The Black Power Movement and American Social Work

EVEN THOUGH THE NATIONAL FEDERATION of Settlements inserted itself into the political arena of the civil rights movement, the organization would distance itself from the emerging Black Power movement. This process of “setting apart” set the stage for the next period of reflection and renegotiation of the organization’s values, practices, and identity that would occur as black dissent rose within the federation in 1967.

How to respond to militants became the question of the day, and settlement workers across the country were asking for guidance on how to deal with Black Power. The result was a discourse that allowed an out from the complex puzzle of activism vs. service. Because the new “militant mood” became increasingly associated with separatism and confrontational tactics, the NFS could retreat behind a commitment to integration and embrace their position as an “established” institution by formalizing their opposition to extra-institutional tactics. In other words, as the black liberation movement radicalized, the NFS was able to take a moderate position on civil rights and reclaim its activist identity while simultaneously rejecting new Black Power ideas—sort of a “radical flank effect” at work in decisions about social activism (Haines 1988). Black settlement workers, however, were not willing to accept this position. Their movement within the social work profession, combined with Black Power challenges to member agencies across the country, proved to be an emotionally charged conflict lasting into the early years of the 1970s.

The 45th Annual Conference of the National Federation of Settlements—held in May 1968 in Houston, Texas—was overwhelmed by black organizing and the “black question.” The meeting was on fire with Black Power. “This is jivin’,” one attendee remarked, “these cats packed their troubles and brought ‘em here.”¹ The conference report reads, “Clearly, racism, militancy and America’s inability to move fast enough on its urban problems dominated the talk.” Indeed, black social workers had brought their troubles to Houston. What’s more, they intended to have them heard and demand action and change from the federation.

At the scheduled Black Power workshop the attendees canceled the planned paper presentations and caucused to come up with a list of demands and proposals to change the NFS’s social policy platform for 1968. It issued a set of thirteen resolutions, the first of which was that NFS support a special conference for black settlement workers to come together. They also demanded that member agencies investigate whether their boards were representative of their clients and that NFS require sensitivity training for its staff and for member agencies “to help them become more aware of problems, including minority history and the contributions of minorities.” Similarly, they recommended that “agencies develop programs to educate and motivate supporting communities, challenging whites to take risks and make sacrifices.” Two other major calls were that the national federation “set a national policy on the hiring of Black people or any other minority group for executive positions,” and that it move its headquarters from New York City to Washington, D.C. “because NFS has either been unaware or has not addressed itself to the decision making process in this country.” Even more importantly, they demanded that a “black staff member be hired to develop coalitions with big businesses, political groups, labor, and other pressure groups” in order to “more effectively influence important legislation and programs which reflect the interest in work of member agencies.” Lastly, they asked that, “member agencies withhold dues” until this staff member was hired.²

A second set of demands was produced by the Black Caucus at the federation’s Conference on Inner City Violence held in Chicago later that year. It began:

We, the Black members of the conference on Inner-city Violence feel that the conference has systematically failed to deal with the issues or genesis of the racist and fascist tendencies encountered by the communities in which we function, and we further believe that we who are Black have to effectively deal with the developing direction of our Black Communities. We therefore must demand some definite support and credibility by our national sponsoring agency, National Federation of Settlements.”³

The fourteen specific mandates reiterate and extend the Houston resolutions. They demanded that “all agencies accept the existence of conflict and violence and support efforts of staff in dealing with this phenomenon on the community level.” They also asked that NFS support a separate black conference; that boards, staff, and committees be representative of their communities; and for both black professionals and community residents to be placed in decision making positions. The Black Caucus also insisted that the NFS take a stand against the Vietnam War; recommended that highest priority in funding by community chests, United Fund, and other social service funding agencies be given to agencies dealing with “real social conflict”; and that the NFS should secure funds for agencies dealing with social and economic conflict and the “amelioration of white racism, individual, group, and institutional.” The Inner City Violence Caucus document also addressed the subject of white activist involvement in the movement, stressing “that white social workers in settlements work with white racism in the white communities.” Along these same lines, they wanted the NFS to “plan programs with themes…that promote the level of Black consciousness” that “should be conducted by Black people.” To provide for this programming, they made the case that the NFS should “secure funds and immediately employ, and if necessary, train Black staff members competent to be sent into settlements in consultant capacities.” The Chicago demands were signed by fifty delegates, who declared their commitment “to the reconstruction of systems to make them relevant to the needs of Black Communities and are therefore pledged to do all that we can to bring these things about by any means necessary.”⁴

These two sets of demands reflect the broader concerns of the larger Black Power movement. Black settlement workers were seeking a move away from issues of access and toward a greater focus on representation, empowerment, and institutional leadership within their profession. Further, black settlement workers were calling attention to white racism by asking that white social workers deal with white racism and allow black social workers to conduct programs in black communities. They also drew attention to the need for real resources—more that just ideological commitments—to support black communities.

It was after the Chicago demands were put forward that real, sustained negotiations between the Black Caucus and the NFS began. The Black Caucus formalized their position in a series of meetings with the newly formed New Directions Committee. This committee, formed between late 1967 and early 1968, was tasked with exploring new directions in settlement work, primarily those related to race relations and the black liberation movement. Overall, it was largely a response to both Black Power challenges to the settlement movement and black dissent inside the organization, the latter of which served as a sort of exclamation point to more general critiques that the settlement tradition was outdated. Throughout the New Directions process, conferences and meetings reflected the tension between black dissent and attempts on the part of white settlement workers to understand and assist with racial change at times, and at other points to resist that change.

