The Battle for

Welfare Bights
Politics and Poverty in Modern America

FELICIA KORNBLUH

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia
Copyright © 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly
citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written
permission from the publisher.

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kombluh, Felicia, 1966-
The battle for welfare rights ; politics and poverity in modern America / Felicia
Kombluh.
p. cm. —(PoUdcs and culture in modem America)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4005-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8122-4005-7 (alk. paper)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Welfare rights movement—United States—History. 2. Welfare recipients—United
States—Political activity. 3. Poor—United States—Political activity. 4. Public welfare—
United States. 5. United States—Politics and government—20th century. '6. United
I. Title. II. Series.

362.5’5614097S—dc22 2006052939
Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1. Inventing Welfare^lights 14

2. Citizens of the Affluent Society 39

3. Legal Civil Disobedience 63

4. On a Collision Course 88

5. Give Us Credit for Being American 114

6. Nixon, Moynihan, and Real Live Welfare Moms

7. End of an Era 161

Conclusion 183

Appendix: List of Oral History Interviews 189

List of Abbreviations 191

Notes 195\

Index 273

Acknowledgments 285
Chapter 5

Give Us Credit for Being American

We are not going to steal anything. We want you to share some of it, you
understand^ We can have paradise here, all of us. There is enough xoealth.
—Mildred Prem, welfare rights activist, Buffalo, New York

In June 1969, Brooklyn welfare rights leader Jackie Pope told readers of
the Welfare Bighter^boxxl a recent political demonstration that had taken
her by surprise. In the middle of the National Conference on Social Wel­
fare in Manhattan, she reported, three hundred social workers walked
out of the proceedings, marched down Seventh Avenue, and joined a
picket line in front of the Sears & Roebuck store on Thirty-First Street.
Responding to claims by members of Citywide that Sears discriminated
against welfare recipients by denying them credit, the social workers
“burned” their charge cards (or, more likely, cut the plastic cards in
half) and followed welfare mothers and fathers into the store. Women
and men who had, under recent statewide cuts in public benefits, lost
access to special grants for items such as children’s school clothes and
furniture, “applied for credit, ordered merchandise with the credit
applications, and sampled the floor samples—that is, they sewed, vacu­
umed, played records and listened to stereos.”’
In the aftermath of the flat grant. Citywide activists held on to their
dreams of first-class citizenship in the United States, including their
vision of participation in tR^dtkimer market and of gaining a fair
hearing in public agencies ancbcourtrooms. The battle for credit at Sears
and other department stores was, according to Brooklyn leader Joyce
Burson, “a case of clients running the show.” Ordinary members of wel­
fare rights groups demanded a form of citizenship in the affluent society
that she, a seasoned leader, had hardly contemplated. The Brooklyn wel­
fare rights movement “started out. . . to just hassle the down town busi­
nessmen’s association to try and get them to intercede for us” on public
welfare policy, but rank-and-file AFDC mothers and fathers turned the
 Give Us Credit for Being American 115

DECEMBER,4968 OW!

WRO’S “GET IT”

Figure 13. The hhVRO newspaper shoTvs the consumerist tactics the movement
pursued after New York and other states began cutting welfare in the late 1960s.
Courtesy Periodicals Division, Wisconsin Historical Society.

effort toward making demands on the private sector itself. They

“decided we ought to be fighting for credit because we need credit. .. .
We tried to talk them out of it,” Burson remembered, but the members
insisted.^
Consumerist demands were constitutive of welfare rights politics
throughout the history of the movement. However, before 1968, these
 116 Chapters

demands had treated public-sector institutions as almost solely responsi­

ble for meeting welfare recipients’ needs. By 1969, the climate in public
institutions had changed: Governor Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay had
begun to change their liberal stripes and Richard Nixon was President.
In the federal courts, the Warren Court era of expanding the rights of
minorities was coming to a close. NWRO activists across the country
shifted some of their protest energy from government agencies to pri­
vate companies in order to “force the most powerful segment of the
society—big business—to yield.’’^ Mildred Prem from BiifFalo and other
welfare recipients perceived a “paradise” of private wealth in the United
States, and they asked major corporations to “share some of it.”^
In a multi-faceted campaign to join the affluent society, Citywide
members and other activists not only tried to get credit cards for welfare
recipients, but they also fought for changes in the federal Food Stamp^
program so that they would have more liberty in the daily spending deci­
sions they made for their families. They pursued a “Private-Sector Fam­
ily Allowance Plan” under which large companies were asked to transfer
some of their profits direcdy to impoverished families. At the same time,
they asked local school districts to disburse compensatory education
funds direcdy to low-income families, instead of to school officials who
might or might not make sure that the money was used for children’s
most immediate needs, and they batded utility companies over what
activists claimed was unequal treatment of welfare families.

The Poor Pay More

The Sears campaign that Jackie Pope and Joyce Burson observed in New
York grew from longstanding prpblems in the relationship between
impoverished people and consumer markets. One of the few empirical
sources on poor people’s consumption in the 196(Ts was a study cospon­
sored by several setdement houses on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and
in Harlem, which focused on African American and Puerto Rican public
housing residents. The resulting-book. The Poor Pay More, argued that
low-income consumers often paid'more than higher income ones for
goods of equal or inferior quality^ Author David Caplovitz claimed that
this occurred because low-income consumers, who had limited cash on
hand and limited geogra^ijc^j^bility, and who lacked “shopping
sophistication,” purchased th^gb^s on credit.® These consumer^ could
not receive credit at stores that sold low-priced goods or offered credit
on fairly good terms, and so they purchased from peddlers who came
into their homes or at local stores that offered high prices, poor mer­
chandise, and installment credit with very high rates of interest. The
installment system allowed customers to take goods home if they made
 Give Us Credit for Being American 117

small initial payments—and signed sales contracts in which they prom­

ised to make relatively high regular payments long into the future.
The Poor Pay More, offered dramatic examples of consumer exploita­
tion by sales people. Sales contracts wei:ey^dj2d confusingly or mislead­
ingly, and the goods purchased were of such low quality that they fell
apart before they were paid for. Store- owners might overlook a few
missed payments but might also be quick to repossess the furniture or
appliances of customers who were delinquent in payments. When they
did not repossess, store owners could garnish the customer’s wages, that
is, arrange to receive a portion of the consumer’s wages directly from
her or his employer. Such a course of action let employers know that
their employees were* delinquent customers and could lead to them
being fired.®
Despite all of these negatives, low-income African American and
Puerto Rican families in New York City participated in the consumer
economy. Ninety-five percent of the families Caplovitz studied had tele­
visions in their homes, 41 percent owned washing machines, and 23 per­
cent had colored telephones.’ He concluded from these figures that
‘"need, as indicated by family size” shaped consumption patterns with
little regard 'to income. For poor families, like other American families
in the postwar era, “Bridging the gap between current income and
extensive needs and aspirations is the institution of credit.”® While
middle-class families used credit cards that they received from major
department stores, poor consumers used installment credit from local
merchants. Even the 15 percent of families in Caplovitz’s study who
received welfare were able to purchase goods on credit for their homes.®
The conditions Caplovitz described in the early 1960s moderated
somewhat under the pressure of legal reform efforts later in the decade.
The consumer credit squeeze, and the procedures retail firms used to
either collect or repossess from their delinquent customers, were high
on the short list of priorities for the nascent poverty law community of
the middle 19608."* Attorneys who worked out of storefront legal services
offices represented clients in their dealings with local installment mer­
chants. Others tried to use the courts to control the system of install­
ment sales by bringing cases under Section 2-302 of the Uniform
Commercial Code of the United States, a model statute concerning
“unconscionable” contracts, which individual jurisdictions wrote into
law beginning in the middle 1960s. An “unconscionable contract was
so one-sided—and relied so heavily on the vulnerability or ignorance of
one of the parties—that courts need not enforce it."
The idea of “unconscionability” was the centerpiece of an important
1965 decision by Judge J. Skelley Wright of the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the D.C. Circuit. The plaintiff in the case was a welfare recipient from
118 Chapters

Washington, D.C., named Ora Lee Williams. In 1962, Williams pur­

chased a stereo priced at over five hundred dollars. She defaulted on
her payments soon thereafter. The Walker-Thomas furniture company
repossessed all the goods Williams had acquired over a five-year period,
arguing that the company had a right to repossess because one densely
worded clause in its contract with Williams kept “a balance due on every
item purchased until the balance due on all items, whenever purchased,
was liquidated.”*^ Judge Skelley Wright refused to enforce the contract
because he deemed it unconscionable, a term he defined in sweepingly
ambiguous terms. He recognized “gross inequalit[ies] of bargaining
power” between low-income African American female welfare recipients
and aggressively profit-seeking firms.**

Black (Buying) Power

The welfare rights movement may have been the only social movement
^that demanded credit cards from Sears, but it was not alone in its focus
Nan the consumer dimension of the economy, or on questions about dis­
crimination and the availability of credit. Historically, women’s move­
ments in the U.S. have often targeted consumer issues, perhaps because
women have had particular responsibilities for negotiating the con­
sumer market in order to care for their families.*^ Consumption has also
been a vital part of black political protest and the assertion of dignity,
human rights, and civil rights by African Americans.*® The claim to lady­
hood, a gendered demand for dignity and decency, which welfare rights
activists expressed in their campaigns for credit, clothes, and home fur­
nishings, recalls individual and collective acts by African American
women from at least the middle nineteenth through the late twentieth
centuries.*® Among Latino/a activists, the outstanding examples of con­
sumer protest were the boycotts of California grapes and lettuce that
C^sar Chavez and Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers coordi­
nated in the 1960s and 1970s.*^ -
A new, largely middle-class consumer movement emerged in the
1960s. This movement converged at points with the women’s and civil
rights movements, federally funded antipoverty programs, and both gov­
ernment-funded and independentle^al reform efforts. Its patron saints
were Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring (1962) raised concerns not only
about the fate of wildlife but also"Sbout the safety of produce for con­
sumers, and Ralph Nader, whose JUmafe at Any Speed (1965) took as its
target the automobile indust^;»itthrSignal consumer industry of the post-
World War II era.*® One m^or*consumer concern of the 1960's was
access to consumer credit for women and racial minorities. Second-wave
feminists, for example, joined their demands for women’s equal employ-
 Give Us Credit for Being American 119

