But If You Have a Pig in Your Backyard … Nobody Can Push You Around

Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri

Following its local workshops in the late 1960s, the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) began to create self-help community programs. This chapter focuses on NCNW's programs in Mississippi--a pig bank for Fannie Lou Hamer's Sunflower County Freedom Farm; low-income home ownership (also known as Turnkey III); and childcare centers in Okolona, Ruleville, and Jackson. To fund these programs, the NCNW utilized financial support from public sources--such as the federal government--and private sources--such as foundations, businesses, and voluntary organizations. Drawing upon its new concept of grassroots expertise as well as the War on Poverty concept of "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, the NCNW recruited local civil rights women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Unita Blackwell to lead these programs that provided black communities with much-needed food, housing, and childcare. The NCNW's efforts boosted Mississippi women's interest in the larger national organization.

Author(s):  
Rebecca Tuuri

This chapter examines the second and third years of Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS), an interracial, interfaith civil rights organization sponsored by the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In the summer of 1965, around fifty black and white, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic women returned to Mississippi to help with Head Start, the newly formed War on Poverty program. Despite increased activist calls for more participation and leadership from the grassroots and poor, WIMS continued to promote its elite pedigree by highlighting its members' expertise in teaching, social work, librarianship, and child development. In 1966, WIMS began to shift its focus to bridge building in the North, promoting the liberal strategy of interracial and interfaith conversations as a method to create personal change and combat racial discrimination. However, by 1966, WIMS leaders began to realize the limitations of such a strategy when they were rebuffed in both Mississippi and Boston.


2014 ◽  
Vol 91 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-73
Author(s):  
David Hamilton Golland

In 1959, Arthur Fletcher—a former professional football player and mid-level Kansas politician—moved to California. He was down on his luck, and things soon went from bad to worse. He made few inroads in Sacramento as the conservatives of his Republican party—including racist John Birchers—marginalized liberals and moderates. He suffered personal tragedy: his wife committed suicide, jumping off the Bay Bridge. Fletcher now found himself a single parent in a Berkeley housing project. As far as he had come from childhood poverty in segregated Junction City, Kansas, Fletcher was back to square one. But he had an incredible tenacity and drive—and more than a few political connections. He resolved to use politics to improve the lot of his fellow man, especially the black man. He took a job as a teacher in an inner-city special needs program, funded by the War on Poverty, and ran for state assembly. Fletcher did well in the race—for a Republican—but lost. He moved to Pasco, Washington, founding a black self-help group and winning a city council seat. This brought the attention of Richard Nixon, who in 1968 was looking for a civil rights program that jibed with the Republican Party’s corporatist ethos. President Nixon appointed Fletcher to the Labor Department, where he implemented the Revised Philadelphia Plan, earning himself the title "father of affirmative action." Fletcher’s experience was hardly typical of civil rights leaders. He preferred to work inside the system, with all the acceptance of it that that implied. But he knew what life was like in the ghetto, and resolved to put his insider’s skills to the task of undermining the very system he served. His years in California, which proved the most trying of his life, were formative, and are the subject of this paper.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Meen ◽  
Christine Whitehead

Affordability is, perhaps, the greatest housing problem facing households today, both in the UK and internationally. Even though most households are now well housed, hardship is disproportionately concentrated among low-income and younger households. Our failure to deal with their problems is what makes housing so frustrating. But, to improve outcomes, we have to understand the complex economic and political forces which underlie their continued prevalence. There are no costless solutions, but there are new policy directions that can be explored in addition to those that have dominated in recent years. The first, analytic, part of the book considers the factors that determine house prices and rents, household formation and tenure, housing construction and the roles played by housing finance and taxation. The second part turns to examine the impact of past policy and the possibilities for improvement - discussing supply and the impact of planning regulation, supply subsidies, subsidies to low-income tenants and attempts to increase home ownership. Rather than advocating a particular set of policies, the aim is to consider the balance of policies; the constraints under which housing policy operates; what can realistically be achieved; the structural changes that would need to occur; and the significant sacrifices that would have to be made by some groups if there are to be improvements for others. Our emphasis is on the UK but throughout the book we also draw on international experience and our conclusions have relevance to analysts and policy makers across the developed world.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 78 (5) ◽  
pp. 813-819
Author(s):  
Paul W. Newacheck ◽  
Neal Halfon

Using data from the 1981 Child Health Supplement to the National Health Interview Survey, we examined differences in access to ambulatory services for children of different family incomes. The results indicate that much progress has been made in equalizing access since the War on Poverty was initiated in the mid-1960s. Poor children with superior health status now generally see physicians at the same rates as children in similar health but from higher income families. However, children with substantial health problems from low-income families continue to lag behind their higher income counterparts in similar health. Medicaid was shown to substantially improve access to ambulatory services for economically disadvantaged children in poor health, but less than half of these children are covered by Medicaid. Recent changes in federal and state policies concerning Medicaid are discussed as well as policy options for addressing the needs of children afflicted by both poverty and ill health.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311
Author(s):  
Colette Gaiter

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.


Spatium ◽  
2007 ◽  
pp. 28-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horatio Ikgopoleng ◽  
Branko Cavric

Botswana like other developing countries faces a problem of acute shortage of housing, particularly for low-income urban families. The current housing problems are the outcomes of the economic, demographic and social changes which the country has experienced since independence in 1966. In particular the urbanization process which surfaced in the early 1980?s. The government has sought to cope with the problem of low-income urban housing by establishing a Self-Help Housing (SHHA) program in the main urban centers. The evaluation findings reveal that, on the whole, the impact of the SHHA approach on the improvement of low-income urban housing has been unsuccessful. The major problems of the scheme are lack of serviced land and inadequate finances for plot development. This has been exacerbated by the high urban development standards which are out of the reach of low-income urban families. The evaluation study also reveals that, there are some indications of non low-income urban households living in SHHA areas. The available evidence reveals that the number of those people in SHHA areas is not as big as has been speculated by most people in the country. However this paper calls for more investigation in this issue and a need for more tight measures to control this illicit practice. The major conclusions are that housing policies in Botswana are not supportive of the general housing conditions in low-income urban areas. Therefore there is a need for urban planners and policy makers of Botswana to take more positive action towards the improvement of low-income urban areas. This would require pragmatic policies geared towards the improvement of those areas. .


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Rosenblat ◽  
Kate Wikelius ◽  
danah boyd ◽  
Seeta Peña Gangadharan ◽  
Corrine Yu

Data has always played an important role in housing policies, practices, and financing. Housing advocates worry that new sources of data are being used to extend longstanding discriminatory practices, particularly as it affects those who have access to credit for home ownership as well as the ways in which the rental market is unfolding. Open data practices, while potentially shedding light on housing inequities, are currently more theoretical than actionable. Far too little is known about the ways in which data analytics and other data-related practices may expand or relieve inequities in housing.


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