Through this process, the Black Caucus prepared a formal position paper on “New Directions for Settlements.” It opens with the understanding that “settlements, like every other major institution in the inner-city, are faced with the tedious task of self-confrontation.” The Black Caucus further acknowledged that “the very nature of the dynamics flowing through the inner-city compel the settlements to reflect on what use [sic] to be, to dwell on what is, and to ponder the contents of a dream to efficiently face the realities of tomorrow. As we dwell,” they warned, “it is evident that we cannot be tomorrow that which we are today.” They then posed a potent metaphor, describing victims and settlements as “dwarfs” fighting the “giants” of white and institutional racism through ineffective programs intended to “soothe the victim” and prepare them for the next blow since neither the victim nor the program possessed the tools for a definitive victory. The Black Caucus also presented a definition of racism similar to that of Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton, which was attuned to the idea that white people do not believe themselves to be racist and that this belief is sincere because “institutionalized racism means that many whites do not discriminate in any direct, overt way.” In other words, the Black Caucus position statement contends that most whites do not have to personally participate in overt discriminate for discrimination to exist. Rather, they cite Lee Rainwater in arguing that white America employs a number of “dirty workers”—such as policemen, teachers, real estate agents, slumlords, and social and welfare workers—to do the discriminating for them, enacting social control over blacks. They are clear that these dirty workers can also be black—what characterizes them is not their race, but that they “control black people as quietly and unobtrusively as possible.”⁵

In addition to demanding that NFS sponsor a conference to hammer out these issues, the Caucus ultimately focused on three specific points:

2. The need to restructure the NFS board. Redistribution of funding and services could not be done in the NFS’s current arrangement. Specifically pointing to trends to hire indigenous workers in the field and in leadership as well as an adherence to the standard of maximum feasible participation, they argued that many new sources of funding, including earmarked grants from big foundations, required black representation on boards and staffs.

Opinions among the NFS leadership about holding the conference were varied. There was an overall tentative sense of support for the conference, but many still expressed reservations. The results of a survey of executive board members show that 78 percent voted to approve the conference. Some who disapproved or those who had doubts argued, like Janice Forberg, that it was “a luxury [they couldn’t] afford.” Yet many did disapprove on principle, such as board member Andy Brown, who was concerned that the black group was not united and those who disagreed would shun the gathering and be in a position where those at the conference were speaking on their behalf without their approval. He drew a parallel between the request for a Black Caucus conference and what the Detroit Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM)⁸ was doing to the United Auto Workers (UAW) union at the Chrysler plant in Detroit. He argued that UAW’s reaction had been “to permit no split of the organization, and not play into a separate organization, but to respond immediately to the real needs.” Loma Allen, then a board member and former secretary of the Social Education and Action committee, added that a separate conference, “negates the whole philosophy of NFS—that people of every creed and color work together with neighbors of every creed and color.” She also made the case that a separate conference could not deal with the dismantling of “white racism,” which had been a major point by the black caucus. Mrs. G. F. Gannon questioned the division that may come from such a meeting considering that settlements have always worked toward integration.⁹

Even some who approved the conference expressed reservations. For example, Lea Taylor voted to approve it, but only if “the financial funding of such a conference be the main responsibility of those proposing it and that in no way shall the responsibility of the financing be a burden on the national staff and the member agencies’ support the of the national program.” Lester Glick pointed out that he was “seriously concerned about the separatist implications in [the] demands.” While these responses reflect the NFS’s commitment to integrationism, they also reflect how the integrationist philosophy was used not only to challenge Black Power but also to rationalize their resistance to the movement for community control of local agencies both from black settlement workers and from the larger movement.

The top leadership at NFS was publicly supportive of the conference, writing to board members and executives that they “warmly endorsed” such a conference. Behind closed doors and in discussions amongst themselves, however, they often took a sarcastic, belittling approach. In a letter to then-NFS president John Austin in January 1970, Margaret Berry writes that she wants to update him on the upcoming Techni-Culture Conference, adding derisively, “they are bound to call it that” (emphasis in original). After touching on some other pieces of NFS business, she ends, “I just hope that the Techni-Culture Conference turns out marvelously. It has certainly taken time, and some of the things I’m sure they’re going to ‘demand’ [quotation marks in original] are things which we would have been working on in the same time we were trying to get the money for the conference.”¹⁰

While the conference was initially planned as a coming together of black settlement workers, conversations and experiences at the 1969 National Conference on Social Welfare in New York led organizers to adopt a multicultural frame, resulting in a shift in the conference focus. When the Black Caucus of the NFS reconvened at this meeting, other people of color also voiced their discontent with the organization. A series of meetings and conversations moved the Black Caucus to organize around a coalition with “brown, red, and yellow brothers and sisters.”¹¹ They decided that it should be a gathering of all settlement workers of color, dubbing it the “Techni-Culture Conference” (TCC), a name that played on the term “Technicolor.”¹²