ment opportunities with demands for equal credit opportunities, includ­

ing credit cards in their own names for married women and improved
credit access for single and divorced women. These efforts resulted ulti­
mately in passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.*®
New Yorkers had a tradition of pyrs^mg politics at the point of con­
sumption dating from at least the early twentieth century. Jewish house­
wives on the Lower East Side protested inflated food prices during
World War I in a series of pickets and boycotts that resulted in cost con­
trols on meat, milk, and other staples.'^arlem was a center of the “Don’t
Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign during the Depression, which
pressured white business owners on the central business strip of 125th
Street'to hire African Americans for visible positions that offered some
hope of upward mtJbility. It was also the center of a consumer coopera­
tion movement, which aimed to bypass mainstream merchants and
merchandising. Ella Baker, who later became the director of branches
for the NAACP and the guiding force behind the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, cofounded the Young Negroes Cooperative
League in 1930, educating Harlem consumers about the possibility of
building an economy not based on the profit motive. After World War
Two, Harlemites continued to organize cooperatives and to agitate for
affordable prices, job and ownership opportunities, and high-quality
goods in local stores.^
In the 1960s, consumer politics of all kinds thrived in Harlem and
other African American neighborhoods. A new cooperative movement
condnued the work Ella Baker had begun, to educate consumers about
the benefits of co-ops and the mechanics of creating them. In one pro­
test over high food prices in African American neighborhoods, welfare
recipients and wealthier women Joined together to picket chain stores
and shop en masse at cooperative grocery stores. Members of the Har­
lem Consumer Education Council planned the action for a day on
which welfare recipients were to receive their fortnightly checks.^*
Consumer boycotts and pickets aimed to increase job opportunities
for African .^merican workers. They also aimed to improve the treat­
ment of black consumers in the public space of the grocery aisle or sales
floor and to raise the quality of goods available to black families. Grass­
roots campaigns, such as one aimed at grocery stores that activists nick­
named “Operation Lambchop,” conducted spot checks of sales practices
and prices in Brooklyn and Manhattan to prove that poor and African
American consumers did, indeed, pay more for food and furniture than
did wealthier whites. Harlemites, Brooklynites, and other New Yorkers
complained about their limited access to consumer credit and the myr­
iad problems they faced when they signed installment sales contracts.^^
120 Chapter 5

Nationally, consumer complaints became central to the African Amer­

ican freedom movement in the late 1960s. Of the major civil rights
groups, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had the greatest impact
on the consumer politics welfare rights leaders pursued in the aftermath
of the New York flat grant. CORE coordinated national boycotts of
department stores and discount retailers that refused to hire or serve
African Americans. Local CORE chapters also developed the tactic of
the “shop-in.” In a “shop-in,” roughly comparable to a labor union “sit-
in,” activists would disrupt the sales floor of a particular store in order
to pressure the company that owned it to negotiate on civil rights
demands. In 1964, CORE chapters organized “coin-ins” at branches of
the Bank of America during which activists interfered with bank opera­
tions by standing at tellers’ windows demanding large amounts of
change. Combined with 100 days of picketing, this tactic persuaded the
bank to hire a significant number of African American employees.^
When he worked for CORE, attorney Carl Rachlin had tried to use
some of the organization’s resources to pursue consumer litigation. He
tried unsuccessfully to generate a class-action lawsuit using Section 2-302
of the Uniform Commercial Code. Rachlin argued that the consumer
credit issue was “not an individual problem but a large socio-economic
problem and as lawyers we should attack it in that way.”^^
By 1967, consumer issues and other economic concerns were ubiqui­
tous in African American movement circles. In their book Bladi Power,
Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton made an analogy between
white-black relationships and relationships between European colonial
powers and their African colonies. The flow of consumer capital out of
African American communities, and the credit practices of white store
owners in black neighborhoods, was central to the comparison. Similar
calls for economic self-determination were heard among leaders of tra­
ditional civil rights groups. Faced with stalled campaigns for housing,
school, and job integration in the North, and a potentially vast new con­
stituency of underemployed urban youth, leaders intensified their focus
on economic causes and solutions for what ailed black America. In his
last book. Where Do We Go From H^e? Martin Luther King, Jr., profiled
strategies that utilized the power of urban African Americans as consum­
ers. Even as he distanced himself ffom the slogan “Black Power,” King
endorsed a vigorous use of black “buying power.”*® He singled out the
“vicious circle” that low-incoma^roitkimers encountered: “You are con­
demned to the jobs and shops-which are closest to your home,'’ he
wrote. “Once confined to this isolated community, one no longer partic­
ipates in a free economy, but is subject to price-fixing and wholesale rob­
bery by many of the merchants.”*®
After King’s assassination, the Southern Christian Leadership Confer-
 Give Us Credit for Being American 121

ence focused on black consumers and black-owned businesses through

Operation Breadbasket, a national campaign of consumer boycotts that
had begun in 1961 but expanded dramatically in the late 1960s when it
came under the direction of Reverend Jesse Jackson.^’ Operation Bread-
basket'boycotts reportedly produced on^Jiousand new white-collar jobs
for black Philadelphians in the early^&^.ttnd spurred selective buying
efforts in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Wilmington, Del­
aware. In New York City, Operation Breadbasket combined employment
demands with consumer-oriented ones; a boycott of the A&P grocery
made demands including that the chain stop raising its prices on welfare
recipients’ “check day.’’^®
The Kemer Commission Report of 1968 argued that consumer prac­
tices were responsibl.e for much of the fury of young African Americans
that had led to rioting in Northern cities. New York City mayor Lindsay
and other members of the commission found that, in eleven out of
twenty cities they studied, grievances about treatment by white store
owners fueled urban riots. The Kemer Commission report argued that
many of the grievances began with the problem of consumer credit in
low-income, racially segregated communities, and the exploitation of
inner-city residents by installment merchants who offered them low-
quality goods on terrible terms.^®
Perhaps because they were afraid of more riots, the President and
Congress aired the same concerns about credit for black consumers and
entrepreneurs that animated the writing of African American activists
and scholars and the Kerner Commission. Richard Nbcon began speak­
ing in support of “black capitalism” during the 1968 campaign. As Presi­
dent, he created an Office of Minority Business Enterprise in the Small
Business Administration to increase opportunities and access to credit
for African American, Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and American
Indian entrepreneurs. Although the office was funded at low levels, by
the time of Nixon’s resignation in 1974 it had an annual budget of $242
million.*” In the same year that President Nixon created the Office of
Minority Business Affairs, Congress considered dramatically expand­
ing access toy:redit for poor people. In the Senate, William Proxmire
(D-Wis.) and a few colleagues sponsored a “Community Credit Expan­
sion Act,” to improve access to “consumer credit, mortgage credit, and
business credit in urban and rural poverty areas.” Citing the Kerner
Commission report, Proxmire spoke out against the “credit gap” that
he believed privileged wealthier neighborhoods at the expense of low-
income ones, and the trap of the installment system.*’
Citywide and NWRO members asserted families’ need for consumer
credit to acquire large consumer durables such as furniture and home
appliances, which they could not afford all at once. They argued, as King

I
 122 Chapter 5

had done, that welfare recipients were in an even weaker bargaining

position vis-a-vis exploitative local merchants than were other low-
income people. Beulah Sanders, Jackie Pope, and many others sought
credit at what they termed “reputable” working- and middle-class
department stores such as Sears, Montgomery Ward, Lemer, and Lane
Bryant, which catered to working-class and middle-class customers.
Collective campaigns for credit at Sears, the paradigmatic American
consumer emporium, and for access to all-American consumer prod­
ucts, were expressions of welfare recipients’ desire for citizc;nship in the
affluent society. For Jackie Pope, Joyce Burson, Beulah Sanders, Jennette
Washington, and other women of color, the private-sector consumer
economy was a particularly significant arena in which to assert member­
ship in postwar society. An increasing proportion of married women
with children, white as well as black, were working for wages by the mid-
1960s. At the same time, women were still responsible for negotiating
the consumer marketplace on behalf of their families.*^ As in their bat­
tles over minimum standards and special grants, women welfare recipi­
ents who fought for rights in the private sector were seeking recognition
as citizen-consumers who negotiated the market on behalf of their fami­
lies just as other women did.

Critical Consumerism
The idea for a consumer credit campaign originated with welfare rights
activists from Philadelphia. In the summer of 1968, Roxanne Jones and
Margie Jefferson of the Philadelphia Welfare Rights Organization, with
the help of Volunteers In Service To America (VISTAs) whose small sala­
ries were paid by the federal government, devised the idea of seeking
credit at major downtown department stores exclusively for members of
their group.” The campaign was a great success. By August 1968, they
had negotiated credit agreements with the Wanaihaker, Lerner, Lit
Brothers, and Lane Bryant stores. The Philadelphia activists later gained
limited credit access from other stores, including Sears. In their agree­
ment with the Lerner Shops, applicants for credit showing evidence of
their membership in a welfare rights group would not even undergo
credit checks but would receive crj^dit automatically. Jefferson lauded
the credit agreements as a way to release people from the hold of
exploitative stores: “No longsr-a^^^ restricted to buying inferior mer­
chandise at high prices in thevgj^tto,” she commented.” The Philadel­
phia WRO saw its membership double after it publicized its agreements
with the stores.”
The credit idea spread quickly from Philadelphia to New York City.
In November, 150 members of the Brooklyn Welfare Action Council
 Give Us Credit for Being American 123

