The organization that is most closely associated with this mobilization is the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The national headquarters of NWRO lasted only from 1967 until 1974. However, its seedbed was local activism by public aid recipients and allies early in the 1960s, and it had legacies that continued into the 1990s and even into the twenty-first century. In New York City, for example, discontent and a coalescing sense of entitlement on the part of poor people fed and was fed by the African American and Puerto Rican civil rights movements. With the help of resources from the War on Poverty, Protestant and Catholic churches, and old-line charities, this discontent grew into welfare rights organizations in several different neighborhoods by 1963–65. In northern and southern California, welfare rights activism was also fed by contact between the welfare reformers from the National Federation of the Blind and those from African American and Chicano groups.45 Alongside NWRO efforts were those sponsored directly by local outposts of the War on Poverty and by other civil rights groups. Local attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, such as Marian Wright (later Marian Wright Edelman) and her colleagues in Jackson, Mississippi, represented welfare recipients who lost their benefits because of civil rights activism, or simply because of the way race, gender, and class hierarchies operated in their communities.46 While most of these efforts dissipated after the middle 1970s, national networks of local welfare activist groups remained and continued to offer expansive welfare reform proposals through the period during which Congress and the White House debated PRWORA.
Gender, parenting, and sexuality were as central in the agendas of organized poor people and their allies as they were in the thinking of politicians who wanted to restrict welfare. The feminist dimensions of welfare rights include the demand for human dignity outside of marriage and for free sexuality. Claimed by majority-white groups of liberal and radical feminists, such rights of independent personhood applied as well to low-income and nonwhite women. Welfare reformers from below further claimed the positive right of economic support to parent one’s own children even if one were not attached to a man who earned a high wage. These aspects of their agenda were precisely those that anti-welfare reforms, culminating with PRWORA, sought to reverse. The earliest welfare rights groups on both coasts wanted to restrict the ability of local welfare departments to deny families benefits on the basis of women’s sexual and romantic behavior. Activist social workers resisted participating in “midnight raids” on the homes of welfare clients, and activist lawyers brought questions about welfare recipients’ sexual privacy before the appellate courts.47 NWRO members argued that forcing women to name their sexual and romantic partners, and efforts to criminalize men’s failure to pay child support, were dangerous. They either would lead to men’s further alienation from their children or would bring them back, angrily, into the lives of women who had separated from them with good reason.
One of the movement’s paramount successes came in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case King v. Smith. As discussed in Chapter 1, the court’s opinion invalidated the “man-in-the-house” rule that had been the Alabama legislature’s way to deprive especially African American women assistance on the basis of their sexual behavior after national authorities indicated their dissatisfaction with “suitable home” restrictions. It was in King v. Smith that the court specified that, under the Social Security Act, if a public assistance applicant met all the eligibility criteria for aid, then he or she was entitled to receive it. The Mrs. Smith at the heart of the case had lost her and her children’s benefits because she was rumored to have an occasional sexual relationship with a married man. Her landmark case started its legal life as one strand in a much larger skein of activist litigation by a post–Civil Rights Act southern freedom movement that was simultaneously a movement for civil rights, welfare rights, and public-interest law.48
The activism that brought the perspectives of poor people into the policy-making process also launched into national politics the idea of a national minimum income, or guaranteed income. The idea originated with intellectuals, such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith Jr., who sought a solution to the problem of rising productivity in advanced industrial societies. Absent a moral or disciplinary commitment to the work ethic, Galbraith and colleagues concluded, it was hardly sensible to keep all adults in the labor force—or to punish them with starvation when they were outside it.49 The welfare rights movement added to this rationale a feminist or motherhood-centered one: AFDC mothers asked, why should a woman work for wages in a child care center or another woman’s kitchen when the social good was served as well by her raising her own children? NWRO formalized the idea into a proposed Guaranteed Adequate Income, which members demanded that politicians consider. After years of calculations, welfare rights leaders finally settled on $5,500 per year for a family of four as an appropriate level. They went into battle on its behalf with the slogan, “5500 or fight!”50
Welfare reformers from below believed they needed to “fight” over the guaranteed income despite the fact that mainstream politicians, themselves, were considering variations of the idea. President Richard Nixon is often credited, incorrectly, with bringing attention to this idea because his administration proposed a kind of guaranteed income to Congress in 1969 and appeared to support it until it finally failed in 1972. However, poor women and men, and the organizers and professionals who worked with them, deserve primary credit for generating a credible case for a guaranteed income—what would later be termed a Basic Income Grant and become the object of social policy experimentation across the world.51 The Nixon initiative, called the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), distorted the idea and then used it against welfare recipients by tying income assistance to mandatory wage-earning by heads of households. Even while advocating expanded income assistance in the form of a guaranteed income, FAP policy advocates mobilized gendered and racialist arguments. President Nixon argued that FAP would end traditional public assistance, which he claimed unfairly privileged female-headed versus male-headed households. Following the lead of Democrats, he committed the national government to forced waged work for recipients (although only for one parent in a two-parent household, thus discriminating between married and unmarried mothers). The Nixon administration proposed a relatively low national income standard, at least by NWRO’s standards and the standards of welfare recipients in northeastern states, who worried that their benefits would drop to the FAP level.52
The legacy of welfare reform from below may have been most powerful in the record of things not done, or not even proposed, during the period when activism by and on behalf of poor people was powerful. Rather than further stereotyping public assistance as a social problem, identified with African Americans, Latinas, and women with lax sexual morals, these welfare reformers conceptualized public assistance as a necessity for all people in poverty, living in a society that routinely generated poverty. A guaranteed income that applied equally to those who were not working because of their family care responsibilities, those who were unemployed, and those whose wages were simply too low, placed the onus for creating poverty on the economic system rather than on individual or group failures.
Welfare rights activists forced the repeal of the “freeze” provision that President Johnson and conservative Democrats had written into the 1967 Social Security Act amendments. They helped defeat Nixon’s FAP proposal. And they helped turn the work requirement under the “WIP” program (also part of the 1967 amendments) into a dead letter; if governments were unwilling to provide adequate training, education, and child care services, then welfare activists and advocates made it difficult for them to implement forced work programs.
Coalitions of poor people and professionals working together had some significant victories. The Supreme Court’s holding in King v. Smith applied beyond Alabama to invalidate “man in the house” laws in every state that had them. It established an individual entitlement to public assistance under the Social Security Act, and signaled surveillance by federal courts of state efforts to deprive benefits to families of color. Shapiro v. Thompson (1969), another Supreme Court case brought by welfare rights attorneys, reformed state laws that distinguished new migrants from other states from long-term residents in regard to their access to public aid. And this principle has endured, even in the wake of state statutes that attempted to compromise it. It was reaffirmed strongly by the Supreme Court in Saenz v. Roe (1999),