The new statement of “rationale for the conference” reflected this shift, declaring that “the racist attitude which dominates American life is destroying the physical, social, and psychological growth of minority people.” As a result, “To overcome the negative impact of white racism, minority people recognize their need to meet, discuss, and determine their own agenda for the growth and development of their community life.” Again arguing that national coordination of local programs was necessary, the statement goes on to “call together on a national level all neighborhood and settlement people of minority background to convene for the purpose of establishing a plan for the development and operation of such organizations serving minority people.”¹³

Importantly, the conference was intended for minority settlement workers specifically, “in order to help them identify how they can more effectively relate to the neighborhood issues of self-determination, racial identification, and financial resources of both the public and private sectors.” The organizers saw its most significant contribution as relating “pragmatic approaches to dealing with current urban issues” and offering a “comprehensive…examination of the internal and external pressures that affect settlements’ and community centers’ relationships with the residents of the neighborhood.” The very first objective on a list of five was the “reorganization of settlements in predominately minority communities to effect community control.”¹⁴

The decision to move toward a multicultural organizing model presented multiple challenges for TCC organizers and created an opening for criticism by the NFS leadership. Five days before the conference, Antonio Tinajero, a Latino leader in the settlement movement from San Antonio, raised a flag of concern when he personally called John Austin. “The gist of his complaint,” Austin reported to Margaret Berry, “seemed to be that matters have been very inefficiently handled” and “necessary parties to the conference, particularly in the other minority groups, have not been contacted with the result he was seriously considering whether he should attend the conference at all.”¹⁵

The conference was held on February 11th through February 13th, 1970, in Chicago. While official recollections of the conference are few, by all accounts it seems that it did not go as planned. There were more registrations than could be handled efficiently, and many sessions were cancelled in favor of several caucuses, both scheduled and impromptu. In particular, over two hundred women caucused, and a youth caucus drew considerable attention as well. Interestingly, the multicultural nature of the group meant that the black leadership found themselves being challenged. Margaret Berry reported that a Puerto Rican attendee shouted to Halloway “Chuck” Sells (one of the leaders of the Black Caucus), “We’re walking with you, not behind you!”¹⁶

But the conference did garner several successes, such as the creation of a sustained attempt at creating permanent structures to give voice to the various racial groups within the NFS and gain representation in NFS’s board and leadership committees. Specifically, the Techni-Culture Committee (as it came to be known) presented Margaret Berry with three concrete demands after the conference in February. First, the Techni-Culture Committee (TCC) demanded that, at the upcoming May 1970 NFS conference, all of fifteen vacancies on the thirty-member NFS board “be allocated to Indian, Asian, Hispanic, and Black Technicultures, in order to begin the process of equal partnership, participation, and representation in the decision making process.” Secondly, the TCC further requested that one of those slots be “designated for youth representation.” Finally, they raised concerns that the NFS national staff did not reflect the people of color who were a part of the settlement movement, recommending that the national office take steps to assure staff representation. To facilitate this, they suggested that, as someone who was in line with the views of the caucus, “Mr. Henry Reid be designated the status of permanent staff member with the title of associate director.”¹⁷ The TCC’s overall stance was that much, if not all, of the other changes they were interested in making within the settlement movement could be accomplished by inserting “black faces in higher places” within the organization.

These demands were made to the NFS board shortly after the TCC conference and they planned to continue to press for these goals at the May 1970 NFS conference in Cincinnati, where black settlement workers vowed to use “modified disruption” tactics to have their voices heard.¹⁸ The interaction at the Cincinnati conference is indicative of the interplay between the NFS establishment, which continued to contrast the “power” frame of settlement dissenters to their own “integration” frame. At the annual business meeting held there, two statements regarding the Techni-Culture Conference Committee were to be heard.

Dr. Arthur Logan, a black physician and president of United Neighborhood Houses of New York, urged whites in the NFS to not “assume the burden of guilt which white America properly bears because of the centuries of injustice…and do not expect to be able to atone for those sins by your performance in relation to your minority brothers in this room.” He continued by asking them to “not be intimidated by the appearance of, or by the statements of, or the performance of any person here who happens to have a somewhat different ethnic background.” Logan went on to directly warn the Techni-culture group against separatism, pleading for them to use “cerebration” rather than emotion, and to use the established mechanism for nominating boards and committees to create change through and within the system. He ended by saying, “If you don’t get the recognition you want, do not leave the NFS—continue, instead, your efforts for greater acceptance within the framework of this organization.” The “establishment of a new body, ethnically oriented, may appear to be desirable,” he argued, “but know that the truly productive future for those in whose interests you work—the consumers, the neighbors of settlements—lies in your traveling down the road toward one world really inclusive of all people rather than traveling down the road toward a separate organization built on the false sands of ethnic exclusivity.”¹⁹

Halloway “Chuck” Sells responded by saying, “The Techni-Culture Committee states now is the time that techni-cultures translate their similarities of color, their social bondage, their repression into a untied action for change. We stand before you, not as a separatist body.” He then mentioned that a comprehensive program for the Techni-Culture Conference had been developed after their consultation and meetings with all Techni-Culture groups. Making it clear that “these proposals (would) be carried out regardless of the outcome of the meeting,” the program included a plan to develop a substantial communication system for neighborhoods; fundraising; staff development and training programs to draw people “indigenous to the community” into the agencies; and a request to “the board and staff to develop a philosophy that programs of the national federation must have as an integral part of the specific purposes of such programs basic factors that will contribute to the elimination of the institutional racism and poverty.”²⁰