(B-WAC) demonstrated at the E. J. Korvette store in their borough’s

downtown. They demanded credit. In language that mirrored the claims
they made against the welfare department, they asked for the right to
represent all welfare recipients in theit^jd^^lings with the department
store chain.^® B-WAC leaders Joyce B^P^nd Jackie Pope practiced a
good cop/bad cop routine on the credit manager of the Korvette store.
Burson remembered that in the mi<^le of negotiations, Pope would
stand up and say: “Well listen, isn’t no sense us sitting here ’cause this
man is not going ... to deal with us,-!soiet’s just go, let’s Just tear up the
store ... and she’d get up and everybody would get up and they’d follow
her out the door.” Burson would pretend that she could not control
Pope and the other women, and would start to leave, before the store’s
representative would^ondliate “and I’d finally let him convince me that
we could talk again.”®’ Korvette’s management offered twenty-five dol­
lars’ worth of credit, which Joyce Burson and the other activists refused
because they were holding out for a more complete credit deal. Manag­
ers from Abraham & Straus, across the street from the Korvette store,
hastened to open negotiations with the B-WAC leadership.**
The City-Wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups picked up'
the credit campaign from its members in Brooklyn. Beulah Sanders,
Sadie Jackson, and Archerie DeLeon of Citywide soon found themselves
negotiating credit deals simultaneously with Abraham Sc Straus, Kor
vette. Sears, Gimbel’s, Lane Bryant, and the Lerner stores. In April 1961
a coalition of welfare mothers demonstrated at a Bronx Sears stor^
demanding credit and threatening a boycott.*® In early July, welfard*
recipients and their allies returned to the Manhattan Sears store that
they had previously visited with the social workers from the National
Conference of Social Welfare. Ninety welfare recipients entered the
store, asked for credit applications, and demanded that these be pro­
cessed immediately. They then listened to “music on expensive Hi-Fi’s
[and] had a dance session,” according to a report by Citywide and
B-WAC member Mamie Hall.'"’ Although Sears refused to consider a city­
wide credit agreement with the welfare coalition, the other stores saw
what had hap^ned at Sears and took preventive action: active members
of Citywide received coupons for credit at Gimbel’s, Abraham Sc Straus,
and Korvette."*’
The most disruptive tactic New York welfare recipients used in their
effort to get consumer credit was a “shop-in.” Citywide borrowed the
shop-in concept from CORE. However, CORE shop-ins aimed to get
black people hired, while welfare rights shop-ins focused exclusively on
the treatment of shoppers.^^ The most detailed description of a shop-in
is that of Jackie Pope, written years after one of the demonstrations at
the BrooWyn Korvette store: first, she wrote, she and Burson assigned
124 Chapter 5

members various roles to play. They asked one group to negotiate with
the store, another to stand outside explaining the action to passersby, a
third to confront Korvette’s employees on the sales floor, and a fourth
to impersonate ordinary shoppers who were either sympathetic to the
welfare recipients or irate about the delays they caused. “On the day of
the demonstration, members impersonating customers selected hun­
dreds of dollars’ worth of goods and took them to the cashiers, who pro­
ceeded to tally the items on their registers. When asked for payment,
each ‘customer’ produced her welfare identification ca^rd and said,
‘Charge it to the Welfare Department’.By mentioning the welfare
department, the demonstrators linked the credit campaign with their
opposition to the flat grant. Before New York State cut the “extras” from
public assistance payments, they might have been able to use welfare
money to shop for these extras; with flat grants and tight family budgets,
they turned to private-sector consumer credit as a second-best alternative.
In response to the slowdowns and long lines that resulted from their
actions, the women and men who had chosen to pose as ordinary cus­
tomers complained loudly about the situation and created even more
disruption by gathering in crowds around the cash registers. “By the
time police reached the demonstration floors,” Pope remembered,
“everything had returned to normal except for piles of unbought cloth­
ing surrounding most of the cash registers. ‘Customers’ were browsing
alongside actual purchasers, waiting for the police to leave and the sig­
nal to begin the demonstration anew.”^^
The basic aim of the credit campeiign was to make local welfare rights
groups, such as B-WAC and Citywide, intermediaries between their
members or potential members and the stores. This represented an
effort to continue the benefit- or membership-based approach to organ­
izing, which welfare rights organizers had originally learned from Cha­
vez, Huerta, and Fred Ross, in an increasingly hostile political
environment. Even as Beulah Sanders and other leaders fought to main­
tain welfare clients’ access to special grants and fair hearings, they also
saw credit cards as new benefits that.Citywide could help its members
access. ^ '
The key to the credit campaign was that local welfare rights groups,
rather than merchants, would evaluate potential customers and offer
lists of credit-worthy consumers to the stores. The Abraham & Straus
store in Brooklyn, for exam^eifeas^pted pre-approval from B-WAC as
adequate proof of a customer^ credit-worthiness, without the usual
financial background checks that it conducted on credit applicants.
With a letter from the chair of the local group, and certification by
Mamie Hall from the B-WAC leadership, a woman or man could receive
a maximum of one hundred dollars in store credit.'*^ Local welfare rights
 Give Us Credit for Being American 125

groups became the consumption-side version of trade union hiring

halls, able to choose who would have access to credit and therefore to
high-priced goods poor customers could not pay for all at once.
Shop-ins around New York City were effective ways to convince large
retail companies to reconsider their credit policies for welfare recipi­
ents. Although it is difficult to know fof'Sure, it is likely that the credit
benefit helped recruit new memberglfc’tSrtywide and slowed the exodus
of .members that had begun after the. flat grant became law. However,
the credit campaign was disastrous for welfare rights activists’ efforts to
build bridges to working- and middle-class New Yorkers. According to a
report in the New York Times, stores that extended credit to welfare moth­
ers and fathers were flooded with telephone calls. “Why make credit
that easy?” many asked. "People on public assistance shouldn’t get
credit at all! Are we going to have to pay higher prices to support welfare
recipients on credit fike we are paying higher taxes? What about people
like me—people who work for a living but can’t get credit because our
income is too low—aren’t we entitled to get credit at least as much as
the welfare families?”"’® One of journalist Pete Hamill’s informants for
his meditation on "The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class” was
similarly provoked: “every time I turn around,” this white working-class
father commented, "one of the kids needs shoes or a dress or something
for school. And then I read about. . . some fat welfare bitch demand­
ing—you know, not askin’ but demanding—a credit card at Korvette’s....
You know, you see that, and you want to go out and strangle someone.”^’
In response to the hostility. Citywide executive director HulbertJames
defended the credit campaign by underlining the fact that low-income
people already received credit, albeit from unscrupulous merchants. To
those who feared welfare recipients would default on their credit
accounts, James argued that public assistance was in fact a form of “guar­
anteed income”; although most members of the City-Wide Coordinat­
ing Committee of Welfare Groups lacked wages, they did receive
income, and were therefore able to repay their debts.

Credit for Being American

National welfare rights leaders and staff members were impressed with
the credit campaigns in Philadelphia and New York. In February 1969,
Beulah Sanders, Carmen Olivo from New York, and the other members
of the NWRO National Coordinating Committee (NCC) voted to make
demands "on both the Federal government and the private sector.”"*®
The centerpiece of the private-sector part of their strategy was a national
boycott of Sears, Roebuck, which the committee members promised to
initiate during the Easter shopping season if Sears did not reverse its
 126 Chapter 5

policy and begin offering credit to welfare recipients. Sears, remem­

bered NWRO deputy director Tim Sampson, “was the really great con-
necdng link” in the credit campaign, a focus for local agitadon all over
the country and for nadonal-level protests as well.^o The NCC appointed
a five-member committee, chaired by Washington, D.C., leader Etta
Horn, to coordinate the boycott and negodate with retail firms.®'
Welfare rights acdvists used a range of different arguments to pursue
their claim for consumer credit. They assumed the ubiquity of credit
sales, even for poor people, and focused on the practices of local mer­
chants and high-interest installment contracts. NWr6 members and
staff also described the credit plan as an answer to “discrimination”
against welfare recipients. By this, they meant three things at once. The
first was racial discrimination, which played a major role in welfare
rights thinking although not all NWRO members were black or Latina/
o. The second was status or caste discrimination, based on the position
of the credit-seekers as recipients of particularly despised government
programs. Third, and most ambitious, was income-based discrimination
comparable to what poverty lawyers were theorizing in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. The legal thinkers who attempted to introduce income
discrimination into the American political vocabulary wanted to
enshrine in legal doctrine the idea that poor people as a class needed
the equal protection of the laws promised under the Fourteenth Amend­
ment to the U.S. Constitution. To realize the promise of equality, they
believed, the U.S. government must grant citizens at least subsistence
income, a right to welfare, or, as they also called it, a “right to life” that
could not be vitiated by a tightfisted legislature.®^
Welfare recipients and movement allies made arguments about
income-based discrimination and equality between the poor and rich.
At the start of the national Sears campaign, Etta Horn expressed her
frustration at Sears president Arthur Wood in th^e terms: “We feel that
president Wood is a part of the sick society that is prejudiced against the
poor. This whole society is run on credit, especially for the rich man. So
why can’t we have it. The poor need it more than the rich.”®* In a letter
to Sears management, the head of a citizens’ group in Appalachia affili­
ated with the welfare rights movement expressed his concern about “dis­
criminatory credit policies followed by Sears stores. We do not believe a
person should be refusecUr^Ujpr the simple reason that he is a recipi­
ent of public assistance. Ped^on welfare,” he added “must be allowed
the same rights and opportunities as other American citizens.”®" The
NWRO staff underlined this view of consumer credit as a right in a list
of proposed slogans for the Sears campaign: “The Rich get cash 8c credit
at least give the poor credit”; “How Many credit Cards do you have? We
 Give Us Credit for Being American 127

only want ONE a SEARS credit card for all poor people”; and “Give us
Credit for being American.”" ,
Welfare rights activists saw themselv^yHSMititled to consumer credit
because they were entitled to participate fully in a consumer-oriented
society. Particularly for white working-cl^ women and women of color,
the right to buy decent goods for oneself and for one’s children was
bound up with postwar ideas of womanhood and motherhood. Members
of the Chicago Welfare Rights Organization expressed the link between
consumer credit and their roles as mothers and decent women in a
leaflet they distributed at a protest of a Sears fashion show. Credit cards,
they argued, “will give us the opportunity to ‘buy better’ clothing for
our loved ones and children.” They complained that their own clothes
were “current fashions 5 to 8 years ago.”" Dorothy Perry, the twelve-
year-old daughter of the “Action Chairman” of the Sears campaign in
Newark, New Jersey, wrote: “One thing I can truely say is that while I am
on welfare my mother is learning her rights and believe me she is getting
them. We have had many Demostrations and they have made a Lot of
change to Blacks and whites and have given them more courage to Fight
For there rights,” she continued. “Today we went to Sears to ask them
could we have credit in there store they don’t want any part of us welfare
people. They don’t know what it is to be poor and to try to have the
better things in Life.””
The combination of militancy and propriety that the Chicago group
expressed in its protest appeared in representations of the Sears boycott
from the national welfare rights office. In a report to local activists on
the progress of the Sears campaign, an NWRO artist represented the
organized welfare recipients as a black woman in a dress, with conserva­
tively styled low-heeled shoes on her feet and a prim hat with a ribbon
and feather on her head (see Figure 14). The woman carried a sign
reading “BOYCOTT $EAR$” and raised her formidably strong-looking
right arm and’fist at a chicken labeled “SEARS.”" The Sears chicken
had been sitting on an egg marked “credit for recipients.”

