The community organizing efforts of the Students for a Democratic Society began in 1963, the year following the Port Huron Statement. SDS aimed to build “an interracial movement of the poor” under the auspices of its Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) to demand changes in state and society and abolish poverty in America. Over the next few years, New Left organizers established sixteen community organizing projects in low-income, racially diverse neighborhoods; the largest, most successful, and longest-lasting projects were located in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston.1 The ERAP projects were a central focus of SDS between 1963 and 1965, and they gave members, according to a former participant, “a sense of presence in the real world.”2 Community organizing also garnered early SDS political and media attention and contributed to its first period of sustained membership growth—before the anti–Vietnam War movement began.3
Although community organizing was an important part of the New Left “activist repertoire,” less attention has been paid to it than to the student and antiwar movements in histories of SDS. Historian Sara Evans and sociologist Wini Breines saw the community projects as important sites for the emergence of the women’s liberation movement and the welfare rights movement, and for “prefigurative politics.”4 But most scholars either briefly mention the projects or completely ignore them. In New Left scholarship, as in life, the larger student and antiwar movements with their mass demonstrations, student sit-ins, and university takeovers eclipsed quiet, less dramatic community organizing efforts.5
But there are good reasons to pay attention to ERAP. Community organizing in the urban North represented a direct attempt on SDS’s part to respond and contribute to the civil rights movement. It is now well known that the struggle for racial equality gave the New Left its initial spark and direction, provided a training ground for SDS activists, and fostered close personal and organizational ties between SDS and other student organizations focused on civil rights and direct action, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By embodying a commitment to “putting your body on the line” for the values in which one believed, SNCC’s activism created a mystique that inspired and intrigued members of SDS. As Tom Hayden asked in the spring of 1963, “Can the methods of SNCC be applied to the North?”6 For white New Leftists, ERAP organizing also provided a new way to relate to the civil rights struggle, as the projects initially focused on poor whites. SDS activists envisioned organizing around shared economic inequality as a way to bring black and white Americans together across differences of race, providing a strategic complement to the work of civil rights activists.
Community organizing also represented SDS’s attempt to formulate and implement a strategy for social change that synthesized insights and lessons from the labor movement, the Old Left, and the civil rights movement. “An Interracial Movement of the Poor?”—the position paper written for ERAP by Carl Wittman and Tom Hayden a year after the Port Huron Statement in 1963—outlined a strategy for building a social movement of poor Americans through community organizing. “We believe,” Wittman and Hayden argued, “that nothing less than a wholly new organized political presence in the society is needed to break the problems of poverty and racism.”7 While this strategy provided a starting point for the community projects, once in the field organizers ended up exploring and experimenting with alternative social movement strategies and revealed the process of defining a new social movement paradigm in the 1960s.
Furthermore, ERAP challenges the view that the New Left, in seeing the state as co-optative at best, failed to define a social democratic alternative to the welfare state.8 To be sure, New Left organizers questioned whether they should seek alliances with, or maintain a hostile distance from, the state; whether they could engage in reform activities that implicitly legitimated the system without compromising their political vision or risking co-optation. Yet, these questions did not mean they eschewed engagement with the state or refused to rethink its contours and content. For community organizers, the state is “the only game in town,” and campaigns in the various ERAP projects sought an expanded and more participatory welfare state. The transformation—rather than the abandonment—of the American welfare state emerges as a goal of SDS’s community organizing.
Most significantly, these experiences and the political lessons learned emerged precisely from how the ERAP projects put the Port Huron Statement’s core concept—participatory democracy—into action. Participatory democracy envisioned a society in which citizens shared in the decisions shaping their lives, and participatory democracy, as an ideal and a practice, profoundly influenced organizing in the projects. I focus on three aspects: the motivations of participants, the organizing process and strategy, and the definition of goals vis-à-vis the state, or the politics of the self, of the social, and of the state.9 While some of this may sound familiar from memoirs and histories of the New Left, what is less familiar is the crucial contribution of community residents in the various neighborhoods. A dynamic series of encounters, negotiations, and conflicts between New Left organizers and community residents shaped how participatory democracy played out in these projects.
