Two recent books released by the University of North Carolina Press imaginatively and provocatively reveal underexplored chapters of twentieth century African American civil rights history. In Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition & the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974, Gordon Mantler turns conventional wisdom on its head. He argues that the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, the last civil rights crusade launched by Martin Luther King (who was assassinated in Memphis that year while planning for an antipoverty march on Washington), was not an unmitigated disaster, as it is usually portrayed. Traditionally, historians depict the campaign as politically ineffective, off-putting, and a depressing denouement to King's heroic career, a failure caused when the movement allegedly sank into a quagmire of divisive identity politics. The Poor People's Campaign supposedly represented a repudiation of an earlier, successful freedom movement centered on universal human rights rather than the particular, self-absorbed demands of different racial groups.
Mantler suggests, instead, that the campaign featured some high points of cross-racial solidarity and that the increasing emphasis on racial and ethnic nationalism within the civil rights movement contributed greatly to Mexican American and African American political successes in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, Pete Daniel, in Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights, explores the paradox of how, at the height of the civil rights movement, racism within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) stripped unprecedented numbers of African American farmers in the South of their land in the post-World War II era.
Both books make extensive use of oral histories, giving usually overlooked participants in the era a voice. Mantler is to be credited also for focusing on the role in shaping the Poor People's Campaign played by underexamined Mexican American leaders such as Reies López Tijerina, a charismatic former Pentecostal preacher. Tijerina focused on restoring land stolen by a racist Anglo court system after the Mexican–American War (1846–48) to the descendants of the Mexican and Spanish owners in New Mexico.
Mantler's chief contribution is his reassessment of the impact of identity politics on the civil rights movement. Mantler notes the tensions already extensively documented within the Latino community between Chicano youth and older assimilationists in organizations such as League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). He furthermore treads familiar ground, exploring the divide between the Black Panthers and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee leaders on the one hand, and older African American civil rights campaigners in more conservative organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Council on the other. He also examines the well-known rift between blacks asserting autonomy and leadership of their own freedom struggle and supportive but patronizing whites within the movement. Finally, Mantler grippingly tells of Cesar Chavez's efforts to win support from more radical blacks, even while maintaining a public distance from such figures. These stories are well known.
However, Mantler gives a more nuanced reading than most scholars of the late 1960s and 1970s freedom struggle. He convincingly makes the case that the much-derided Poor People's Campaign did, in fact, refocus the nation's attention on the fundamental problem of poverty. The campaign, he proves, educated many African Americans about the existence of appalling white poverty in places such as Appalachia. even as it enlightened Latinos about the depth of antiblack racism in American society. The campaign gave an important boost to feminism as well. He solidly establishes that many prominent figures in the campaign, such as Jesse Jackson and Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, later created the electoral coalitions that allowed the first generation of African American and Latino politicians to triumph at the ballot box, such as Harold Washington, who would win election as mayor of Chicago in 1983. Black and brown politicians following the Poor People's Campaign often sounded nationalist themes but still relied on transracial constituencies to triumph on Election Day. As Mantler suggests, identity politics and rainbow coalitions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Responding to earlier historians such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who decried black nationalism and the Chicano uprising of the late 1960s and early 1970s as “balkanizing America,” Mantler argues that, “Identity politics did not represent an abandonment of coalitional politics but actually was a necessary element of coalition. Identity and coalition coexisted and reflected important, productive and complementary impulses . . . Ultimately, the story of the late 1960s and 1970s is neither one of triumph nor declension. It is the story of social change through empowerment” (Mantler, 4–5).
The various rights movements of the 1960s did eventually go their own ways, Mantler acknowledges, but that was natural, as their interests were not identical. For African Americans, the “result [of identity politics] was considerable independent political power, both formal and informal, in black hands . . . the most since Reconstruction” (Mantler, 244). One of the most important legacies of the 1968 poor people's March on Washington, however, was the strengthening of the Chicano movement and the experience it gave Mexican American leaders who would emerge on the national stage in the 1970s. Chicanismo helped “identify structural inequalities, and thus liberate Mexican Americans from solely blaming themselves for their poverty . . . [allowing] them to become ‘comfortable in their own skins’” (Mantler, 244). Even though Mantler unfairly criticizes the work of whiteness scholars, and underestimates the pull of antiblack racism within the Mexican American community, Power to the Poor stands as an important, innovative addition to the growing literature on racial coalitions during the civil rights era.
Most civil rights histories focus on the action in urban centers such as Birmingham or Atlanta. Pete Daniel's Dispossession heartbreakingly tells how, even as African Americans won political triumphs in Washington, DC with passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, black farmers experienced not progress, but the loss of their land or their homes. Much of this was engineered through the USDA's embrace, beginning in the 1930s, of expensive, highly technological and scientific techniques as the future for American farming. Such high-capital, reduced-labor farming left African Americans out in the cold. Daniel pored through a mountain of records from the federal extension service and conservation service, oral histories, and other primary documents. He starkly records the deeply entrenched racism of Southern state administrators of the USDA who relied on a strategy of what Daniel calls “passive nullification” to keep African American farmers uninformed about USDA financial assistance programs and new research on farming techniques. USDA officials in Washington consistently looked the other way as their white Southern counterparts egregiously discriminated against African Americans (and women, Latinos, and Native Americans as well) in terms of crop allotments and loans.
Even as President Lyndon Johnson and a liberal Democratic Congress repeatedly passed antidiscrimination laws, USDA officials filed obviously fraudulent reports indicating compliance with new civil rights requirements, phony paperwork that went unchallenged. As a result of department discrimination, the number of black farms in ten Southern states (minus Florida, Texas, and Kentucky) declined 88% in the 1960s alone. “The civil rights and equal opportunity laws of the mid-1960s prompted USDA bureaucrats to embrace equal rights rhetorically even as they intensified discrimination,” Daniel argues (Daniel, xii). This was part of a larger decision by the federal government to encourage corporate farming, which also dispossessed white farmers who were not affluent or whose holdings were small, a trend reinforced by changes in the tax code that turned farm losses into write-offs for wealthy investors. As Daniel enumerates, as the USDA grew in size, the number of farmers it served dwindled, but he proves that the USDA at the local level clearly intended to, in many cases, rob African Americans of family farms. Department officials punished African Americans who participated in the civil rights movement by illegally denying them financial aid, and subjected them to discriminatory “character tests” when they applied for loans.
Daniel tells a fascinating, in many ways surprising, but completely infuriating story. His archival research is creative and impeccable. He shifts our attention from the usual civil rights battleground to where the post-Civil War African American freedom struggle began during Reconstruction: the Southern farm belt. His work and Mantler's are intelligent and indispensable, greatly expanding the boundaries of civil rights inquiry. They belong in the library of all serious students of American race relations.