While the issues covered by Sells were the background and foundation of the TCC concerns, the concrete demands at the meeting were focused more on representation. They were pressing for 50 percent representation on the NFS board, or to fill the existing fifteen vacancies with “Black, brown, red and yellow” people.²¹ This demand was met. When NFS delegates left Cincinnati, 62 percent of the board was comprised of people of color, as compared to 30 percent just days earlier.²²

The rest of the “modified disruption” at the conference laid the groundwork for a concerted effort and sustained dialogue between the TCC and the NFS establishment, one that mostly focused on representation on the board and committees. Central to black settlement worker demands for representation at all levels was that the NFS recognize the TCC as a standing, regular committee of the federation, and that the newly created associate director position be filled by a black man.²³

The TCC had requested that a staff vacancy be elevated to associate director, and that the position be filled by a black man. The board and Berry agreed to this and she started to contact potential candidates she had identified. Two candidates stood out for her. TCC leader Halloway Sells considered one candidate unacceptable—Walter Smart was the other. In relating his qualifications for the job, Berry focused not only on his work experience but the fact that he was a courageous and “absolutely straight human being.” She spoke about how he had “suffered his share of humiliation in the South,” having had “the experience of his home being burned in Georgia.” “But,” she continued, “he has worked out these feelings and is quite comfortable in relating to others—of any hue.”²⁴

As Berry was researching and contacting candidates that she was interested in, the TCC wrote her with a new list of candidates and she scheduled an interview with Morris Jeff, a central figure in the TCC movement and someone the caucus suggested. However, after the Techni-Culture Conference in February 1970, the TCC informed Berry that they had decided as a group to only back Henry Reid. Choosing a single candidate was a strategic move to pressure Berry into hiring someone that would be in agreement with the TCC. After the caucus settled on a single candidate, Jeff withdrew himself from consideration.²⁵ Berry made it clear that she was not interested in hiring Reid, though never clearly expressed why in writing, and wanted to go ahead with Smart. The TCC group did not take her position lightly. In a presentation to the board, Sells detailed the resolutions that came out of the conference, including that

It was not enough. In the end, Margaret Berry asserted her right as executive director to choose her associate director and hired Smart. Sells and the rest of the group were livid. The TCC publicly accused Berry of impropriety in handling the situation. Smart tried to be sensitive to the fact that there was conflict around the position and delayed accepting the post until Berry felt she had exhausted all options. He came in under circumstances that were unwelcoming at best. White settlement workers were bitter about the rise of black leadership in the organization, while the TCC group was upset that their choice was not respected. Yet the fact that Smart was neither chosen nor endorsed by the core black activists in the NFS but was a black man nonetheless in many ways worked to silence the TCC group. In a way, they fell into a trap in the representation frame that Carmichael and Hamilton warned against when they argued “black visibility is not black power.”

Smart replaced Berry at the helm of the NFS in 1971 after she resigned to assume the presidency of the National Conference on Social Welfare. With Smart in place as executive director, 62 percent representation on the NFS board, and Betti Pittman, a black attorney newly elected as president of the organization, the TCC disbanded within two years of their first conference. Smart did work with and sought to be accepted by black settlement worker activists, but they never fully saw him as one of their own.

Nonetheless, Smart really did change the face of the organization. By 1972, he was characterizing the NFS as “the Nation’s oldest organization fighting for people of color” (emphasis mine),²⁷ and claiming that “the National Federation of Settlements continues to believe that our highest priority should be the elimination of racism in America.”²⁸ He also wrote a column that appeared in major black news outlets like Ebony and Jet, and generally tried to forge a new identity and a fresh public face for NFS, central to which was work with people of color generally and in black communities in particular. For example, in 1974 the federation ran a public relations campaign in magazines across the country where the bulk of the page was taken with a picture of a black child, one version with a boy and one with a girl. The large lettering across the top of the boy’s picture read, “When I grow up, I wanna be a pimp like the guy next door.” Underneath the photo, ran seven short paragraphs of text: “Kids take their heroes where they can find them. When a boy growing up in the ghetto sees a pimp, he sees a big, beautiful block-long car. A girl sees that hookers have fancy clothes. Numbers runners have money, pushers have cool.” The rest of the text is about what neighborhood centers can provide, “from a part-time job to a free breakfast.” At the bottom of the ad were the words, “National Federation of Settlements: The Other Heroes on the Block.”²⁹ The “blackening” of the federation’s image is clear. However, despite the shifts Walter Smart ushered in, the Techni-Culture fire had undoubtedly dimmed as the activism within NFS subsided in the face of this ironic victory.

Smart’s directorship of the organization was also part of a larger trend towards black male leadership in social service agencies around the country. An outcome of the rise in educated black professionals in the post-civil rights era and of concerted movements of black social workers within the profession, this shift was an uneasy transition to say the least.