Putting participatory democracy into action motivated the New Left activists who volunteered for ERAP’s community organizing. “Politics,” according to the Port Huron Statement, “has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.”10 Wittman and Hayden restated this principle in “An Interracial Movement of the Poor”: “The meaningful participation in politics, the moral reconstruction that comes from cooperation in positive work . . . [is] the main social basis for a democratic America.”11 In response to the call for volunteers for the first summer of organizing in 1964—“We are asking each person . . . to consider [whether] one should devote a summer, if not a lifetime, in a personal engagement with the problems of America’s dispossessed”12—ERAP was “swamped” with applications. Some 120 organizers went into the field that first summer, a number equal to 20 percent of SDS’s total membership (although not all volunteers belonged to SDS at the time).13
Dave Strauss, a University of Michigan student, was one of them. As he recalled, “The civil rights movement is exploding all over the place, and we’re sitting there saying, you know, ‘wait a minute, if we just stay on campus we’re not gonna be there when we’re needed. A lot of civil rights organizations are starting to say people need to work with whites, that’s us. We’re white, why don’t we do that.’ ” Carol Glassman also remembered why she joined. She had just graduated from Smith College, where she had taken a course on problems in the American economy, written a seminar paper on poverty, read Michael Harrington’s The Other America, and expressed solidarity with the civil rights movement, and then she had a conversation with SDS leader Lee Webb about ERAP organizing to build an interracial movement of the poor. “It really is like I was an adding machine and all the stuff had been put in and nobody had pushed the equals button, and that conversation with Lee, there it all was. That was the first time I really felt like all the things I thought and felt just came together in some way that made sense to me.”14 For Strauss, Glassman, and others, the ERAP projects offered an opportunity to engage in organizing work that felt personally meaningful and politically significant.
The community residents who participated in the projects felt the same. Just as in the civil rights movement, the local people in ERAP were often “empowered personalities” before they even met a New Left organizer, but there is no doubt ERAP activism “took their empowerment to another level.”15 The projects created a context in which they developed confidence, skills, and experience, and these attributes, in turn, provided a spur to political activism and a means for upward mobility. A significant group continued in their work after the end of SDS’s community organizing and later spoke of the way their involvement transformed their lives. In 1964, Lillian Craig was a welfare mother in Cleveland when “Sharon Jeffrey knocked on my door and asked me if I was registered to vote. I asked her in, and after awhile I told her I was on welfare. That’s how our friendship began.” Craig related feeling ashamed and silenced about her status as a single mother on welfare. “I am nobody, and nobody cares, and there is no escape,” she remembered feeling. But through her involvement in SDS’s community organizing, Craig felt she had received “good basic training”: “I had learned that I could do things.” “You have skills that you don’t know about,” she later contended. “You can get involved in your immediate community, and then go from there.”16
In Chicago, Dovie Coleman and her niece Dovie Thurman expressed similar sentiments. Thurman said she “was organized by Rennie Davis” outside a welfare office and recalled how she spoke at her very first meeting:
I stood up and made a couple of statements. “I’m sick and tired of this welfare system. I don’t know what to do about it, but I want to fight, too. It’s doing the same to all of us.” It was my first encounter speaking to a group of people, and I got a big hand. . . . At the next meeting I was nominated to be chairperson. Just that quick. What was most exciting was somebody wanted me. I didn’t even know what a chairperson was. I had a lot inside of me that I always wanted to say, but I never knew how to get it out. I didn’t use to be a person that would speak out a lot. ‘Cause I was angry that night, it just came out real easy.17
She and her aunt became active in the JOIN Community Project, and Dovie Coleman later wrote of finding “freedom of mind” through organizing. “When I began to organize other people for the first time in my life I began to feel free. . . . I want other people to feel the way I do.”18 For these women, participation meant both personal and political transformation. Along with New Left organizers, they confirmed, and lived, participatory democracy’s synthesis of moral values, personal life, and politics.
The process of organizing the community projects also reflected a commitment to participatory democracy. Echoing a long American tradition, the Port Huron Statement called for decision making to occur through a variety of “public groupings,” of which community organizations could be one type.19 Wittman and Hayden elaborated on this idea in “An Interracial Movement of the Poor,” believing neighborhood-based forums and discussions could establish a basis for participatory democracy and “possibly the seed for a different society.”20 Crucially, this commitment meant that community residents should have a role in determining the shape and direction of the ERAP projects. “Let the People Decide” became the favorite ERAP slogan. To ensure grassroots participation, New Left organizers dedicated themselves to listening to and taking seriously the ideas and requests of community residents, which came to be called organizing from the bottom up.
