07/09/2023
"I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare," Tillmon once wrote. "In this country, if you're any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all."
The article "The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare" begins with use of the socalled "welfare queen" as a heavily raced-and-s*xed political weapon. "A grim irony around these characterizations is that black women became the face of welfare even as the program had long been closed off to them. The program most of us refer to as "welfare" began as Aid to Dependent Children during the New Deal, and offered financial assistance to women whose husbands could not work, were not around, or were dead.
"When it was started the architects of that program assumed that the beneficiaries would be largely white women who were widows," Premilla Nadasen, the historian, told me. Poor black women were often rejected when they applied for those benefits, and if they did receive them, they might be conditional. In the South, Nadasen said, officials would do things like cut off welfare aid to black women during cotton-picking season.
"It was the assumption that African-American women didn't belong in the home and didn't need to take care of their children, but they actually belonged in the labor force," she said.
"As more Black folks moved out of the South during the Great Migration and civil rights activists chipped away at discrimination in welfare policy, it became easier for poor Black women to get welfare. But even though the biggest share of welfare recipients were white (as it is today) the face the public associated with welfare became much browner. Backlash to welfare and aid programs like food stamps began to grow.
"By 1960, a growing percentage of recipients are African-American women and this [caused] alarm among policymakers, among people in the press, and ordinary white Americans," Nadasen said.
"Life magazine ran ominous stories about Negro migrants moving from the South to the North and getting on welfare assistance; city officials in declining industrial towns blamed these new recipients for their cities' flagging economic fortunes and sometimes implemented new restrictions on their benefits. Nadasen said that it was this stew of contempt and punishment of black welfare recipients that presaged the "welfare queen" trope to come...
We've mostly forgotten, though, the black women on welfare who fought to change how people understood aid to the poor. Instead of a necessary evil, they maintained that it should be a guaranteed right, much more expansive and far less punitive to the people who needed it.
Johnnie Tillmon was one such woman. A divorced mother of six, Tillmon left Arkansas in 1959 to head to Los Angeles, but reluctantly applied for welfare rolls after she became too sick to keep working. She was humiliated after a welfare caseworker showed up at her home and rifled through her belongings to look for evidence of unreported income or a man in the home — either of which would have been grounds to cancel her welfare benefits — and so she began organizing the women in her Watts housing project to demand better treatment from their caseworkers.
As it happened, poor black women in other cities across the country were doing the same thing Tillmon was: marching, suing and staging sit-ins at local welfare office for increased benefits, for simple dignities like being addressed with honorifics, for the right to move from state to state while still maintaining their benefits.
By the mid-1960s, President Johnson's war on poverty helped push those disparate welfare rights groups into a more coherent, organized movement. Felicia Kornbluh, a historian at the University of Vermont and the author of The Battle for Welfare Rights, said that while the mainstream women's liberation movement was made up of younger, middle-class white women, the welfare rights movement looked decidedly different — mostly black but with organizers in Puerto Rican neighborhoods and on Native American reservations — and its participants brought with them a different set of concerns.
For example, welfare rights activists' fight for reproductive and s*xual freedom began with different premises than mainstream feminists: since the government could cancel or alter their benefits if they had more children or if a male partner moved in with them, they argued that the rules of welfare programs had to change so they could decide for themselves whether they wanted to have s*x or have children. What's more, some welfare mothers were forcibly sterilized to keep them from having more children, something college-educated mainstream feminists didn't have to worry about.
Welfare rights organizers wanted to treat poverty as a women's issue; they fought to make welfare a guaranteed right, and even called for a universal basic income. Their radical idea was that poor mothers should be provided the means to raise their children regardless of whether they worked or were looking for work. They wanted to live their lives on their own terms.
"It was a matter of equality, so that poor women and nonwhite women would have the same access to bonding with their kids and raising their kids, that middle class mothers had and white mothers had," Kornbluh said.
By the late 1960s, the National Welfare Rights Organization, made up of hundreds of smaller local welfare rights groups, had nearly 25,000 dues-paying members, and Johnnie Tillmon was its chairperson.
"Some people have called it the largest black feminist organization in U.S. history," Kornbluh said."
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/09/730684320/the-mothers-who-fought-to-radically-reimagine-welfare