By the time black settlement workers and the Black Power movement launched a wide scale critique of settlement endeavor in the late 1960s, the National Federation of Settlements was no stranger to criticism. The challenge came on the heels of severe criticism, as early as 1939 and as late as 1965, of the settlements themselves from Saul Alinsky and Alinsky-style organizations.³⁰ The Alinsky strategy was to go into communities and draw on indigenous leadership, create concrete targets, help them set attainable goals, and then leave them organized and prepared to fight on their own (Alinsky 1971). The disruptive tactics he and his organizers used, however, were in direct conflict with the settlement way of doing things, which emphasized speaking and organizing for the communities they worked in and operated on the idea that educated, well-spoken, and influential settlement workers were best suited to actually make changes on behalf of their neighbors. Alinsky’s basic critique of settlements was that poor people did not need someone to speak for them, but needed to be given the tools to speak and fight for themselves, and he often chose settlements as targets for action in communities he organized. The various assaults on settlements leveled by Alinsky led the NFS to pull together a series of news articles, scholarly articles, settlement opinion papers, and various working papers clarifying and denouncing the Alinsky method, which was distributed to all member houses.³¹

The attacks continued in 1964 when Herbert Gans published an article in Social Work entitled “Redefining the Settlement’s Function for the War on Poverty.” He accused settlements of being outmoded and advised settlements to “fight for the social and economic policies necessary to reduce poverty and racial discrimination” (Gans 1964) rather than seeking to imbue poor people with middle-class values. Margaret Berry’s response to the article defended NFS’s commitment to integration arguing:

The settlement has always taken an inclusive view of society, and believes that segregation by religion, race, or economic condition is unhealthy for democracy. It has believed that “consensus is better than warfare,” and has seen progressive social programs emerge when people were in communication. To become only a “protest agency of the poor” seems to imply a segregation of the poor and a kind of class warfare that cuts off opportunities for the evolutionary development of social reforms.

(Berry 1965)

These critiques of settlements were about both content and practice. Both Alinsky and Gans argued that settlements should no longer press for integration nor should they try to impart middle-class values to poor people. Further, though, they stated that settlements were behind the times in terms of the practice of seeking social change in how they sought to speak for poor communities rather than supporting them in speaking for themselves and how they worked to change people in communities they intended to help rather than the oppressive social policies affecting them. They argued that settlements were outmoded and irrelevant in a protest era characterized by calls for self-determination and community control by any means necessary, tenets that were central to the Black Power challenges to NFS both from black settlement workers inside the national organization and from the black communities where settlements were located.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, social workers everywhere were grappling with the issues raised by the Black Power movement. Settlement agencies were often located in urban neighborhoods that were rocked by riots and had to deal with communities that wanted greater control over the institutions in them. Settlements in Northern cities in particular were also struggling to serve young people who strongly identified with the movement. Many settlement workers and leaders conceived of themselves as being on “the front-lines” and sought guidance from their national office.³²

In Philadelphia, for example, the Houston Community Center found itself negotiating with the local black youth it served. In 1965, the center had fired a black part-time worker who worked closely with the teens in the neighborhood for his “difficulty accepting agency policy against serving the black community exclusively.”³³ Many of the teenagers protested his firing and submitted a petition to the director. In 1966, the center hired a program director who taught a black history class at the center and quickly became very popular with the youth. Eventually, that relationship too became strained and he resigned after being placed on probation with the center. This time, the teenaged clients of the center insisted that he be rehired. Harry Freeman, recalling these events, characterized these protests as being under siege. To resolve the conflict with the neighborhood youth, the Houston Community Center hired another adult worker to co-teach the black history class. In all, these events forced the center to reflect on their role in “militant politics.”

As a result, the center produced an informational packet on their Dialogue with Black Power as a learning tool for other settlements. They raise the point that Black Power “is unsettling to social welfare practitioners who see these alternatives available to them: ignore or resist Black Power and watch it grow into rebellion; or respond and work with it and possibly antagonize the white power structure which controls the finances for much social welfare.” They continue, “We believe that any agency operating in the Black community these days must face the challenge of Black Power and its militant advocates.” They conclude that their “role within the neighborhood [had] to be a broker between conservative and militant, bringing them together to act in areas of agreement, rather than use their energies on intra-neighborhood conflict.”³⁴

Along these lines, Eleanor Hardy and the Community Work Department of the Philadelphia Friends Neighborhood Guild wrote a working statement on “Rendering Settlement Services in a Predominately Black Community.” Hardy and her colleagues were responding, in part to the police repression of student protests at the Philadelphia Board of Education offices on November 17th, 1967. After a discussion of the emergence of the Black Power movement and a summary of what happened at the student protests and the subsequent suppression, the Friends Neighborhood Guild asks itself, “What shall be the role and contribution of the third primary institution: Welfare, of which our settlement is a member?” The answer: “the Guild must support the momentum to make the Black community believe in its own ability and self-respect.”³⁵

In the wake of these sorts of community control challenges, the staff and leadership of the NFS received several inquiries about how member agencies should respond to militant groups seeking control over “agency policies, programs or personnel.”³⁶ They issued a statement and provided guidelines on community control, reaffirming that “the role of a settlement is one of building a creative partnership among peoples of all races and economic levels for the purpose of creating a society of equal justice and opportunity for all.” They acknowledged the “need of excluded minority groups to band together for self-help and mutual aid,” but went on to reassert the belief “that settlements must press for a society in which differences are not the basis for exclusion or special privilege, but are cherished as part of the vast human mosaic.” The following guidelines were based on this settlement philosophy:

