PUBLIC HOUSING TENANTS ARE POWERLESS
Rhonda Y. Williams
From the inception of public housing, racial segregation, economic marginalization, urban politics, and housing policies shaped the daily lives and activism of low-income tenants in Baltimore and across the United States. The myth in public housing history, and even contemporary media images of public housing residents, is that public housing tenants are powerless in the face of these trends and policies. Their poverty is taken as a sign of their inability to act in the face of more powerful institutions and patterns. Yet the fight for resident empowerment in Baltimore in the 1960s through participation in the policymaking process reflected poor people’s demand for justice in an activism-rich decade. Tenant organizers felt that living in subsidized housing did not mean they had to be quietly satisfied or forfeit their voice, even though many tenants clearly feared that contesting management might result in retaliation. For them, public housing residency did not mean they were powerless and, to that end, cadres of tenants refused to accept inadequate or unsafe living conditions without question.
With the passage of the National Housing Act of 1937 that established the United States Housing Authority, the city of Baltimore formed its local Housing Authority and began clearing “slums” and constructing racially segregated public housing complexes—developments that intentionally preserved the city’s Jim Crow landscape by turning racially mixed neighborhoods homogenous and undermining integration. The first public housing apartment complex, Poe Homes, opened on Baltimore’s west side in 1940 for black residents only. Four additional apartment complexes, which housed black and white residents separately, opened between 1940 and 1941. McCulloh Homes opened on Baltimore’s west side and Douglass Homes on the east side, both for black tenants only, and Latrobe and Perkins homes opened on the east side for white tenants only.
These apartment complexes, situated alongside emergency defense housing constructed as a result of World War II, expanded the city’s subsidized housing supply. Postwar housing policies, such as the Housing Act of 1949, resulted in the construction of extensions of already existing low-rent black complexes, including additions in the planned black community of Cherry Hill that featured the first permanent black public housing complex built on vacant land. Finally and critically, the Housing Authority constructed additional public housing in racially segregated or transitioning neighborhoods where low-rent public housing already existed. This wave of low-rise construction, which occurred through slum clearance and “Negro removal,” facilitated downtown urban redevelopment, reinforced Baltimore’s Jim Crow racial geography, and enhanced economic apartheid. It also inaugurated the city’s high-rise public housing program. Lafayette Courts was the first high-rise to open in 1955 in the vicinity of Douglass Homes and Latrobe Homes, followed by Flag House Courts near Perkins Homes. Lexington Terrace opened near Poe Homes in 1958 and Murphy Homes followed five years later near McCulloh Homes. Three of the four high-rise complexes—Flag House Courts not among them—were initially built for black tenants, and even in the wake of desegregation mandates primarily housed black residents.1
Whether in the initial low-rise or the subsequent high-rise complexes, working-class residents who experienced marginalization along race and class lines sought out new public housing in order to improve their daily surroundings and quality of life. Moving into housing that was not only government subsidized but also government controlled, black and white tenants formed resident organizations and initiated tenant-based projects. They lauded their new modern spaces, complete with indoor plumbing, and the new social status it afforded in neighborhoods suffering from well-worn housing, crumbling and outdated infrastructure, and blocks riddled with poor sanitation and disease. When pioneer public housing tenants’ visions of a better life and living conditions were threatened, whether in the initial low-rent, wartime, or postwar public housing complexes, cadres of white and increasingly primarily black residents lifted their voices to the rafters, put their feet to the concrete floors, organized campaigns, and confronted housing officials whom they deemed unresponsive and recalcitrant. They expected decent housing. After all, the federal government—the self-avowed purveyor of American democracy and freedom—was their landlord. Even in the face of discriminatory government policies, tenants fought back and demanded better. Low-income women, in particular, who found themselves in public housing for a variety of reasons led many of the critical battles that secured small and substantive wins, including representative voice, and demanded greater respect and dignity for poor people.
By the mid-1950s and 1960s, when the last wave of traditional public housing opened in Maryland’s Charm City, social struggle had become a familiar feature of urban communities across the country. The Upper South city of Baltimore did not escape urban activist discontent, black liberation protests, or their politicizing impact on black and white residents. Nor did its public housing communities. The streets (even the elevated concrete ones behind wire fences), courtyards, and public and private gathering spaces—whether at Housing Authority or public welfare offices, individual public housing complexes, or community centers—became stages for broadcasting mounting concerns and challenging maltreatment and marginalization based on race, class, gender, and place of residence.
