[ Policymakers in the 1960s had the answers - give political and
economic power to the people - but walked away. Instead, policymakers
blamed black people for the instability, ignoring the buildup of
centuries of racial oppression.] [[link removed]]

GEORGE FLOYD'S DEATH IS A FAILURE OF GENERATIONS OF LEADERSHIP  
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Elizabeth Hinton
June 2, 2020
The New York Times
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_ Policymakers in the 1960s had the answers - give political and
economic power to the people - but walked away. Instead, policymakers
blamed black people for the instability, ignoring the buildup of
centuries of racial oppression. _

Police taking a man into custody in Detroit in 1967., Credit:
Associated Press // The New York Times

 

The circumstances that led to the police killings of George Floyd —
and thousands of other citizens over the years — could have been
avoided if our elected officials in the 1960s had responded to
protesters’ demands for socioeconomic inclusion. Instead,
policymakers blamed black people for the instability, ignoring the
buildup of centuries of racial oppression. They pursued a misguided
policy path that has failed to keep communities of color safe for more
than 50 years.

The police have long operated as guardians in white and middle-class
communities, protecting property from outsiders. But in segregated
urban neighborhoods, officials have deployed militarized police forces
and expanded the prison system instead of working to address the root
causes of the uprisings: mass unemployment, failing public schools,
dilapidated housing and the deterioration of basic public goods like
clean water.

We can’t let history repeat itself. While flames engulf at least 140
cities across the country, we must create a more egalitarian society
out of the ashes by transforming policing. The blueprint was laid out
in the 1960s — empowering low-income citizens to change their
communities in their own vision, and investing in those
alternatives _at scale_. Today we need the courage to act.

President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized the role police brutality and
socioeconomic inequality played in urban uprisings when he convened
the Kerner Commission in 1967. Its report
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American political and economic institutions failed to commit
resources “sufficient
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make a dramatic, visible impact on life in the urban ghetto,” the
nation would become increasingly divided along racial lines and
plagued by inequality — a “spiral” of segregation, violence and
police force. Unfortunately, Johnson and other liberal policymakers
distanced themselves from the Kerner report, out of discomfort that
the document implicated white racism in fomenting domestic turmoil.

Johnson’s racism may have compromised the promise of the Great
Society, but his domestic policies leave us with an important policy
precedent, a blueprint for getting out of our current crisis. To begin
to dismantle the socioeconomic conditions that led to Mr. Floyd’s
premature death, we can look to the principles of community
representation and grass-roots empowerment that steered the early
development of Johnson’s domestic program.

The inaugural legislation of the war on poverty, the Economic
Opportunity Act of 1964, enshrined a commitment to community
involvement in the idea of “maximum feasible participation.”
Inspired by Saul Alinsky’s method for organizing, this principle
empowered ordinary citizens to develop their own solutions to cure and
prevent the system of racial inequality, with support from the federal
government.

Officials from the Office of Economic Opportunity interpreted
“maximum feasible participation” to mean the law should help
“the poor in developing autonomous and self-managed organizations
which are competent to exert political influence on behalf of their
own self-interest.” Essentially, the Johnson administration and
Congress charged the O.E.O. with systematically including poor people
in the administration of urban social welfare programs. It was the
first and only time in the history of the United States that
grass-roots organizations received direct federal funding to transform
unequal conditions on their own terms.

During the very brief moment when “maximum feasible participation”
was given a chance to steer the direction of the war on poverty,
activists, organizers and residents of segregated low-income
communities throughout the country seized on the idea to realize
radical, even revolutionary approaches to restructuring American
society, exercising claims to self-determination and autonomy that
mainstream civil rights leaders championed in the mid-1960s.

In Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the O.E.O. supported residents in
protesting the New York City’s police department, department of
welfare and public school administrators with the Mobilization for
Youth Program. In Chicago, federal authorities granted the
community-based Woodlawn Organization $1 million to work with young
people who had been arrested. And the Community Development
Corporation of Syracuse used federal funding to support neighborhood
organizations in rent strikes and demonstrations at city hall, so
parents could have enough disposable income to feed their families and
keep a roof over their heads. Continued direct action eventually led
to the establishment of public recreational centers in the city,
providing young people with space to play.

The tragedy of the war on poverty is that the promise of grass-roots
empowerment and representation was not sustained on a wider level, or
for entire communities, but only for individuals. While remnants of
critical reforms are still with us, like the Head Start program, on
the whole policymakers at all levels believed “maximum feasible
participation” worked against their self-interest. By 1965, as many
promising grass-roots initiatives began to receive the initial O.E.O.
grants, they were required to design programs with public officials
and municipal authorities in top-level positions. Soon after,
policymakers defunded and dissolved anti-poverty programs.