Perhaps the best known aspect of how participatory democracy shaped the organization of the community projects was decision making by consensus. But in keeping with criticisms then and now, consensus decision making did not always meet the needs of ERAP’s community constituency. To achieve consensus, meetings were initially unstructured, without rules of procedure, and open-ended until the last person had the last word. But unstructured meetings demanded much time, a commodity in short supply for community members, especially women with domestic and childcare responsibilities. New Left organizers further discovered that apparent consensus could hide disagreement and even misunderstanding among community residents, given that in situations of unequal power, the costs of, and ability to, participate were not distributed equally. Over time, a number of projects, including Chicago and Cleveland, moved to ensure clearer accountability in how meetings were run and decisions made, including adopting parliamentary procedures to ensure a more democratic outcome.21
Yet, the more significant outcomes of the process of community organizing in ERAP were in the area of strategy. The initial ERAP strategy for building an interracial movement of the poor focused on organizing a constituency of jobless men, reflecting the influence of the political paradigm of the Old Left and the labor movement. From the start, however, the projects attracted more women than men. The projects’ preferred methods of recruitment, the door-to-door canvass or leafleting at welfare offices, contributed to this development, as women were the first and easiest to meet, as happened with Lillian Craig, Dovie Thurman, and Dovie Coleman.22 Moreover, because initial discussions focused on community problems—problems that particularly concerned women, as the caretakers of households and families—New Left organizers found women residents more receptive. For many women residents, the lack of community resources typical of low-income neighborhoods hindered their ability to carry out domestic responsibilities. In keeping with a twentieth-century tradition, they also saw such problems as theirs to solve, viewing community improvement as a logical extension of women’s domestic responsibilities.23 And, indeed, a number of women contacted by New Left organizers were already doing so as leaders in their communities. Although not without conflict from some male SDS members, women ended up forming the largest and most active membership and providing the most consistent leadership for the projects.24
As part of this development, the projects began to define new issues for organizing. SDS had initially considered unemployment to be the priority issue for mobilizing community residents. Organizing around unemployment “[means] the movement is immediately political,” asserted Wittman and Hayden in “An Interracial Movement of the Poor.”25 Few neighborhood residents responded to this issue, however. What SDS believed the poor needed—jobs for men—contrasted with what their actual constituency of neighborhood women, men, and children considered to be their primary concerns. Taken together, residents in Boston, Newark, Cleveland, and Chicago voiced problems with Aid to Families with Dependent Children (popularly known as “welfare”), housing, urban renewal, children’s welfare, police brutality, as well as jobs. As a result, organizers began to shift their priority from the issue of unemployment to the issues raised by residents. Carol Glassman, for example, stressed “the need to listen to the community to learn what the issues should be.”26 Yet, many organizers questioned whether the issues proposed by community residents had “political” content and could contribute to social change. For Steve Max, organizing around such issues was clearly “non-political community work.” Richard Rothstein wondered whether the focus on “immediate grievances” and “non-radical issues” was politically “a step or more backwards” for ERAP.27 In the end, organizers justified the shift from unemployment to a multiplicity of organizing issues as practical, principled, and political. There were constituencies for issues such as welfare, urban renewal, and children’s issues, and organizing around these issues of concern to residents was consistent with participatory democracy. Organizers also came to see these issues as connected to fundamental social, economic, and political inequalities and, thus, political.
A similar shift occurred with service provision. From the beginning of the ERAP projects, New Left organizers consistently received requests for service work from community residents. Residents asked for aid with bureaucratic procedures, such as dealing with caseworkers, tracking down late or lost checks, and filling out forms. A reduced, delayed, or missing payment could cause tremendous hardship for poor people living on a minimum budget and from check to check. Even so, organizers feared that help on such issues was not a “political” activity.28 These fears reflected the dominant view that politics and services were, or should be, separate activities, that an opposition existed between “making change” and “helping people.”29 Despite these concerns and criticisms, they decided that engaging in service work was a concrete, practical way to meet the immediate, felt needs of low-income residents and consistent with participatory democracy. Over time, they also began to understand service provision as political. It brought community residents into the projects, built a neighborhood base and reputation for the projects, fostered trust between residents and organizers, and helped to shift the balance of power between welfare state institutions and community residents. As Elvie Jordan of the Cleveland project’s Welfare Grievance Committee stated:
Before I started working with the Welfare Grievance Committee I had the feeling that any time I would attempt to go to the Welfare Department for anything I would be embarrassed and insulted before I could get over to them why I was there or why I called. [With the Welfare Grievance Committee] you learn how to gain the respect of the Welfare Department. And as long as we have this respect we can work with the Welfare Department to make this a better welfare system.30
In the case of Jordan and others, participating in service activity contributed to a greater sense of personal competence, control, and political efficacy.