“You Got To Be Kidding”

At the national level, welfare rights leaders asked Sears management to
enter into an agreement that would be binding on all of its stores. The
details of the plan closely resembled the one Sanders and other New
Yorkers had negotiated with Abraham & Straus. It stipulated that “a let­
ter of reference from NWRO should be adequate proof that the recipi­
ent is a good credit risk, and there [should] be no other investigation.”"
Sears was asked to ensure that welfare recipients were not charged any
additional interest rates above the 1.5 percent per month ordinarily
128 Chapters

Figure 14. An artist represents the NWRO demand for cre'dit cards at Sears as a
battle between African American women and a greedy company sitting on a nest
of profits. Counesy NWRO Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center,
Howard University.

charged to credit customers, and n.ot to hold NWRO or its local chapters
responsible for any late or m]s?^ payments. Etta Horn’s committee and
the NWRO staff advised local^aSl^^ to insist that stores make access to
credit dependent on certification by a welfare rights group.®*
Tim Sampson and George Wiley in the NWRO headquarters office
believed that the credit campaign might help organized welfare recipi­
ents recover somewhat from their political isoladon at the end of the
 Give Us Credit for Being American 129

1960s. They thought that a focus on Sears and other major companies
offered valuable opportunities for participation in welfare rights activ­
ism to middle-class “Friends” of the movement, such as the social work
conferees who destroyed their credit cards in the name of equality. In
the midst of a season of flat grants an^Efl^Vfide cuts in welfare budgets,
the Sears campaign was an opportunity/or NWRO to “dramatize welfare
recipients’ need for clothing and fumifure,” and gain publicity for local
action groups “so that other welfare recipients will join.
Sampson’s and Wiley’s calculation was only half correct. The Sears
campaign did, indeed, involve middle-class allies in the work of NWRO.
“Friends,” including Betty Younger, the widow of a Cleveland minister
who had helped organize welfare rights protests before his death in
1968, and leaders oPthe Women’s Division of the Methodist Church,
were pleased by the Sears campaign because it offered them concrete
ways to support NWRO that went beyond writing checks.®^ But some
middle-class people otherwise sympathetic to NWRO disliked the Sears
campaign, and it caused genuine rage among a few.“ As it had in New
York City, the demand by welfare recipients for credit cards touched a
particular nerve in some antiwelfare whites. NWRO activists asked peo­
ple they encountered at demonstrations in front of Sears stores and else­
where to mail in postcards affirming their support for the campaign,
and pledging financial contributions. “Dear NWRO,” the cards read:

I support the NWRO boycott of Sears. I do not believe that welfare recipients
should be discriminated against and not receive credit.
__ I have notified Sears that 1 will not buy from Sears until an agreement with
NWRO is reached.
__ I would like to do more to help welfare recipients gain equal rights. Please
send more information.
__ 1 am enclosing a contribution to help in the cause.

Of the twenty-two cards that survive in the archives, twenty were support­
ive and one was ambivalent. But one, received April 7, 1969, was doc­
tored to read:'“Dear NWRO”:
V

I DO NOT support the NWRO boycott of Sears. I do believe that welfare

recipients should be discriminated against and not receive credit.
TIBEY Get ENOUGH!
__ I have notified Sears that I will buy from Sears
__ I would NOT like to do more to help welfare recipients . . .
__ 1 am enclosing a contribution ... You got to Be IQdding!
Let them go to work
like we all do!
Signed
Disgusted Harder Worker
Struggling-Middle Glasserl'^'*
130 Chapters

The Sears campaign provoked an even more irate response from a cor­
respondent who identified himself only as “an outspoken wage
earner.”®® Welfare, and the organized demand for consumer credit,
drove this self-described worker to distraction. He complained, in terms
that were already cliches, about the supposed spending patterns of
women who received public aid. “Did you ever count the number of
‘Cadillacs’ that pull up at the stores to cash their ‘Welfare’ checks? I
know of one case where the woman had to wait for the .cashier for a
few minute’s to cash her ‘Welfare check,’ and became very ‘imprudent’
because she had to get ‘back to her cottage’ on the lake, while her boy­
friend sat in a new ‘Cadillac’ in front of the store waiting for her! She
was dressed in clothes that I never could afford to buy for my wife!”®®
NWRO members were never able to persuade Sears management to
enter into a national agreement covering their full credit plan. However,
in Philadelphia, Memphis, Pontiac, Michigan, and Portsmouth, Ohio,
welfare rights groups received some access to credit at Sears. In Cincin­
nati, the local Sears store agreed to the entire NWRO credit plan. In
Boston, certified welfare rights group members received $50 credit lines
at Filene’s, Gilchrist, and Jordan Marsh in the wake of a major demon­
stration at Sears.®’ At least three thousand welfare recipients and other
poor people received credit from Montgomery Ward as a result of
NWRO negotiations with the company’s national management. Proba­
bly hundreds of others received credit through informal agreements
between their groups and various consumer emporiums, and many
more poor people received credit on what the companies claimed was
an individual basis but was more likely leniency shaped by the compa­
nies’ fear of NWRO actions.®®
The credit campaign spread across the country, in twenty-nine areas,
including Rochester, New York; Des Moines, Iowa; Hinds County, Missis­
sippi; and Pomona, California, welfare rights organizations reported
that they either had negotiated with Sears or were planning to do so.
Groups in sixty-two areas, ranging from West Helena, Arkansas, to
Bakersfield, California, had conducted Sears actions of some kind by
April 9, 1969. As they did in Ne^York, these actions ran the range of
disruptiveness. They included^assing out leaflets in front of busy Sears
stores, filling out credit appli^Soft'S collectively and creating long lines
for service, and having numerous “Friends” with Sears credit destroy
their credit cards and deliver them to the store management.®®
Local welfare rights organizations maximized disruption by timing
their shop-ins to coincide with some of the heaviest shopping days in the
year. Etta Horn and George Wiley suggested that the groups demon­
strate on the Saturday before Easter and offered detailed suggestions on
how to carry out protests. “If you have any problems,” they suggested.
 Give Us Credit for Being American 131

“raise hell,” call Sears headquarters in Chicago, and alert the press.’”
Welfare rights groups also organized demonstrations at department
stores to coincide with the heavy shopping period between Thanksgiving
and Christmas.

A Private-Sector Family Allowance

A second foray into the private secfor^^^e welfare rights movement

was the “private-sector family allowance plan” that NWRO offered to

major consumer-product companies. This strategy transposed the West­
ern European idea of a family allowante, a grant from the national gov­
ernment to help parents raise the- next generation of citizens, to the
private consumer market.” Utilizing the rhetoric of the incoming Nixon
administration, Etta Horn, NWRO chair Johnnie Tillmon, Tim Samj>-
son, and George Wiley sought the help of profit-making firms to secure
welfare rights.
NWRO leaders proposed that large national firms enable poor people
to buy their products by donating vouchers, or coupons, for the prod­
ucts to the National Welfare Rights Organization. NWRO would then
distribute the vouchers to its members and, as with the Sears credit plan,
gain a concrete material benefit the organization could provide to mem­
bers as a reward for their participation. Horn, Tillmon, Sampson, and
Wiley offered their national network of local action organizations “as a
distribution system for these coupons.”’* They suggested that the com­
panies provide packages of |5.00 or more of coupons for the family of
each NWRO member, distributed in small denominations and redeem­
able, like sales coupons, in local grocery and drug stores. “If a number
of companies participated,” N\^^0 publications argued, “this could
amount to a significant direct subsidy of poor people without any inter­
vention or involvement of government agencies.”
The exchanges between welfare rights leaders and officials of various
firms about the private-sector family assistance plan illuminate the wide
berth that social movement activists of the late 1960s believed they had
to reinterpret standard economic practices. They also reveal the dis­
tance between the thinking of welfare rights activists and that of the peo­
ple who ran profitable corporations. Requesting a meeting with J. F.
McFarland, the president of General Mills, Wiley and Tillmon argued
that corporations had a responsibility to ameliorate poverty. They also
presented their request as a corporate opportunity. Tillmon and Wiley
proposed the welfare rights movement as a particularly apt partner for
the behemoth marketer of brand-name household products because of
its unique position as a movement of poor people and its consumer ori­
entation: “NWRO,” they claimed, “is the only nationwide organization
132 Chapter 5

of, by and for poor people vigorously striving for a fuller share of the
abundance of our affluent society.”'^^
As they expressed their belief in the Nixon administration’s ideal of
private-sector rather than governmental solutions to problems such as
poverty, the welfare rights leaders also called into question the morality
of limitless profits. “Since poor people do not have enough money," they
wrote, “we ask that your company distribute a share of your great wealth
to those poorest of the poor.”^"* Appealing to corporate self-interest, they
assured the General Mills executive that donating products to NWRO
members would help in accessing the low-income market. Tillmon and
Wiley argued that this would happen both because the NW^O vouchers
would make General Mills products more visible in low-income commu­
nities and because NWRO would create its own “honor roll of participat­
ing companies and their products.”” In their outline of the voucher
plan, NV^O leaders added that, despite their poverty, welfare recipients
had buying power estimated at $10 billion per year. Finally, they pointed
out that, because of charitable giving laws, “The cost of this program
would be largely born[e] by the federal government through tax write
offs.””
The response to Tillmon and Wiley’s request came from the General
Mills company’s chief community relations officer rather than from its
president His letter revealed befuddlement about the arguments made
by NWRO and resistance to the idea of giving away products that his
firm might otherwise sell for a profit “Dear Mrs. Tillmon,” he wrote,
“although your letter outlines in general terms a cooperative approach
toward solving the problems of poverty, I must confess that I remain con­
fused as to the exact means.”” He in^^ted Tillmon to send additional
information about the plan, but General Mills and NWRO never made
any progress in designing a joint program. Welfare rights leaders had no
more success with the other corporations to which they offered the pri­
vate-sector family allowance “opportunity.””