Obviously, the issue of community control was a particularly relevant one for settlement workers. Operating community and neighborhood centers meant that “neighbors” seeking community control sometimes targeted settlement houses. Outside specialists also echoed the call for community control to the NFS leadership. When Tom Gwynn of the National Urban League addressed the NFS board at an October 1968 Board Training Institute, he focused on how to handle rising demands for community control. He discussed the “myth of the melting pot” and emphasized the “new pride in difference” and the “need to recognize individual and specific needs.” He advocated a new thrust towards community control and urged agencies to be agents for change. This entailed helping communities develop their own power and resources, dispersing the decision-making process, supporting communities with their own goals, and acting to “get rid of the dead wood on the board.”³⁸

The speakers at the Urban Crisis Conference in October 1968 addressed the issue of Black Power and white responses to it. Edwin C. Berry, then-director of the Urban League of Chicago, opened the second day of the conference with an appeal to end white racism and specifically dismissed the idea that Black Power was simply black racism. He countered that this response was a “distortion of the legitimate aspirations of black power,” which “many whites are using as an excuse to cop out.” And in a direct appeal to white social workers, he consoled, “I know it’s tough to hang in, seek to work constructively under the epithets of ‘honky,’ ‘Whitey, get out,’ and others. To the honest, whites, I say, you must hang in—work as equals. We blacks must expect of you the kind of heroism, for a little while, that you have routinely demanded of all blacks for all the years since the emancipation proclamation.” “The future of our country,” he ended, “can settle for no less.”³⁹

The push for community control hit hard on the most sensitive spot for settlement leadership and old-timers in the movement. At the contentious 1968 NFS national conference in Houston, where black dissent in the organization really took hold, Margaret Berry addressed her executive speech to the issue at hand—community control—and the challenge it presented to way things had “always” been. “This is the first time in the history of the settlement movement that our accepted values are being seriously challenged,” she claimed. “Our trust in the peculiarly American paradox of freedom with control,” she argued, “has been shaken with the awareness of deep cleavages and we have a sudden fear of continuing violence because of the shattering of concepts which seemed to hold us together.” Berry then warned that “the fact that neighborhood groups now say: ‘I want to do it myself,’ that they want to ‘take over,’ spells the end of any conscious or unconscious patronizing. Now we are moved into an unsentimental appraisal which challenges the very values we live by.” Finally she counsels, “No agency today can rest in the sluggish backwater. Each agency must ask: Do we use our whole strength, our establishment—for useful social purposes?”⁴⁰

There was a very real sense among many on the NFS staff and among local and national settlement leadership that the settlement philosophy itself was under attack. When the New Directions Committee met with representatives of the Connecticut and Rhode Island agencies, for example, the conversation reflected a larger theme in the organization’s discourse during this period: that NFS should not participate in conflict tactics, but remain committed to their role as established institutions. At this meeting, Mr. Wattles of the Hartford Community Centers said that he had gone to the Conference on Inner City Violence in Chicago a few weeks earlier to learn to deal with urban violence. Instead, he said, he discovered “whites in a minority and under attack from the blacks.”⁴¹ The way he saw it, racism became the major theme and transformed the social work conference into a Black Power conference. He spoke about the demands that the Black Caucus presented, “which in essence recommended that the settlement movement move from the middle-of-the-road position in the area of conflict and violence.”⁴² He admitted that he was not prepared to do this and that he saw a “continuing role of settlements in the gray areas of racial conflict and tension.” The rest of the conversation settled in around the idea of being the “establishment.” Mr. Tyson of the Southfield Neighborhood Center in Stamford, Connecticut, noted that the real question was, “Who are we, agents of whom? The establishment, people doing for others?” As a way of wrapping up the establishment discussion, Mr. Ganter of the Hartford Community Centers asserted, “Many of us are too old for the militant confrontation that the extremists promote and which are tearing our nation apart. It may be that this is the only way to change a racist society. Some of us should seek other alternatives for dealing with the problems, which are more consistent with our history and value orientation.⁴³

A delicate dance around the fear, resentment, and defensiveness was occurring behind the process of heading in new directions. Many white social workers took particular umbrage at perceived attacks on established white liberals. Richard Peters, chair of the Executive Committee, suggested at an April 1968 meeting that there was “nothing wrong with being part of the establishment,”⁴⁴ as it suggested “a heritage of which we can be proud, and it means that we have arrived, have resources and ties.” At the May 1968 meeting of the committee, Mrs. Kirshbaum responded to criticism that boards did not reflect the communities served by settlements by mentioning the “reluctance of some Negroes to participate on boards because they are afraid of being tagged as establishment.”⁴⁵ She went on to say that agencies could not let this affect their legitimacy by abdicating leadership. “One must face the fact that power lies in the establishment—it has money, jobs, political ties,” she avowed.