In a parallel development, New Left organizers initially set out to build an all-encompassing solidarity in the projects by drawing upon community members’ status as poor Americans. They believed a collective identity as “the poor” would structure and give shape to political mobilization and expression in the projects. After all, as Connie Brown observed, the “central issue of the development of a radical movement” was “the forging of a new identity.”31 But constructing a collective identity out of shared poverty was primarily a goal of New Left organizers rather than neighborhood participants, who only rarely chose to represent themselves as “the poor” or even as “poor people.” For example, when Chicago participant Dorothy Perez dictated an article for the JOIN newsletter, she used “we” and “us” to refer to Uptown residents; but the organizer typing her article parenthetically inserted “(the poor)” after every occurrence.32 In keeping with participatory democracy, residents instead preferred and organizers endorsed a common citizenship, or identity as “the people” or Americans, as a basis for solidarity in the community projects, although this could be inflected with class, race, gender, and geographical meaning. “As citizens of America we should fight for decent communities. Just because we are poor,” Mrs. Alcantar of the Chicago project declared, “we should not have to live in slums and be pushed around because we are Puerto Rican, Mexican, hillbillies or colored.”33
From the beginning, SDS’s ultimate goal for community organizing under the auspices of ERAP was to solve the problem of poverty in the United States by transforming the welfare state along social democratic lines—a goal that was shared by many on the liberal-labor left and appeared in the Port Huron Statement. “A program against poverty must be just as sweeping as the nature of poverty itself. It must not be just palliative, but directed to the abolition of the structural circumstances of poverty.”34 In the Port Huron Statement and in later ERAP publications, SDS activists called for national economic planning. Direct government intervention in labor markets and manpower policy, they believed, was necessary. “It is time for a reexamination of the way in which resources are presently allocated in our society,” one ERAP conference proposal stated. To this end, the United States needed to develop institutions of local, state, and national planning.35 Beyond economic planning, the Port Huron Statement urged that “existing institutions should be expanded so the welfare state cares for everyone’s welfare according to need.”36 ERAP writings specified the need for full and fair (nondiscriminatory) employment and a guaranteed income apart from employment for all Americans; SDS’s community organizing projects incorporated these twin goals into the demand for “jobs or income now.”
In keeping with participatory democracy, SDS also contended that planning and programs to end poverty must be and could be organized democratically. At this point, as Richard Flacks notes, SDS was grappling with the “macro-political meanings of participatory democracy” and attempting to envision a state and economy open and responsive to people’s voices and needs.37 The expansion of public authority to resolve the problem of poverty thus needed to be accompanied by the extension of political participation, including to poor Americans themselves. Economic questions could not be separated from political ones, or economic justice, from democratic participation. As a result, once the ERAP projects were under way, organizers broadened their agenda for welfare state transformation from national planning and “jobs or income now” to incorporate the multiplicity of needs and concerns articulated by community residents.
In pursuing the goal of welfare state transformation, ERAP activists gained impetus from President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a “war on poverty” in January 1964. Together with the successes of the civil rights movement, this proposal for the largest expansion in welfare state programs since the New Deal contributed to a mood of possibility and urgency among community organizers. They would be “frontline soldiers in a real war on poverty,” ERAP recruitment advertisements emphasized in 1965.38 The community projects could be a means of shaping the War on Poverty on the local level. Some raised fears of co-optation, arguing that involvement in the War on Poverty would preempt or sidetrack ERAP from its larger goals, but most did not question this involvement. In fact, as SDS president Todd Gitlin contended, they believed that “if radicals are not participants” in local War on Poverty efforts, “then assuredly [such efforts] will be co-opted.”39
As a result, between 1964 and 1968, New Left organizers launched numerous campaigns that incorporated both substantive and participatory aims—that is, that sought both tangible goods and benefits from welfare state institutions and an open, decentralized welfare state. For example, in their campaigns around welfare, project activists demanded adequate benefits, free school lunches, higher clothing and rent allowances, and an improved food stamp program, as well as recipients’ right “to change and run the welfare system.” In Chicago, Dorothy Perez called for a voice in administration, arguing that “recipients have a right to help make the decisions that affect their lives so radically.”40 ERAP campaigns aimed at halting urban renewal took a similar approach. Basing their campaigns on federal legislation mandating citizen participation, or approval, of renewal programs and the rehousing of residents displaced by renewal efforts, they sought to realize adequate housing for all citizens and to redesign poor neighborhoods with the participation and according to the needs and interests of local residents. In Cleveland, participants envisioned new low-and moderate-income housing, medical clinics, schools, parks, playgrounds, and public swimming pools. Such facilities, they maintained, would allow “people [to] have interesting, happy lives here.”41