Cash, Not Food Stamps

In addition to their efforts to gaiiT credit and goods, welfare recipients
in New York City and elsewhere f(^ught to maintain control over how
they would spend their public assistance grants in the consumer market.
One of the hallmarks of the pt^iq^sistance programs created during
the New Deal Vk^as the “money-^yment” principle, by which local wel­
fare departments were supposed to dispense grants in cash rather than
in kind and leave each client free to spend her money as she saw fit” As
previously noted, this principle was weakened by the 1962 amendments
to the Social Security Act, which allowed caseworkers to restrict the
 Give Us Credit for Being American 133

spending of clients they believed were mismanaging their money. It was

also weakened by the rise of food stairnM^ an alternative to cash welfare
that recipients could spend only foF^oods^that appeared on a federally
approved list.
Welfare recipients never accepted the limitations federal and local
authorities placed on their purchasing power. However, their battles
against these limitations became niore difficult over time; one manifes­
tation of the crescendo of conservatism surrounding public welfare was
the increasing recourse policy makers and caseworkers in the late 1960s
and early 1970s made to restrictions on recipients’ spending.
Thomasina Lewis, Jean Younger, Ann Freeman, Miriam Stevenson,
and Toni Stret, all clients of Carl Rachlin, demanded fair hearings in
part because their social workers had restricted their cash grants. Several
of the women had been given two-party rent checks, which local officials
wrote out directly to landlords so that clients could not spend their rent
money on something else. Others had the amounts they were instructed
to spend on electricity, heat, or food removed from their welfare grants
and distributed in the form of vouchers that could not be cashed.®® A
caseworker placed Lewis “on voucher” after she received an emergency
cash supplement to fill a budget gap she explained by saying that she
was robbed. When a welfare department supervisor had asked if she
wanted to receive vouchers or cash, Lewis wrote, “I told him that I
wanted the cash grant.” However, her caseworker had explained that
she would henceforth receive vouchers. Thomasina Lewis decided to
bring a fair hearing because, as she put it, “I do not think this is fair.”®*
Lewis and the other women who brought fair hearings with Rachlin’s
help were fighting for control over their public assistance grants. In
addition to two-party rent checks and vouchers instead of cash, they
objected to the welfare department practice of assigning a “shopper” to
a client who^was believed to have trouble managing her money or who
suddenly received a large sum. Julia Lopez and her husband, for exam­
ple, won eleven checks (presumably for minimum standards items),
totaling nearly seven hundred dollars, from the Melrose Welfare Center
in the Bronx. Their caseworker insisted that they endorse the checks
and leave them with the welfare department. When the couple pro­
tested, the answer they received was that their worker “was taking the
checks ’til he could get a shopper for her. Both Mrs. Lopez and husband
insisted that they could do the shopping alone” and asked for their
money.®^
The City-Wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups did not
wage a collective campaign against vouchers or mandatory shoppers, but
it did protest against food stamps. The food stamp program was origi­
nally authorized by Congress on a limited basis in 1939. It expanded dra-
134 Chapters

matically in the 1960s and early 1970s, reaching ever larger numbers of
poor people in a widening range of counties across the United States.®®
Unlike public assistance, the only criterion for receiving food stamps was
economic need. Anyone who was poor could get stamps, if she or he was
able to purchase them (they were worth more than they cost, but were
not free) and was willing to shop within their restrictions.
The federal government implemented the stamp program in a lim­
ited number of New York counties in 1968, but New York City did not
get food stamps until the summer of 1970. According to welfare director
Mitchell Ginsberg, the delay \vas largely due to Citywide’s vigorous oppo­
sition.®"' Beulah Sanders was an especially vehement foe of food stamps
because she believed they restricted clients’ spending and narrowed
their ability to respond to emergencies. She argued that the program
grew out of an alliance between antipoverty activists and the farming
lobby, which promoted the program as a benefit to the agriculture
industry more than as help for parents and children. She suspected that
the rise of food stamps was part of an effort to take cash out of the hands
of poor people. “ni take Green Power any day,” Sanders wrote,
“instead of food stamps.”®® Other Citywide members protested against
the creation of a local food stamp program because of the limited range
of goods consumers could buy with the stamps. Puerto Rican members
were especially exercised about the prospect of receiving stamps instead
of cash, since the rules excluded imported foods, such as “Spanish prod­
ucts” that were staples of their diets.®®
Welfare rights activists around the country shared these concerns.
Marty Green, who chaired the food stamp committee of the Washing­
ton, D.C., welfare rights group, echoed Beulah Sanders’s critique of U.S.
agriculture policy and the favoritism it showed toward large-scale farm­
ers. Many poor people, she explained, “in dire need of food,” could
not afford to buy the stamps. Others faced emergencies and wanted the
flexibility to redeem their stamps for cash when “crises arose.®’ Fifty
women and children demonstrated in Houston against food stamps,
arguing that the program deprived them of “the right to spend their
money as they see fit” and made it hard for them to afford necessities
such as “laundry supplies, household cleaning supplies, toilet tissue,
[and] sanitary napkins,” which wej^e'nol covered under the food stamp
regulations.®® Annie Smart from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, found shop­
ping with food stamps “embarra^it^g,” and argued that it “strips you of
your dignity.”®^ Joe McDermot^vho was part of a poor people’s coali­
tion from South Carolina that traveled to Capitol Hill to discuss prob­
lems in the program, insisted that it wasn’t “right to give food stamps to
me and then tell me how I can use them.”®®
In New York City, the battle over food stamps was inseparable from
 Give Us Credit for Being American 135

the battle over flat grants. In August 1968, on the eve of the implementa­
tion of the flat grant, two hundred members of the Brooklyn Welfare
Action Council demonstrated at the headquarters of the Board of Elec­
tions, demanding access to the vote even for those who could not read
and insisting: "We do NOT want FLAT GRANTS or FOOD STAMPS.
These are the goals of City Hall.”®‘-feAer than accepting food stamps
as inevitable, Citywide membersftRe^tp preserve and improve the sys­
tem of free surplus food distribution, which New York welfare recipients
generally preferred to food stamps. Citywide members were arrested at
commodity distribution centers around New York as they passed out
leaflets informing people of theirTights as clients of the program, and
they demanded that the centers niake a wider range of foods available.®^
Demonstrations and debates between Citywide activists and city offi­
cials helped to hold the food stamp program at bay. However, Governor
Rockefeller ultirflately proposed state legislation to bring food stamps to
every county in New York, and both the state legislature and City Coun­
cil approved the move.®^ Food stamps finally came to New York City on
August 31, 1970. The Lindsay administration abolished the commodity
distribution system and encouraged the 775,000 people in “working
poor” families, plus over one million welfare recipients, to apply for the
stamps.^
As they campaigned for credit cards and against food stamps. Citywide
and NWRO members took arguments and tactics from these campaigns
into other arenas. In 1968, Citywide announced a march on the welfare
centers to protest budgets that “cheated” clients by granting them less
than they actually paid for utilities and thus forced them to use money
from their strained food budgets for gas, electricity, and water. By 1969,
welfare recipients from all over the country had taken their protest
directly to the utility companies, accusing them of discriminating against
the poor by demanding high deposits from low-income people and
charging higher rates in poor neighborhoods than they charged else-
where.“ While they fought to keep the food stamp program out of many
U.S. counties, activists also fought to bring in the school lunch program,
which made federally subsidized food available to schoolchildren. Mem­
bers of NWRO argued that schools offering subsidized lunches should
not discriminate against poor children by making them stand in sepa­
rate lines, or hold food stamp-like chits that marked them as different
from everyone else.^®
One of the most creative strategies NWRO sponsored was an effort to
compel local school districts to distribute the money they received for
poor children’s education directly to the families of those children. This
strategy began with complaints by low-income parents about the fees
public schools charged for gym suits, class trips, and other educational
 136 Chapters

expenses. Such charges, argued attorneys affiliated with NWRO, placed

poor people systematically at a disadvantage when they attempted to
access education, and therefore violated the equal protection clause of
the Fourteenth Amendment. Their solution was to end the programs
school districts had created to serve poor children under Title I of the
federal education law, and distribute the money Congress had allocated
for educating the poor direcdy to parents.®’ Through what lawyer Gabe
Kaimowitz called “the application of Title I,” parents would be
able to pay school fees, and welfare recipients could buy tl^eir children
some of the clothes and shoes that had disappeared from their budgets
when New York and other jurisdictions created flat grants.®®

In their Sears campaign, efforts to gain a “private-sector family allow­

ance,” and opposition to food stamps. Citywide and NWRO members
ventured into politics as American consumers who deserved fair treat­
ment although they were poor, black, brown, female, and recipients of
government benefits. Beulah Sanders, Jennette Washington, and Etta
Horn linked their agenda for reforming the welfare state with an agenda
for reforming the supposedly private realm of the profit-oriented
market.
Welfare rights activism illuminated the fuzzy boundaries between the
public and private sectors, raising hard questions such as why the gov­
ernment should permit a company like Sears to acquire limitless profits
at a time when the city of New York could barely afford its welfare costs.
What, the women and men of the welfare rights movement asked, did
lucrative companies, which benefited from government regulation or
even subsidies, owe to everyone else? In the food stamp controversy, they
underlined the ways public policy makers shaped and directed the
spending decisions of low-income families. They pointed out the fact
that politicians used public tax revenues to sustain the market for
agricultural commodities, and complained that there were not enough
public resources devoted to ending hunger. Why, these activists won­
1
dered, did federal planners get to choose what poor families would eat,
or how much of their limited income they would spend on food as
V opposed to other goods? Why werej)oor people treated differently from
rich ones, by companies and governments alike?

e
 Notes to Pages 112-118 243

to Poor People’s Movements, Piven and Cloward, “Strategy of Crisis: A Dialogue,”

American Child 48, S (Summer 1966): 20-32, reprinted in Cloward and Piven,
The Politics of Turmoil: Poverty, Race, and the Urban Crisis (New York: Vintage,
1975), 106-26; and Piven and Cloward, The Breaking of the American Social Contract
(New York: New Press, 1997), 267-308, 329-44.