From the very inception of a black caucus within the National Federation of Settlements, there were strong and differing reactions from white settlement workers and leaders. In a 1969 NFS newsletter column, Margaret Berry wrote, “The existence of a Black Caucus within the settlement movement brings different reactions. Some support the idea. Some oppose it on idealistic grounds, believing that it condones the very racial segregation that we have been striving to eliminate. Some white people, who have fought effectively for inclusiveness, now feel hurt or betrayed when they are excluded.” Berry goes on to claim that she welcomes a black caucus and takes it as a show of faith in the settlement movement. She reminds settlement workers that “the Federation is an inclusive organization and is committed, in the words of the Executive Committee, to the goal of a ‘society in which differences are not the basis for exclusion or special privilege, but are cherished as part of the vast human mosaic.’ The settlement movement has given many of us the opportunity to find friends and co-workers in diverse groups and to learn for ourselves that common human impulses transcend race or religion. We value this experience.”⁴⁶

But the response by the settlement establishment to the movement within the NFS and the larger shift to community control and rise in black male leadership at all levels speaks volumes about the process of shifting race relations during the tumultuous transition period in U.S. race relations in the period following the civil rights movement. Moreover, these interactions between black activists and the established white leadership of the National Federation of Settlements reveal the centrality of emotional dynamics in social movements.

Social movements scholars, rejecting the collective action literature that focused on the irrationality of crowd behavior in the early part of the twentieth century, have until recently ignored the function of emotion in social movements.⁴⁷ However, as Jasper (1998) points out, emotions are an “integral part of all social action,” and as such, “affective and reactive emotions enter into protest activities at every stage” (404). Operating on this realization, studies on the emotional nature of social movements have focused almost exclusively on the emotionality of movement participants. Indeed, as Aminzade and McAdam (2001) point out, scholars have yet to explore the emotional dynamics of the “complex interactive processes that mobilize the emotions of [actors outside of movements]” (15). Therefore, where emotions have been studied, the focus has been on the emotionality of challengers—not the emotional responses of power-holders. But it is logical to assume that the prospect of losing power or power sharing would bring with it intense fear, resentment, bitterness, and other negative emotional reactions. These “complex interactive processes” are difficult to understand without recognizing the emotions underlying them. The difficulties of understanding emotion in retrospect notwithstanding,⁴⁸ it is clear in this case that the response of elites within the NFS cannot be understood without exploring the emotional content of their reactions.

Judith Trolander (1987), writing about the tension between professionalism and social change in the settlements, characterizes the general shift to black male leadership in settlements as a root cause of the movement’s decline. Her argument borders on outright racism, expounding that “Blacks as a group seemed to have more difficulty with administrative matters, such as dealing with boards, raising money, and writing grant proposals.” She continues to lay the blame on the promoted black leaders, saying “in part, this situation may have resulted from a reluctance to accept white help, perhaps because of the danger of white control.” “Yet,” she argues, “by themselves, Blacks sometimes lacked the necessary administrative skills and influence” (209). She also describes the resentment and hurt feelings that white settlement workers felt as black social workers “took over” and neighborhoods continued to insist on “community control” over their institutions, without any comment on the white racism that these grievances were rooted in.

Observing that “the black ascendance to leadership was accompanied by a corresponding departure of a generation of whites from the settlement house movement,” Trolander contends that the “general white settlement leaders’ reaction was ‘to hell’ with the blacks” (211). “The abrupt black takeover was a slap in the face to many whites,” she argues (211). Though this fear of being pushed out was central to the response by white settlement people, so was the patronizing and belittling attitude present in Trolander’s more contemporary reflections. The outpouring of support and sympathy Margaret Berry received after the charged Cincinnati conference is revealing of the sense. John Austin wrote:

She received another letter from Mrs. Anderson Page, who wrote to congratulate her on “practicing what [she] preach[es].” Page also mused “that was quite a meeting we had. I hope that now the Techni-culture Conference have gained the seats they will use their new found ‘power’ [quotation marks in original] for the general good and not for power alone. Many I listened to were impressive but some were beguiled by their own rhetoric—and so I guess is true of many of us old white ladies.”⁵⁰

Ousted board member Gordon Herstslet wrote John Austin after the Cincinnati meeting as well. He expressed his surprise at “how far the Techniculture group had gone,” referring to the number of board and committee leadership positions they had secured. He went on to exclaim, “It will be interesting to see how this ‘palace revolution’ turns out.” But he also added, “At the moment, I feel that the Techis have been guilty of overkill. They will eventually discover that the Establishment—whether you like it or not—has a vital contribution to make.”⁵¹ This combination of resentment at being pushed out and looking down on the movement of black workers runs throughout many of the responses by white settlement leadership.

The response by the NFS’s leadership (and established white membership) showcased the ongoing strain between trying to keep up with the times of social action and new norms of racial interaction while maintaining that what they were doing—indeed, had been doing since Jane Addams’s reform days—was still useful and effective. For example, Executive Director Margaret Berry’s address to the May 1968 NFS conference in Houston highlighted the “reform potential” of settlements and how to mollify the loud demands for community control. She made it clear that the sentiment of the day was that they had to get with the program being demanded by black social workers. “But,” she asked the audience, “can we use our establishment for useful social purposes?”⁵²

Berry was a prominent player in shaping the direction that NFS would take on the administrative end of the black movement within the organization, and sat at the center of this conflict in her own thinking. Her reaction made it clear that she that she fully realized that the NFS couldn’t keep on with old ways and had to respond to the black movement within their ranks. As Cincinnati Enquirer reporter James Adams observed at the Cincinnati conference, “Miss Margaret E. Berry, spunky executive director of the NFSNC, is learning yesterday’s rebel can be today’s establishment symbol.”⁵³

