Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post–Civil Rights America

Since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the federal War on Poverty in 1964, various policy analysts, politicos, social scientists, and historians have tried to evaluate its effectiveness, trace its lasting impact, and interpret its meanings. The question of success or failure has dominated much of this analysis, with many observers noting rather unremarkably that the War on Poverty failed to eliminate poverty in the United States. More recently, a handful of scholars have pushed beyond the stale success-versus-failure paradigm and have shifted the conversation to focus a critical lens on the concrete consequences of the federal antipoverty program of the 1960s and 1970s. Their questions have opened new avenues for research, and their examinations have shed new light on federal policy, antipoverty efforts, and the plight of the poor. In what ways did the federal antipoverty program intersect with existing social justice movements? What effects did the War on Poverty have on US cities amid a variety of urban crises?Historian Casey Nichols’s Poverty Rebels offers several compelling answers to these questions. Focusing the lens on Los Angeles from 1964 to 1979, Nichols argues that African Americans and Mexican Americans came together to transform the War on Poverty into a new stage of the struggle for equality. Relying primarily on manuscript collections, government and organizational records, newspapers, and oral history interviews, Nichols reveals that this Black-Brown coalition, while facing numerous challenges and impediments to their solidarity, used their commonalities as westerners and city dwellers to demand that federal policies be implemented in ways that improved their daily lives. By centering class as both an organizing principle and an analytical category, Nichols reveals that Black and Brown activists in Los Angeles used the category of “poor” as an empowering political tool of resistance. The multiracial and multiethnic coalition built in Los Angeles during the implementation of the federal War on Poverty, Nichols concludes, continues to shape debates about Black-Brown relations today.A key building block in Nichols’s analysis is the Model Cities program. Originally conceived by United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, Model Cities was an ambitious plan to rebuild the nation’s cities by mobilizing public and private resources and including poor city dwellers in decisions about the future of the urban landscape. Nichols points out that the 1965 uprising in Watts on the south side of Los Angeles provided fresh urgency for President Johnson and federal War on Poverty administrators to move past the planning phase and to launch the program the following year. After a delay due to city officials’ failure to comply with application regulations, in 1969 Los Angeles finally received Model Cities funding. Nichols shows how Model Cities extended the duration of the War on Poverty in Los Angeles and continued to shape Black-Brown relations in the city well into the Richard Nixon presidency. Pushing beyond simplistic questions about success or failure, Nichols reveals that Mexican Americans and African Americans in Los Angeles were able to use the Model Cities program to improve their daily lives.In Poverty Rebels, Nichols engages in important conversations with several works related to the War on Poverty. Several historians, including William S. Clayson, Brian D. Behnken, and Max Krochmal, have written about the relationship between African Americans and Mexican Americans during the 1960s and 1970s, centering the War on Poverty in their analyses. Behnken’s Fighting Their Own Battles (2014) and, to a lesser extent, Clayson’s Freedom Is Not Enough (2010) highlight the divisions between Black and Brown people in Texas to argue that they ultimately failed to create multiracial and class-based movements for social change. The title of Behnken’s book states his thesis quite clearly. Nichols’s book joins Krochmal’s Blue Texas (2020) to offer a counterpoint by revealing the myriad ways African Americans and Mexican Americans, despite their divisions, discovered ways to work together to demand justice and equality.Nichols also continues a tradition of linking the War on Poverty to contemporaneous social movements, particularly the African American and Mexican American civil rights struggles, a link that historians Robert Bauman, Susan Youngblood Ashmore, Crystal R. Sanders, and I have explored. In his 2008 book, Race and the War on Poverty: From Watts to East L.A., Bauman investigated how the federal antipoverty program both divided and united Black and Brown activists. By extending the periodization of the War on Poverty, Nichols offers an important reminder that the War on Poverty affected these struggles for justice long after the 1960s and 1970s.Poverty Rebels is a significant contribution to the ongoing conversation about the place of the War on Poverty in twentieth- and twenty-first-century US history. It is deeply researched and persuasively argued. Labor historians might wish Nichols had provided a more consistent analysis of class throughout the book, particularly how class intersected with race to affect how poor people in Los Angeles viewed both local and federal antipoverty initiatives. Yet this minor criticism does not detract from an insightful and thought-provoking book that will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the War on Poverty, urban politics, grassroots social movements, and the African American and Mexican American struggles for equality.