Chapters. Give Us Credit for Bang American

1. Jackie Pope, “Credit Cards Bum at "Sears,” Welfare Righter 1, 4 (June 27,
1969): 1. For the relationship between the NCSW and NWRO, see “An Impor­
tant Issue Before the Membership,” nTd., 2079/NCSW, NWRO; proposals to
NCSW from dissident groups, including NWRO, [1968], ibid.; and letter from
Arthur Flemming, president, National Council of Social Welfare, Columbus,
Ohio, to George Wiley, NWRO, June 28,1969, with attached pamphlet, “This Is
the National Conference on Social Welfare,” n.d., ibid.
2. Joyce Burson, interview with Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz, 1974, 48, 24/
Joyce Burson Interview, Kotz. Brooklyn organizer Rhoda Linton agreed that the
credit card campaigrToriginated with rank-and-file members. “I really hated that
campaign,” she recaUed. “I didn’t have a credit card undl I was 40 or some­
thing.” Rhoda Linton, interview with Felicia Kombluh, June 9, 1997, by tele­
phone, 68, transcript in possession of the author.
3. “Sears Action Oct. 23rd,” Welfare Filter2 (October 1969): 1.
4. Hearings on Family Assistance Plan, H.R. 16311, Thursday, November 19,
1970, Washington, D.C., 178, 17/NWRO—FAP Testimony Before Clean Gene,
Kotz.
5. David Caplovitz, The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families
(Glencoe, N.Y.: Free Press, 1963), 81. Other studies of consumer practices in
postwar black neighborhoods include Federal Trade Commission, "Economic
Report on Installment Credit and Retail Sales Practices of District of Columbia
Retailers,” in Consumerism: Search for the Consumer Interest, ed. David Aaker and
George Day (New York: Free Press, 1971), 374-81; and Eric Schnapper, “Con­
sumer Legislation and the Poor,” Yale LawJournal 76 (1967): 745-92.
6. This was true until the U.S. Congress in 1968 expressly forbade firing
employees on account of wage garnishment 82 Stat 146, Act of May 29, 1968,
cited in Justice Douglas’s opinion in Sniadach v. Family Finance Corporation of Bay
View, et al (395 U.S. 340) (1969).
7. Caplovitz, Poor Pay More, 37, 41.
8. Ibid., 47.
9. Ibid., 9, 30,50.
10. See Allison Dunham, “Consumer Credit Problems of the Poor—Legal
Assistance a^ an Aid in Law Reform,” National Conference on Law and Poverty,
June 23-25, ^965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 9-14; Office
of Economic Opportunity, ThePoor Seek Justice (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1966),
Guidelines for Legal Services Programs (Washington, D.C.: Community Action Pro­
gram, 1966, and GPO, 1967), and Evaluation Manual (Legal Services Program,
1966); and Harry Stumpf, Community Politics and Legal Services: The Other Side of
the Law (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1975), 137.
11. See the definition of unconscionability in Henry Campbell Black et al..
Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed. (Saint Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Company,
1991), 1059.
12. Williams v. Walker-ThomasFurniture Company (351 F. 2d 447) (D.C. Circuit,
244 Notes to Pages 118-119

1965). For the significance of the case, see Stewart Macaulay, “Bambi Meets
Godzilla: Reflections on Contracts Scholarship and Teaching vs. State Unfair
and Deceptive Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Statutes,” Homton Law
Review 26, 4 (July 1989): 575-601. For similar issues among the clients of welfare
rights counsel Carl Rachlin, see SEDFRE, Summary of Mary Dandridge’s Install­
ment Purchasing Experiences, n.d. [Summer/Fall 1968], 3, Case of Mary Dan-
dridge, 47/98. SEDFRE; Case of Ellen D’Amico, 47/82, SEDFRE; Case of Sarah
Harrison, 48/4, SEDFRE; and Case of Doris Brown, 47/141, SEDFRE. The
names of all of Rachlin’s clients have been changed.
13. Williams v. Walker-Thomas, 448-50.
14. For a theory of consumption as a form of work women perform, see Batya
Weinbaum and Amy Bridges, “The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capi­
tal and the Structure of Consumption,” in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for
Socialist Feminism, ed. Zillah Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979),
190-205. On women as consumers of welfare state services, see Laura Balbo,
“Crazy Quilts: Rethinking the Welfare State Debate from a Woman’s Point of
View,” in Women and the State, ed. Anne Showstack Sassoon (London: Unwin
Hyman, 1987), 45-71.
15. For the significance of African American protests over “the right to shop
and the right... to sell,” see Regina Austin, “A Nation of Thieves: Consump­
tion, Commerce, and the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7, 1 (Fall 1994):
225-48; and Patricia Williams, “The Death of the Profane,” in Williams, The
Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991),
44-51.
16. See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Move­
ment in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer­
sity Press, 1993); Jacqueline Jones, iMbor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women,
Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985),
68-70; and Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on
Race and Sex in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), 22-23. On the claim
of African American women to ladyhood at the turn of the twentieth century,
see Giddings, 49, 178; Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership in the
Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and
Gaines, “Rethinking Race and Class in African-American Struggles for Equality,
1885-1941,” American Historical Review 20\, 2 (April 1997): 378-87.
17. Linda M^ka and Theo M^ka, Farm Workers, Agribusiness, and the State
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 174-99, 205-7. On women in the
UFW boycotts, see Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twenti­
eth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 119, 132; and
Margaret Rose, “ ‘From the Fields to the Picket Line’: Huelga Women and the
Boycott, 1965-1975,” Labor History 31, 3 (Summer 1990): 271-93. On NWRO
and the UFW, see chapter 1 and Tim Sampson, interview with Felicia Kornbluh,
July 26, 2001, Oakland, Calif., 27-30, transcript in author’s possession.
18. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring York: Fawcett Crest, 1962), esp. 161-78;
Carson, Always, Rachel: The Letters of ISzchel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-
1964, ed. Martha Freeman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 247-420; Charles
McCany, Citizen Nader (New York^Jtorday Review Press, 1971); and Ralph
Nader, ai Any (1965;«^Iew^%rk: Pocket Books, 1968).
19. Estelle Freedman, No Tuming^ack: The History ofFeminism and theFuture
of Women (New York: Ballantine, 2002), 183-84; and Flora Davis, Moving the
Mountain: The Worrmi’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1991), 147-48.
 Notes to Pages 119-120 245

20. For early twentieth-century women’s protests, see Annelise Orleck, Com­
mon Sense and a Utile Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States,
1900-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 200-221;
and Dana Frank, “Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New
York Cost-of-Living Protests,” Feminist Strl^is 11,2 (Summer 1985): 255-56. For
“Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work’‘^ff'‘]^iJem, see Wil Haygood, King of the
Cats: The Ufe and Times ofAdam Clayton Powell, fr. (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
*1993), 75-77; Jim Sleeper, The Closest of^trangers: Liberalism and thePolitics ofRace
in New York (New York: Norton, 1990), 48-50; and Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The
Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 121. On Ella Baker, see
Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic
Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 82-90; and
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light ofFreedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Missis-
sippiFreedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 82. On the
immediate postwar geriod, see Martha Biondi, To Stand andFight: The Struvefor
Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2003), 89-93.
21. Cathy Aldridge, “Harlem Housewives Join Pickets Over Food Prices,” Am.
News, November 5, 1966, 3. For co-ops, see “Consumer Plan for Harlemites,”
Am. News, September 24,1966, 22; “Human Rights Through Consumer Cooper­
ation,” program, Harlem Consumer Education, Inc., 6th Annual Conference,
n.d. [1968], 51/19, SEDFRE; “E. Harlem Furniture Co-Op Opens Friday,” Am.
News, December 21, 1968, 4; and George Todd, “Housewives Form Own Food
Co-op in Bed-Stuy,” Am. News, February 21,1970, 23.
22. Leaflet, “The Black Forum Invites You to Hear a Discussion on ‘Install­
ment Buying and Black Peopld,” n.d., 51/19, SEDFRE; “Don’t Buy and Sign in
Haste,” Am. News, May 22,1965,10; “Seeking Credit Gyp Legislation,” Am. News,
September 16, 1966, 25; Whitney Young, “Consumer Frauds,” Am. News, June
17, 1967, 16; and “Credit Dealings in City’s Ghettos Come Under Fire,” Am.
News, January 20, 1968, 1. For “Operation Lambchop” and similar protests, see
“War Is Opened on Overchargers—Boro Combats Fleecing,” Am. News, Novem­
ber 6, 1965, 27; “Milk Cost 20 Cents More in Harlem Stores,” Am. News, April
16,1966, 48; Simon Anekwe, “Operation Lambchop Hits Harlem Markets,” Am.
News, May 14, 1966, 1-2; and Floyd McKissick, “The High Cost of Being Poor,”
Am. News, February 14,1970, 7.
23. “CORE Wins Hiring Pact in Bank Drive,” Am. News, September 26, 1964,
7. See also Oakland Chapter, CORE, “Selma, Alabama and Bogalousa, Louisiana
. . . Here in Oakland?” [1965], 3/44, Social Protest; “They Think You're a 98
lb. Weakling . . . Picket 8c Sip-In Hy’s Restaurant” [1965], ibid.; and August
Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Cixhl Rights Movement (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1975), 30, 47, 57, 59, 234.
24. Letter from Carl Rachlin, General Counsel, CORE, to Mr. Peter Darrow,
University of Chicago Law Review, Chicago, Illinois, December 1, 1965, 12/20,
SEDFRE; memorandum from Carl Rachlin to Messrs. [James] Farmer, [George]
Wiley, [Alan] Gartner, [Marvin] Rich, Re: Follow up on Memorandum on
Unconscionable Retail Practices to the Poor, November 29, 1965, 50/41, SED­
FRE; and [Rachlin?], draft press release, on the report, “Unprincipled Exploita­
tion of the Poor,” n.d. [1965], 50/42, SEDFRE. Rachlin assessed Section 2-302
of the Uniform Commercial Code in letter from Rachlin to Robert F. Drinan,
S.J., dean, Boston College Law School, Brighton, Mass., September 19, 1966,
12/23, SEDFRE.
246 Notes to Pages 120-122

25. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community
(New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 38.
26. Ibid., 116. On consumer demands by SCLC and other major civil rights
groups, see Claybome Carson, David Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and
Darlene Clark Hine, eds.. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader (New York; Pen­
guin, 1991), 291-303; Claybome Carson, In Stru^le: SNCCand the BUk^ Awaken-
ing of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 103, 172,
255, 269; and Meier and Rudwick, CORE, 187, 234, 262.
27. Operation Breadbasket began in Philadelphia. It built on the initiative of
Reverend Leon Sullivan, who began a campaign of "selective patronage” by
African American consumers. See Matthew Countryman, Up Sinith: Civil Rights
and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Penn^lvania, 2006),
101.
28. Southern Christian Leadership Conference, New York City, flyer about
A&P boycott, Febmary 1971, 33/14, Social Action. See also Dick Edwards,
"Operation Breadbasket: Total Involvement—NOW!,” Am. News, May 18,1968,
23; editorial, "Operation Breadbasket,” Am. News, April 18, 1970, 16; and Rev.
William A. Jones, chairman. Operation Breadbasket of Greater New York, "Not
a Press Release,” on the A&P Protest, n.d. [February 1971], 33/14, Social
Action. On Operation Breadbasket generally, see Negro Ministers of Atlanta,
“Selective Buying Campaign Enters Second Phase,” January 23,1963, 38/Oper­
ation Breadbasket, Social Action.
29. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, Report of the National
Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968), 274-75.
30. Joan Hoff, Nixon Reconsidered (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 95-97. One
recipient of Nixon Administration funds for the promotion of "black capital­
ism” was Floyd McKissick, who had defeated George Wiley in the 1966 contest
for the presidency of CORE. Community Relations Service, U.S. Department of
Justice, “Ne%v Minority Enterprises” (Washington, D.C.: Department of Justice,
[1971?]), 55, lists McKissick as president of a for-profit "economic development
corporation” involved in developing a new town of 18,000 persons called Soul
City. See also Meier and Rudwick, xi. Writer James Baldwin called black capital­
ism "a concept demanding yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia
than the concept of the Virgin Birth.” Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York:
Dell/Laurel, 1972), 48.
31. Statement by Senator William Proxmire on the introduction of S. 2146,
the Community Credit Expansion Act, in the Senate of the United States, Con­
gressional Record, May 13,1969, 2038/Retail Stores—Other Than Sears, NWRO.
32. See discussion of postwar labor-force participation rates in Alice Kessler-
Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage^ming Women in the United States (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 301-3. On postwar gender relations and con­
sumption, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold
WarEra (New York: Basic Books, 1988), 162-82.
33. On the role of VISTA’s m the Philadelphia welfare rights movement, see
Countryman, Up South, 277. On^dw^SI^dit campaign, see Countryman, 279-80;
Felicia Kornbluh, "Black Buying^ower: Welfare Rights, Consumerism, and
Northern Protest,” in Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South,
1940-1980, ed. Komozi Woodard and Jeanne Theoharis (New York: Palgrave/
Macmillan, 2005), 199-222; Kornbluh, "To Fulfill Their ‘Rightly Needs’: Con­
sumerism and the National Welfare Rights Movement,” Radical History Revieio^^
(Fall 1997): 76-113; Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz, A Passionfor Equality: George
 Notes to Pages 122-126 247

A. "Wiley and the Movement (New York: Norton, 1977), 235-36; and Larry R. Jack-
son and William A- Johnson, Protest by the Poor: The Welfare Rights Movement in
New York City (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Rand Corporation, 1974), 41.
Roxanne Jones was later elected to the Pennsylvania State House, where she
served until her death in 1996. See Linda Loyd, et al., “State Sen. Roxanne H.
Jones Dies at 68,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20,1996, Al.
34. Quoted in “Wanamaker and Lerner Agree To Give Relief Clients Credit,”
Philadelphia Tribune, August 20,1968, n.p., “NWRO ACTION Leadership Packet
No. 3,” file titled “NWRO,” NCLEJ. *“* ,
35. [Tim Sampson?], “Nationwid«*SeaiS^redit Campaign,” notice from
NWRO to all WRO’s, n.d. [March 1969?] 50^8/NWRO Sears Materials, NWRO.
- 36. “NWRO Winter Acdon Campaign—^WRO’s ‘Get It’—New York,” NOW!
2, 14 (December 1968): 8. On Brookl^, see Jacqueline Pope, Biting the Hand
That Feeds Them: Organizing Women on Welfare at the Grass Roots Level (New York:
Praeger, 1989), 62,105-10; and Kotz and Kotz, A Passion for Equality, 236.
37. “I played a game with the man,” Burson added, "and that’s the way we
always did.” Burson, with Kotz and Kotz, 48.
38. “NWRO Winter Action Campaign—New York”; and Pope, Biting the
Hand, 105-6.
39. Pope, Biting the Hand, 108-9; “Credit Offered to Welfare Recipients,”
TLI, 4, 1 (January 17, 1969): 1; Jackson and Johnson, Protest by thePoor, 41; and
Sadie Jackson, “Sears Demonstration,” B-WAC Newsletter, April 4, 1969, 2038/
Local WRO Sears Material, NWRO.
40. Mamie Hall, “Heat on in July,” Welfare Fighter 5 (July 31,1969): 2. Hall
and Sadie Jackson, mentioned above, were both members of B-WAG as well as
Citywide. Rhoda Linton, personal communication, June 21, 2006.
41. Isadore Barmash, “3 Big Stores Agree on Extending Credit to Relief
Recipients,” A^, July 23, 1969, 1, 78; and notice on credit, NOW (July 1969),
10.
42. Pope, Biting the Hand, 106-8. For the shop-in as a tactic in places other
than New York City, see “Call to Action” on Sears campaign, n.d. [March
1969?], 2038/NWRO Sears Materials, NWRO.
43. Pope, Biting the Hand, 106-7; and “Call to Action.”
44. Pope, Biting Hand, 106-7.
45. Barmash, 78; Notice on Credit, NOW!\ and summary of NWRO credit
agreements, n.d., 2038/Sears Correspondence, NWRO.
46. Typical callers quoted in Isidore Barmash, “As Those on Relief Get an
Offer of Credit,” ATT, July 20,1969, E2.
47. Pete Hamill, “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class,” New York
Magazine, April 14,1969, 24.
48. Institute for Religious and Social Studies, New York, notes on an interview
with Hulbert James, February 6, 1970, 2-3,11/18, Wiley.
49. Press release on National Coordinating Committee Meeting, Jackson,
Mississippi, February, 24, 1969, 36/Nat. Welfare Rights Org. (2), Social Action.
For Sanders and Olivo as leaders at this time, see “NWRO Action—^Negotiate
NOW! Avith Sears,” 2038/Sears, NWRO.
50. Tim Sampson, interview with Felicia Kombluh, February 12,1996, by tele­
phone, informal notes in author’s possession, n.p. Also see Kotz and Kotz, Pas­
sion for Equality, 236; press release on NCC meeting in Jackson; Paul Harvey,
“Conversation Piece— Poverty Pays as Welfare Demands More,” Wheeling (West
Virginia) News-Register, n.d. [March? 1969], n.p., attached to letter from U.S. Sen-
248 Notes to Pages 126-130

ator Jennings Randolph, D-West Virginia, to Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon, April 8,1969,
21/5, Wiley; and Etta Horn, “Credit Given by Montgomery Ward,” WelfareFighter
1, 4 (December 1969): 1.
51. Horn, “Credit Given by Montgomery Ward.”
52. On legal efforts to encode income discrimination in constitutional doc­
trine, see Martha Davis, Brutal Need: Laxiryers and the Welfare Rights Movement,
1960-1973 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993); Aryeh Neier, Only
Judgment: The Limits of Litigation in Social Change (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1982), 127-40; Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law
(Mineola, N.Y.: Foundation Press, 1978), 1098-1136; Frank Mfchelman, “The
Supreme Court 1968 Term—Forward: On Protecting the Poor Through the
Fourteenth Amendment,” Harvard Law Review 83, 7 (1969): 7-59; and A. Dela-
field Smith, The Right to Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1955).
53. Mrs. Etta Horn, statement, WRO's in ACTION, 1,1 (April 1969): 2, 2038/
Sears, NWRO.
54. Letter from Eugene May, president, Pike County Citizens Association,
Hellier Kentucky, to Manager, Sears Roebuck 8c Company, Pikeville, Kentucky,
June 15,1969, 2038/Sears Correspondence, NWRO.
55. List of possible slogans for the Sears campaign, n.d., 2038/NWRO Sears
Materials, NM^O.
56. Chicago Welfare Rights Organization, “Press Release,” April 7, 1969,
2038/Ix>cal WRO Sears Material, NWRO.
57. Dorothy Perry, “Composition—‘Welfare Rights’,” April 8, 1969, 2038/
Local WRO Sears Material, NWRO.
58. WRO’s in ACTION 1,1 (April 1969): 8, 2038/Sears, NWRO.
59. “Nationwide Sears Credit Campaign,” NWRO ACTION Leadership
Packet No. 3, File titled “NWRO,” NCLEJ.
60. “Nationwide Sears Credit Campaign”; NWRO notice to local WROs, n.d.,
2038/NWRO Sears Materials, NWRO.
61. “Call to Action [on Sears campaign],” n.d., 2038/NWRO Sears Materials,
NWRO. For the campaign as outreach to the middle class, see letter from Betty
Younger, Pittsburgh, Pa., to Johnnie Tillmon, president. National Welfare Rights
Organization, Washington, D.C., May 9, 1969, 2038/Correspondence with Peo­
ple About Sears, NWRO; Pima County (Tucson, Ariz.) Welf^e Rights Organiza­
tion, “NOW! Don’t Buy Sears,” n.d., 2038/Local WRO Sears Material, ibid.; and
[George Wiley], “Sears Action Group,” n.d., 2038/Sears—^To Write, ibid.
62. Letter from Better Younger to Johnnie Tillmon and letter from Mrs.
Wayne W. Harrington, president. Women’s Division of the Methodist Church,
to Arthur M. Woods [sic], president, Sears, Roebuck Company, Chicago, March
18.1969, 2038/Sears Correspondence^ NWRO.
63. See letter from Mrs. S. N. Levens, Rutherford, N.J., to Dr. George Wiley,
c/o TV. station 13, March 29, 19^» 2038/Correspondence With People About
Sears, NWRO; letter from NeiLWi^^g Alexandria, Virginia, to NWRO, April
25.1969, ibid.; and letter from M.*Kling to George Wiley, n.d. [marked received
April 3, 1969], ibid.
64. Mail-in cards on the Sears campaign, 2038/Correspondence With People
About Sears, NWRO.
65. Letter from “An outspoken wage earner” to the National Welfare Rights
Organization, July 20, 1969, postmarked Buffalo, N.Y., 2038/Sears Correspon­
dence, NWRO.
 Notes to Pages 131-133 249