However, she maintained a strong desire to hold on to both the organization’s and her own personal legacy of social change work, and would not allow a blanket indictment of their previous work towards social change. After a New Directions Committee meeting in June 1968, Austin sent Berry a little note: “I hope that none of the discussions made you feel defensive because you have no reason to. The Federation has always kept pace with the times and right now some new direction is indicated, and that’s what all the flack is about.”⁵⁴ She responded by saying that she felt like the meeting was useful and that all the issues were dealt with but that her “human reaction” was to be ambivalent. “On the one hand,” she disclosed, “I’m the first to say that we can’t go on as we are, and when I fully realized that last fall I pushed for this New Directions process. I really welcome new directions intellectually, and emotionally. What is hard is to hear newcomers make statements as if they were general truths, which belittle true accomplishments…you can half kill yourself though, and all you get is blame because you didn’t accomplish the impossible.”⁵⁵

This personal exchange between close colleagues and friends reveals a highly emotional process that must have been central to the transitions in racial understandings and interracial relationships in all sorts of organizations during the Black Power era. It seems particularly so for those white and interracial organizations that considered themselves advocates of racial equality. It couldn’t have been easy for Berry and her contemporaries to have black colleagues telling them to move aside in favor of black leadership of the organization. Still, what accounts like Trolander’s do is to justify “white bitterness” at black struggles for leadership without attempting to understand a context in which power sharing with whites seemed impossible given the entrenchment of white leadership and the perception that those white leaders were doing more harm than good in the black community.

Berry maintained a firm commitment to integration in general and in the NFS especially. She wrote to Austin just before the 1970 Cincinnati conference that “the words ‘restructuring the Federation’ which is used constantly and is listed for one of the Cincinnati workshops being arranged by H. Sells, really means an all-minority board and staff.” She then notes that this demand “is also based on a perception which is false—the neighborhoods served are all minority. If that were true there could be the usual charge that all whites are leftover do-gooders and should retire from the scene.”⁵⁶ She also defended her personal commitment to racial justice by calling on her own work in black communities. In an interview on-site at the Cincinnati conference, she’s quoted as saying, “As an old revolutionary, I’m perfectly willing to defend the role of the federation,” and, “I spent 10 years in Pittsburgh’s Hill section in the vanguard of racial justice. The Settlement House movement may not be perfect but at least we didn’t desert the inner city.”⁵⁷

These responses reveal a visceral emotional reaction: resentment at being asked to step aside and defensiveness at being told you haven’t done enough. These emotions go beyond the clear political and philosophical commitment to integration and established ways of doing neighborhood based social work, reflecting a deep hurt and personal confusion. Being charged with irrelevance clearly hit on a sore spot for settlement workers. Looking back on the settlement movement in a July 1976 article published in Social Work, Bertram Beck—director of Henry Street Settlement in New York City—proclaimed, “Fortunately, the settlements were not untouched by the events of the 60s” (268). He argued that the community participation trend of the decade increased the number of minority persons on the settlements’ staffs, governing boards, and directorships, thereby reducing the gap between settlement leadership and its constituency. What happened, “during the sixties,” he reasoned, is that “the old role of the settlement leader as social spokesman had been further diminished by the evident ability, willingness, and desire of the people who suffered the social problems to speak out and bear witness themselves” (Beck 1976:269). This caused settlement leaders to “gain a new humility in their relationship to the participants” (269). This new humility, however, was clearly resisted, accepted defensively, and was ushered in by the Black Power movement within the settlement endeavor.

In the archived papers of the National Federation of Settlements, I found an undated document with no author attributed to it. It looks like a flyer or a leaflet someone would have handed out to people at a meeting. Across the top, in all caps, it shouts, “BULLETIN: THE FACT IS THAT NFS MUST CHANGE! THE RUMOR IS THAT THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF NFS WILL TENDER HER RESIGNATION IN BEHALF OF THE NEW DIRECTIONS CONCEPT!!”⁵⁸ The author goes further: “And that she will encourage all the little old white ladies to resign from the board; that the Board will reflect the 80% Techni-Culture constituency of NFS; that the Executive Director’s ties with the 40’s and 50’s concept of NFS rendered her impotent to deal with the institutional racism of the 60’s; that we went through the 60’s with an all-white staff; that we entered the 60’s in a financial crises and the outlook for the 70’s is dim; that the fact is if NFS continues with white domination it will limit our opportunity for securing needed outside resources.”⁵⁹

From where I sit, as a twenty-first century researcher, I am most struck by the frank way in which they talked about the racial issues at hand, and by the “directness” of all of the organizing that was going on within the NFS. Their style clearly reflects a black professional ethic of “telling it like it is,” as shaped and culled by the National Association of Black Social Workers and other emergent black professional associations during the 1960s and 1970s. But more than that, it opens a window into the uneasy transition to a different way of “doing race” in America—post-civil rights, but not quite.

Black social workers were demanding things like greater representation within their professional structures and calling for things like community control in black neighborhoods, but they were also demanding their right to speak out and make claims about the racial inequality they witnessed and experienced in their professional lives. This was met with some defensiveness among the white establishment against whom their challenges were being leveled. This interaction is central to the tumult of changing racial relationships and rules in the Black Power era, which Robert Smith refers to as an “intervening period” between the civil rights and post-civil rights eras.