Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post–Civil Rights America
Casey D. Nichols
University of North Carolina Press
In 1960s Los Angeles, a powerful network within Black and Chicana/o organizations transformed the War on Poverty and Model Cities program. Black and Brown activists worked together and separately to use the US federal government's War on Poverty as an opportunity to establish programs that would counteract the neglect that led to underfunded schools, inadequate housing, and a lack of community institutions.
Casey Nichols examines this diverse group of intentional and unintentional collaborators she calls "poverty rebels," which included politicians, activists, youth, professionals, community members, and local people. Poverty rebels leveraged federal antipoverty funding to work around the limited capacity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address the dual impact of race and class in African American and Mexican American communities.