66. Ibid.
67. [Tim Sampson?], “Summary of NWRO Credit Agreements,” n.d., 2038/
Sears Correspondence, NWRO.
68. On quiet extensions of credit to low-income people, see Pam [?], “Ponti­
ac’s Agreement with Sears,” n.d., 2038/Local WRO Sears Material, NWRO. For
Montgomery Ward agreement, see press release, Montgomery Ward Company,
on its Agreement with the National Welfare Rights Organization, December 8,
1969, 2038/Montgomery Ward, NWRO; memorandum of Agreement between
the National Welfare Rights Organization^and the Montgomery Ward Company
for a Pilot Program Extending CrediPrSSVelfare Recipients, September 10,
1969, 21/5, Wiley; Kotz and Kotz, Passion for Equality, 237; and Jackson andjohn-
son. Protest by the Poor,
69. “NWRO Sears Action,” n.d. [March, 1969?], 2038/Consumer Credit.
NWRO; and “Sears Boycott Action List,’’ April 9,1969,15/2, Wiley.
70. Memo to: All WROs, From: Etta B. Horn, chairman, NWRO Ways and
Means Committee and George A. Wiley, executive director, Subject: Sears
Action, n.d. [March-April 1969], 2038/Sears Correspondence, NWRO.
71. On European family allowances, see Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence,
and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 13, 326, 415-17; Jane Jenson, “Representa­
tions of Gender: Policies to ‘Protect’ Women Workers and Infants in France and
the United States,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 158; and Alva Reimer Myrdal, Nation and
Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (New York:
Harper 8c Brothers, 1941), 134-35.
72. National Welfare Rights Organization, “NWRO Private Sector/Family
Allowance Plan,” n.d., 2038/ NWRO Sears Stuff, NWRO.
73. Letter from Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon and George Wiley, National Welfare
Rights Organization, Washington, D.C., to Mr. J. F. McFarland, president, Gen­
eral Mills, Inc., Minneapolis, Minn., December 16, 1968, 2038/Consumer
Credit, NWRO.
74. Ibid.
75. The suggestion of such an “honor roll” probably bore with it the implicit
threat of a boycott of firms that failed to participate. For an explicit threat, see
letter from (Mrs.) Etta Horn, chairman, Committee on Ways and Means, and
George Wiley, executive director, National Welfare Rights Organization, Wash­
ington, D.C., to Mr. H. J. Morgens, president. The Proctor & Gamble Company,
Cincinnati, Ohio, May 16,1969, 2038/Proctor and Gamble, NWRO.
76. “NWRO Private Sector/Family Allowance Plan.”
77. Letter from Thomas L. Olson, manager of Community Relations, Gen­
eral Mills, to Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon, December 31,1968,2038/Consumer Credit,
NWRO.
78. See letter from Johnnie Tillmon and George Wiley to Mr. D.J. Fitzgib-
bons, president, the Sterling Drug Company, New York, N.Y., December 16,
1968 (same text as General Mills letter), 2038/Consumer Credit, NWRO. On
high-priority targets for NWRO’s private-sector program, see note [from Tim
Sampson] to Joyce [Burson], n.d., ibid.
79. Jane Hoey, director. Bureau of Public Assistance, “Significance of the
Money Payment in Public Assistance,” Social Security Bulletin 7, 9 (September
1944): 3-5. See discussion in Chapter 2, above.
80. Letter from Thomasina Lewis, Mount Vernon, N.Y., to Carl Rachlin, legal
 250 Notes to Pages 133-134

director, Scholarship, Education, and Defense Fund for Racial Equality, New
York, N.Y., August 3,1967, case of Thomasina Lewis, 47/16, SEDFRE; memoran­
dum from E. Dahlgren, B. Wolf, M. Barlow, and E. Shapiro, to Mrs. Mae
Feinstein, Re: Younger, Jean, November 10, 1967, and George W. Chesbro, act­
ing commissioner. New York State Department of Social Services, decision after
fair hearing, in the Matter of the Appeal ofJean Younger from a determination
by the New York City Department of Social Services, May 28, 1968, 2-3, case of
Jean Younger, 49/35, SEDFRE; letter from Stephen Nagler, SEDFRE, New York,
to Hon. Joseph Louchheim, deputy commissioner. State of Npw York Depart­
ment of Social Services, New York, N.Y., November 6,1967, and [Louchheim?],
decision after fair hearing, in the Matter of the Appeal of Miriam Stevenson,
May 1,1969, case of Miriam Stevenson, 47/58, SEDFRE; Ann Freeman, reasons
for requesting a fair hearing, November 2, 1967, case of Ann Freeman, 49/14,
SEDFRE; and George K. Wyman, commissioner. New York State Department of
Social Services, decision after fair hearings, in the Matter of the Appeal of Toni
Stret, from a determination by the New York City Department of Social Services,
October 25, 1967, March 26, and May 8, 1968, 4, Case of Toni Stret, 47/118
SEDFRE.
81. Letter from Thomasina Lewis to Carl Rachlin, case of Thomasina Lewis.
Also see letter from Stephen Nagler, SEDFRE, to Honorable Max Waldgeir,
Westchester, N.Y., August 11, 1967, ibid.
82. Letter from Nelly Peissachowitz, ACSW, Neighborhood Service Center
No. 1, Bronx, N.Y., to Carl Rachlin, SEDFRE, May 16,1967, 46/19, SEDFRE. See
also letter from Marjorie Nazel, Forest Neighborhood House, Inc., Bronx, New
York, to Stephen Nagler, SEDFRE, n.d., 46/19, SEDFRE.
83. Michael B. Katz, In The Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social Histoiy of Welfare in
America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 266; Maurice McDonald, “Food Stamps:
An Analytical History,” Social Service Review 5\ (December 1977), 643; and Nick
Kotz, Let Them Eat Promises: The Politics of Hunger in America (Engletvood Cliffs
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 48,178-89, 229-38.
84. Mitchell Ginsberg, interview with Nick Kotz and Mary Lynn Kotz, n.d.,
4-5, 24/Mitchell Ginsberg Interview, Kotz.
85. Beulah Sanders, “Food Stamp Trick,” TUS, 3 (March 14, 1968): 3. For
other arguments against food stamps from Sanders anH Citywide, see Beulah
Sanders, testimony, hearings on Family Assistance Plan, H.R. 16311, November
18, 1970, Washington, D.C., 44, 65, 17/NWRO—FAP Testimony Before Clean
Gene, Kotz; and press release. May 1, 1969, Unnumbered Box/New York
C.C.C.W.G. Newsletters; Leaflets; Pamphlets, Sampson.
86. "Discurso de Socurro Martin al-Rally de Junio 30,” TUB, 8 (July 3,
1968): 1; and Celia Paul, “Anti-Food Stamp Action,” TUB, 7 (May 22,1968): 2.
^ 87. Mrs. Marty Green, "Food Stanif^s = Hunger Stamps,” NOW! (July 1969):

88. “Complaints Against Foo^^fatjips,” Welfare Fighter6 (February 1970):

6; and Hon. Allard Lowensteinr "’^i^nscript of a Meeting Between Poor People
of Beaufort and Jasper Counties, S.C., and Representative Allard K.
Lowenstein,” extension of remarks. Congressional Record, April 3, 1969, p. E2774,
21/2, Wiley.
89. Mrs. Annie Smart, southern regional representative, NWRO, testimony,
hearings on Family Assistance Plan, H.R. 16311, Thursday, November 19, 1970,
Washington, D.C., 108-9,17/NWRO—FAP Testimony Before Clean Gene, Kotz.
90. Lowenstein, extension of remarks, E2774. On the meeting, see also
 Notes to Pages 134-136 251

“NWRO News from Across the Nation," WelfareRighler I, 2 (March 28,1969): 4.

On Lowensiein generally, see William Chafe, Never Stop Running: Allard
Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books,
1993).
91. “Brooklyn WRO Demands Voter Registration,” NOW! (August 1968): 9.
92. City-Wide Coordinating Committed^tTf Welfare Groups, press release,
August 14,1969, Unnumbered Box/New¥d^^C.C.W.G. Newsletters; Leaflets;
Pamphlets, Sampson; and Jennette Washington, “Food Surplus Action.”
'93. Ron Pollack, "Food Stamp Yiozxf^Welfare RighterX, 3 (April-May 1969):
7; Beulah Sanders, "Legitimate Chanels*vs. Governmental Repression," April
16, 1969, press release, Unnumbered-Box/New York C.C.C.W.G. Newsletters;
Leaflets; Pamphlets, Sampson; and "A Statement by Mrs. Beulah Sanders,” June
27, 1969, press release, ibid.
94. Francis X. Clines, "25% Here Eligible for Food Stamps,” NYT, August 15,
1970, 1, 30; letter from John V. Lindsay, mayor, City of New York (by Bob Car-
roll), to Mr. Harold Larsen, regional director. United States Post Office, New
York, N.Y., August 28, 1970, Conf.—S.S. (3), 17/203, Lindsay; Peter Kihss,
"Food Stamp Plan Under Way Here,” NYT, September 1, 1970,1, 26; and letter
from John V. Lindsay, mayor. City of New York, to Honorable Clifford M. Har­
din, secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Department ofj^riculture, Washington, D.C.,
September 2,1970, Conf.—HRA (4), 11/133, Lindsay.
95. For welfere departments having "cheated” by not paying full utility costs,
see “Citywide Action on Utilities,” TL/S, 1 (January 15, 1968): 1. On the cam­
paign generally, see "The Poor Pay More for Utilities,” report from Congressional
Record, May 15, 1968, 2063/Utility Campaign, NWRO; letter from Roger Rice,
staff attorney, NWRO, Washington, D.C., to Mr. Steve Herzberg, National Con­
sumer Law Center, Boston College Law School, Boston, Mass., December 24,
1969, ibid.; and Carol McMurrough, "Utility Hike Halt Hearing Slated,” Denver
Post, November 16,1969, n.p., ibid.
96. “School Lunch Rights Campaign,” Welfare Fighter\, 4 (December 1969):
3; “Demands of the Utah State Board of Education in Behalf of Utah Welfare
Rights Organization Members,” n.d., 1959/Legal Title I—Harvard & Columbia
Center Stuff, NWRO; George Wiley, report to the Inteireligious Foundation for
Community Organization, covering January 1 to December 31, 1969, 11/18,
Wiley; letter from Ron Pollack, Center on Social Welfare Policy & Law, New York,
N.Y., to Attorney, December 16,1968, 2063/Legal Network, NWRO; and memo­
randum from Pollack to Tim Sampson, January 31,1969, ibid.
97. Center on Social Welfare Policy & Law, "Legal Approaches to the Provi­
sion of a Meaningful Public School Education in the City of New York,” n.d.,
1959/Legal Tide I—Harvard Sc. Columbia Center Stuff, NWRO; letter from Mr.
and Mrs. Bernard Strassberg, Brooklyn, N.Y., to Dr. Seymour Lachman, New
York City Board of Education, Brooklyn, N.Y., February 10, 1970, ibid.; memo­
randum from Gabe Kaimowitz, Center on Social Welfare Policy and Law, to Gen­
tlemen, Re: Freemen, et al. v. Nyquist, et a/., January 1970, ibid.; and list of people
attending the Title I Litigation Conference, New Orleans, La., April 17-18,1970,
ibid.
98. Memorandum from the Center on Social Welfare Policy & Law, to
National Welfare Rights Organization, Re: Action on issues linking education to
welfare, especially through the utilization of Tide I of the Elementary and Sec­
ondary Education Act of 1965, n.d., 1959/Legal Title I—Harvard & Columbia
Stuff. NWRO.