalition” (p. 4).
Power to the Poor takes a closer look at the campaigns including the Poor People’s Campaign, the Chicago Rainbow Coalition, and the grape boycott in California to show how a range of activists worked together in uneven but visionary ways. Many groups engaged in identity politics and coalition building at the same time. They did not see it as a choice between the two.
While today’s social movements focus heavily on raising the minimum wage, the coalitions of the 1960s and 1970s brought a broad understanding to the notion of poverty, including demands about access to land coming out of the American Indian and Mexican American movements, the right to a meaningful job at a living wage from the civil rights groups, and the need for a universal basic income for those who cannot find jobs from welfare rights groups. These came together in the list of demands put forward by the Poor People’s Campaign, which included specific but diverse demands—from calling for investigations into police brutality on reservations to a reevaluation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Identity politics did not tear apart the campaign but instead strengthened and deepened it.
At the same time, activists faced serious challenges. Some complained about a hierarchy within the movement—both that certain black power groups held a privileged position within the coalitions and that certain organizations were top down and difficult to work with. Men dominated many groups, leaving women to carry the bulk of the grunt work. After King’s assassination the Poor People’s Campaign was inundated with volunteers and resources that they were not equipped to handle.
Despite the advances in coalition building, the period did not result in a strong, cohesive movement to deepen and expand the “War on Poverty” or build electoral power. Certain organizations and coalitions emerged and sustained into the 1980s, but overall, the challenges proved too much to build and grow a national multiracial movement focused on poverty.
Yet, Mantler argues, the small successes must be highlighted, as they disprove the notion that identity-based organizing undermined multiracial class coalitions—a view that is harmful in several ways. In particular, dismissing black power or Chicano power movements as “identity politics” suggests that white people did not engage in their own form of identity politics throughout history. It takes whiteness as the status quo, as the normal (much like certain kinds of restaurants are labeled “ethnic” while others are considered “American”). The critique of identity politics also tends to assume that these politics are inherently conflictual and denigrating to others. Mantler’s examples show that it was possible to assert “black is beautiful” without shutting down space for other voices. In fact, some of the experiments Mantler writes about appealed to poor whites as much as other groups.
Most importantly, Mantler argues that coalitions are not possible without an awareness of distinct identities. Poverty and class are experienced through a sense of self, which includes race and gender. Rather than eschew identity politics, activists looking to build multiracial antipoverty coalitions should embrace it since it is impossible to ignore differences and distinct histories when defining poverty and developing strategies to combat it.
This is a valuable lesson for today’s movements, including labor unions, which often seem eager to avoid difficult conversations about race and ethnicity in the hope of avoiding potential conflict or focusing only on least-common-denominator politics. Power to the Poor suggests that our movements could be much deeper, inclusionary, and visionary by allowing those differences to come to the fore.