ERAP’s War on Poverty campaigns exemplified most clearly this goal of transforming the American welfare state through expansion and participation. Activists first set out to ensure that local poverty programs adhere to the provision mandating “maximum feasible participation of the poor” and even quoted Sargent Shriver, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), on the importance of participation. They believed that without the direction and participation of low-income residents, the poverty war would fail to target the sustaining conditions of poverty: the political powerlessness and social marginalization felt and lived by those in poverty.42 After all, Richard Rothstein argued: “The demand for an end to poverty and the demand for participation of the poor in that fight are in reality one.”43 Demands for participation resonated within communities. Chicago resident Junior Brown wrote of the War on Poverty: “The people of Uptown should make the decisions about what they know.”44 Demands by ERAP activists in all of the cities took seriously what could have been seen as “rhetorical preambles” about citizen involvement and joined civil rights and other community activists in strengthening grassroots pressure on local and government officials to fulfill these promises of democratic participation.45
In addition to calling for participation in the poverty war, the community projects put forth their own programs for solving the problem of poverty in the United States. Federal policy makers’ understanding of poverty as a product of blocked economic opportunities and personal handicaps, activists argued, failed to confront underlying structural inequalities.46 “People like me and millions of others are not being reached by the War on Poverty program,” protested Dovie Coleman. “I’m a Negro woman, 45, needs a job and can’t get one. When are you going to start listening to me?”47 In Cleveland, a woman welfare recipient asked of the poverty program: “What can [it] offer me? Does it raise wages to $2 an hour? Will it retrain me for a good job with decent wages?”48 By advancing their own program proposals for the War on Poverty based on the needs and concerns of residents, the community projects revealed the limitations and inadequacies of state-initiated solutions to the problems of poverty in the United States.
Of course, SDS’s community organizing under ERAP did not succeed in building an interracial movement of the poor or ending poverty in America. The resulting recognition of the difficulties of cross-class, interracial organizing, and frustration and anger with local government officials and liberal policy makers, had real, and complicated, consequences for New Left organizers and SDS.49 Yet, as social movement scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward have noted, “What was won must be judged by what was possible,” and the community organizing tradition has always been one of small victories and large defeats.50
However, the community projects yielded interactions and outcomes among New Left organizers and community participants that should be remembered. Their transformative vision of the welfare state, a vision that sought to redefine and expand what constituted a public responsibility and democratic participation in America, to redefine citizenship rights, is one that remains relevant to the problem of economic inequality today.51 Their evolving organizing strategy opened up the “old” political paradigm to the multiplicity of constituencies, issues, and identities that signaled a new way of building and understanding social movements.52 What ended during the 1960s was the notion that there was only one vehicle for achieving social change, and what began, or reopened, and is still with us, was a debate on the strategy for fundamental social transformation. Finally, personal and political change occurred for many participants, just as has happened in many social movements and organizing efforts, past and present.
An illustrative example of this process is David Strauss’s recollection of a resident he and other New Left organizers encountered in Cleveland, Beulah “Boots” Neal, a welfare recipient. “What we did the first year for her was move her,” Strauss recalls. “Every few weeks she was moving again, and we got to go and move her, her refrigerator and stove.” When he first met her, he remembers thinking, “ ‘This is absurd. Why are we working with this person?’ . . . And then one day it seemed like she just decided to commit to the stuff that Sharon Jeffrey kept talking to her about, and she did it with a lot of integrity.”53 Boots Neal ended up joining the Cleveland project’s welfare rights group. “We are trying hard to better ourselves,” she explained, “by working together as a group.”54 For Neal, the Cleveland project provided impetus, focus, and resources for her community activism. The help and time organizers gave to her resulted in an active member of the Cleveland project, but such successes felt very small. “At the time,” Strauss remembers, the effort organizers put into people like Boots Neal “looked like a waste of time,” for it did not produce what organizers had hoped. “I think most of us had the mass movement idea of change. The civil rights movement . . . the Russian Revolution, sitdown strikes of the ‘30s. That’s how you change things. It’s hard to measure what we were doing against those things.” By January 1967, when he left the Cleveland project, he took this sense of failure with him. “I incorrectly felt that I hadn’t any skills, that I hadn’t learned anything. That wasn’t true, but I didn’t know that.” Only later, reflecting back, did he realize that the “model we were using was actually a pretty good one, which is that you are probably going to change people one person at a time.” “Moving Boots Neal,” he now says, “was a good thing.”55
For participants like Dave Strauss and Boots Neal, the 1960s marked a beginning, not the end, of struggles for democracy and social change. This history of SDS, ERAP, and community organizing reminds us of what, despite great historical and political obstacles, the New Left attempt to put the Port Huron Statement’s participatory democracy into action made possible in the 1960s.