{"id":1182781,"date":"2023-08-17T15:32:22","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T15:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/08\/welfare-rights-history-storming-caesars-palace-interview\/"},"modified":"2023-08-17T15:35:56","modified_gmt":"2023-08-17T15:35:56","slug":"the-welfare-rights-movement-wanted-society-to-value-the-work-of-child-rearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/08\/17\/the-welfare-rights-movement-wanted-society-to-value-the-work-of-child-rearing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Welfare Rights Movement Wanted Society to Value the Work of Child-Rearing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

The welfare rights movement of the 1960s and \u201970s resisted invasive policies like caseworker \u201cmidnight raids\u201d and cuts to already-miserly public assistance. Their animating vision: that society treat every mother and child with dignity.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Members of the National Welfare Rights Organization march along Summer Street in Boston, Massachusetts, October 14, 1969. (Phil Preston \/ the Boston Globe<\/cite> via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

In 1971, thousands of poor black women shut down the Las Vegas Strip and occupied Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in protest of welfare cuts in Nevada. They were joined by left celebrities like Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, partly to ensure that the mobsters who owned the casinos would not shoot into the crowds of protesters. These women subsequently founded Operation Life, considered one of the most successful programs of the War on Poverty era.<\/p>\n

Historian Annelise Orleck<\/a>\u2019s book, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought their Own War on Poverty<\/em><\/a>, documents this struggle for welfare rights. It has been published in a revised edition and is the basis of a new PBS documentary<\/a> of the same name. She was recently interviewed<\/a> by Sasha Lilley<\/a> for Against the Grain<\/em><\/a>, a California-based progressive radio show, about the punitive policies like \u201cmidnight raids\u201d that spurred welfare recipients\u2019 organizing, the connections between the local and national welfare rights movement, and, as one welfare rights recipient and organizer put it, \u201cthe idea that I was entitled to certain benefits for the work I did, raising my children.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

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Sasha Lilley<\/dt>\n \n

What was Nevada was like in the 1950s and \u201960s?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Annelise Orleck<\/dt>\n \n

Nevada itself was a wide-open libertarian place. It was the center of defense production, which began during World War II, and drew a lot of folks from the South to work there. It was a Jim Crow town.<\/p>\n

The famous era of Strip development started in 1947 with Bugsy Siegel\u2019s Flamingo Hotel, and a lot of the famous hotels went up during the 1950s. Those were the hotels that drew the city\u2019s early black population and the hotel unions. There was a black woman business agent by the name of Sarah Hughes representing the Culinary Workers Union, who literally went to the cotton fields in the Mississippi Delta to try to recruit people to work in the hotel industry \u2014 the men as porters and car valets, and the women as housekeepers and kitchen help.<\/p>\n

The women who would make up the Clark County Welfare Rights Organization came from pretty much three Delta towns: Tallulah, Louisiana; Fordyce, Arkansas; and Greenville, Mississippi (and some from some Vicksburg, Mississippi). So every one of the women that Storming Caesars Palace<\/em> focuses on had been sharecroppers \u2014 literally, the last cotton pickers. Their decision to move to Las Vegas was rooted in their determination that whatever else their future held, their children would not pick cotton. Las Vegas offered alternative kinds of labor and means of living.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Sasha Lilley<\/dt>\n \n

Tell us a bit more about the employment there. Now, Las Vegas is known as a union town, but back then, what were the working conditions for people in the casinos and in the hotels, especially since you could find yourself on public assistance while also working for these employers since much of it was seasonal?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Annelise Orleck<\/dt>\n \n

The people this story is about \u2014 Ruby Duncan, Rosie Seals, Alversa Beals, Emma Stampley, Essie Henderson \u2014 were excited at the experience of their early employment in Las Vegas. Beals said that the union\u2019s business agent had not been lying when she said you could make in a day what you made in a week in the cotton fields. When she got her first check after two weeks of cleaning rooms in the Flamingo Hotel, she was amazed. She remembers asking her sister, is this check real? Did I really make that much money? And as Alversa said, you could work in the shade. You didn\u2019t have to be out in the hot sun.<\/p>\n

The industry was also already unionized. Early deals had been made with the mob hotel owners \u2014 the idea being that if we give our workers pretty good wages, decent conditions, and they agree not to strike, then the hotels and the casinos will run smoothly and the flow of dollars into the coffers of the owners and also into state tax coffers (because Nevada was the only state in the union with legalized gambling) would not stop. So for the women, the wages they earned and the fact that they had a union representing them was really important.<\/p>\n