Following Johnson’s escalation of the “war on crime” during the
second half of the 1960s and amid the “long hot summers” that
marred his presidency, the national government began to invest in
police forces and entrust officers to assume a more prominent role in
urban life and the administration of social services in low-income
neighborhoods. The United States would look entirely different today
had policymakers embraced “maximum feasible participation” with
the same level of resources and the same length of commitment as they
devoted to the wars on crime and drugs.

As well as divesting from grass-roots initiatives while shoring up law
enforcement, policymakers and officials consistently dismissed the
ideas for social change that emerged among people of color themselves
— resistance largely rooted in their own racism. “There has never
in history been an adequate black nation,” President Richard Nixon
told his chief of staff, Harry Haldeman, “and they are the only race
of which this is true.”

This thinking prompted Nixon to defuse the O.E.O. and join its
programs with the Justice Department, relegating community involvement
in federal social programs to the crime control arena and bolstering
omnipresent police patrol, surveillance and law enforcement
technologies in black and brown neighborhoods. During this period,
only about 2 percent of the grants the Justice Department dispersed to
fight the war on crime went to community-based measures like tenant
patrols and block watches.

Although public officials rarely assert their racism in such blatant
terms as Nixon did, their consistent resistance to supporting
autonomous community organizations reflects a longstanding
unwillingness to disrupt the racial hierarchies that have defined the
United States since its founding.

For instance, President Jimmy Carter emphasized the need for
grass-roots participation in a program he established to revitalize
public housing projects in the late 1970s. In practice, however,
citizen groups like the League to Improve the Community in Chicago’s
Robert Taylor homes were denied funding — even though activists
called for the very same strategies as federal officials, but sought
to carry them out without oversight from law enforcement and housing
authorities.

The rhetoric of community involvement evaporated from the domestic
policy arena when Ronald Reagan took office. As the wars on drugs and
gangs unfolded in the 1980s and 90s, and federal policymakers
continued to shore up policing and incarceration over social welfare
provisions, the police became even more central to the provision of
social services in isolated communities.

In the aftermath of the unrest that roiled Los Angeles in 1992 after
an all-white jury acquitted four police officers on charges of assault
and excessive force for beating Rodney King, the Clinton
administration and Congress created “empowerment zones” to spur
economic activity. But rather than empowering impoverished residents
themselves, this grant program turned into tax breaks for businesses
and is widely considered a failure.

As we create a new future of policing, we should not fall back on the
unsuccessful, top-down approaches of the past. Demonstrators today are
calling for the restructuring of vital resources that will be required
to build a just society, summarized in their demand: “Fund
Community, Not Police.” The Minneapolis group Reclaim the Block
quickly set up a campaign
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of Mr. Floyd’s killing that envisions the abolition of police forces
by defunding them altogether. The burning of the Third Police Precinct
in Minneapolis, the fires set to the Multnomah County Justice Center
in Portland, Ore., and the widespread smashing and destruction of
police cruisers across the United States are material expressions of
this sentiment.

Although the University of Minnesota ended its contract with the
police and the Minneapolis Public School Board seems poised to do so,
residents in over-policed and underprotected communities of color must
have a more central role in fostering public safety, as well as
welfare, education, public housing and other social programs that
directly shape their everyday lives.

Ceding political and economic power to the people doesn’t require us
to reinvent the wheel. The policy precedent of “maximum feasible
participation” provides an inspiring starting point.

We can fund local victims’ rights groups and vibrant autonomous
grass-roots programs at or above the same level as anti-gang task
forces and community policing initiatives. We can establish powerful
civilian review boards to hold troublesome officers accountable and
entrust residents themselves to keep their own communities safe,
rather than outside forces that often resemble occupying armies. We
can commit to job creation programs for at-risk groups outside of the
service economy. We can come to terms with the growing movement to
abolish the police and the nation’s horrific prison system.

These are the kinds of transformative approaches that will allow us to
attack the entrenched systemic problems and assaults on civil
liberties that have enabled racial inequality to persist in America.
The challenge must be met immediately. Or else we risk becoming even
more fractured, with the fires in our streets continuing to burn.

_[Elizabeth Hinton (@elizabhinton [[link removed]])
is an incoming professor of history, law and African-American studies
at Yale and the author of “From the War on Poverty to the War on
Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.”]_

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