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Fremont Street, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1952. (Edward N. Edstrom \/ Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Duncan tells a story about having worked her shift, and at the end of the day, her supervisor said, there\u2019s a convention coming in and you have to work tonight as well. She said, I have seven children at home, I can’t do that. And she was fired. She went to her union business rep, Hughes, who came back and said, hey, that\u2019s not in our contract. The contract says that you can\u2019t suddenly spring night work on people. And Duncan remembered going in and talking to the supervisor, who was a white woman from Florida, and she said, you may not know it, but slavery is over.<\/p>\n

So there was a lot that Las Vegas offered in the beginning. There was a lot that it didn\u2019t offer as well: on the west side of Las Vegas, most housing was considered substandard, there was raw sewage in the streets, and there were people living in housing that Mary Wesley and other activists I write about who came from Mississippi thought were chicken coops.<\/p>\n

Las Vegas was also a segregated town until 1965. As the years went on, black residents started to get a little bit better infrastructure and conditions, but they couldn\u2019t go to the Strip. They could work in the back of the hotels and in the cleaning rooms, but they couldn\u2019t go for an evening\u2019s entertainment.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Sasha Lilley<\/dt>\n \n

What was the welfare system like in Nevada in the 1960s?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Annelise Orleck<\/dt>\n \n

It had some of the lowest benefits in the country, second only to Mississippi and maybe Alabama. Part of that was the libertarian culture of the state \u2014 you know, you don\u2019t take handouts from anybody. But after a while, as the casino and hotel business began to develop, the state officials and hotel owners both realized that the Las Vegas tourist industry in its early years was very much seasonal. They didn\u2019t want to pay workers when there were not enough people coming to stay in the hotels or play on the slot machines and the craps tables, but they didn\u2019t want the workers to leave town either because they wanted them to be able to be called up at a moment\u2019s notice.<\/p>\n

They began to realize that if people could apply for public assistance, then they might have just enough to feed their children and keep roofs over their heads, no matter how inadequate those roofs were. And so the welfare system developed as something that served the hotel and casino industry and the state at least as much, if not more, as it served the poor people who received welfare.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Sasha Lilley<\/dt>\n \n

Can you remind us, since this is a big part of this story, about the history of what has come to be known as welfare \u2014 that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Annelise Orleck<\/dt>\n \n

The program has its origins in the 1935 Social Security Act, which said that there\u2019s some floor below which we won\u2019t let the poorest mothers and kids fall, as an entitlement of citizenship. In its initial years, it had a positive gloss: we\u2019re going to give this money to women whose husbands were killed in World War I or disappeared looking for work and never came back during the Depression. But increasingly, it came to be seen \u2014 and this was especially true during and after the civil rights movement \u2014 as something that disproportionately benefited black women and Latino women.<\/p>\n

To get the law passed, and to get it reauthorized from time to time, the Roosevelt administration was willing to allow each state to make its own rules. So you got fifty different welfare systems, and states had laws like \u201cemployable mother\u201d clauses, which said that you could kick everybody off, for example, during the agricultural season when employers wanted pickers in the fields. And that didn\u2019t only happen in the South \u2014 it happened in New Jersey, it happened in the West.<\/p>\n

So this is the system that the women entered when they began as hotel workers. Many of them became injured because the work was brutal on their bodies, and also because some had more children than they wanted to, sometimes because they couldn\u2019t access birth control.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Sasha Lilley<\/dt>\n \n

You mentioned this shift that was happening to associate recipients, particularly black women recipients, with drawing welfare unfairly and defrauding the system. Can you tell us about the efforts of George Miller, Nevada\u2019s director of welfare, to investigate and basically terrorize women to see if they could be thrown off welfare?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Annelise Orleck<\/dt>\n \n

Miller had attended a conference that had been convened by then California governor Ronald Reagan. He was interested in using Nevada to experiment with major cuts, and had been very actively engaging in what came to be known as midnight raids.<\/p>\n

Midnight raids were a practice whereby the state and county welfare departments would send caseworkers into recipients\u2019 houses in the middle of the night. It was this terrifying knock on the door, and they\u2019d come into the house when everyone was sleeping, wake everybody up, and start looking for evidence that a man might be present in the house \u2014 or even if the man wasn\u2019t there, look for razors, look for cigars, look for men\u2019s clothes.<\/p>\n