Across the nation, public housing tenants—particularly black women who, with their families, were often deemed as unworthy breeders of social ills and urban pathology—mobilized to fight for representation, voice, and the power to make programmatic and policy decisions affecting their lives and communities. This included challenging unaffordable rent levels and retaliatory evictions, pushing for fair grievance policies, and demanding a say in how local housing officials spent federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) modernization money. In numerous cases, their activism within public housing exposed their participation in local black liberation campaigns that often spoke to and overlapped with antipoverty, welfare rights, and tenants’ rights crusades. Public housing and their cities, then, gave rise to “awakening giants” engaged in struggles for political power, rights, respect, and dignity. Some of these struggles were successful; others were not.2
“An Awakening Giant”
Within a couple of decades of moving into Lafayette Courts in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 10, 1955, Shirley Wise had married and separated from her children’s father, held several jobs, attended Cortez Peters Business School, and become a beautician. Possessing a sense of community belonging, she became active in the PTA and Lafayette Courts Mothers’ Club. But Shirley Wise avoided controversy and “leadership” roles. While she was happy to serve as vice president or treasurer, she did not want to be head honcho. “In those days . . . I did not want to be the leader” or the person “who had to do, to make sure everything happened.”3
Between 1955 and 1970, Shirley Wise shed her timidity as she learned more about rights: her civil rights, her legal rights, and her rights as a tenant. By the early 1970s, the petite Wise had made an unpaid career of advocating for the poor in her housing complex and citywide. Before her political awakening, Shirley Wise often said, “Let somebody else take care of that. I was one of those people. Like I say, social commitments, that’s me. Anything that was really rocking the boat, I wasn’t into that until I found out I had the legal right to do that—to rock the boat.” Shirley Wise’s transformation—her heightened consciousness of power relations, inequality, and rights—mirrored that of other poor black women living in cities. As black freedom movements and antipoverty programs grew in northern cities, “rights,” “struggle,” “power,” “control,” “respect,” and “dignity” became popular words and goals. Referring to the local housing and political bureaucracy, Shirley Wise maintained that public housing “provided a place for me to raise my children. It [also] provided me with a serious education that I couldn’t have got in no school. I had good teachers—some of the best congressmen out there.” 4
In the 1960s, greater awareness of economic inequalities and poor people’s rights ushered in intense disruptions and demands in cities. In Baltimore, militant black and white groups helped radicalize the urban terrain. To be sure, “traditional” civil rights protests occurred, like the boycotting of Jim Crow restaurants, stores, hotels, and taverns in the city and along the fiftymile stretch of Interstate 40. However, in the mid-1960s, grassroots efforts also took another activist route—one that sought subsistence rights, empowerment, and economic equality. By the time black freedom activists, white student radicals, and federal antipoverty workers converged on cities, concentrated black poverty had produced communities and situations ripe for organizing working-class people.
Out of East Baltimore’s public housing complexes emerged black women like Shirley Wise, whose activism ultimately altered poor people’s relationship to government. Politicized by their living conditions and activist discontent after World War II, low-income black women grew more confrontational in the 1960s, a time when “people got to talking to people, [to] know more about their rights,” according to Julia Matthews, a Douglass Homes tenant activist. Shirley Wise similarly argued that a “new generation of public housing residents came along who said, . . . we have rights too,” and they worked to “effect some kind of change.”5 Viewed as “objects of charity” and policed by the state because they received government aid, poor black women mounted housing and social welfare campaigns. Joining generations of low-income, working-class activist women, these women mobilized in communities. Some drew on a familial historical legacy; others built on the knowledge gained from their community participation efforts. They became involved in parents’ school groups, mothers’ clubs, recreational activities, and other civic activities. They continued the age-old demand for safe neighborhoods and subsistence. But they also did something different: this new generation of activist women pushed for respect, a right to representation, and power as not only citizens but as human beings deserving of basic rights.
Alongside family, historical, and community influences, the presence of militant grassroots activists and antipoverty workers helped politicize low-income black women in these new decades of struggle. Some public housing tenants met local officials, antipoverty workers, and black freedom fighters, or at least knew of their presence. Goldie Baker identified two of the city’s most popular organizers, U-JOIN’s Walter H. Lively and CORE’s Walter P. Carter, as mentors alongside her grandmother and mother, who were activists for poor people’s rights and Progressive party members during the McCarthy era.6 She recalled the diehard commitment on the part of Lively and Carter to working-class black people’s advancement: “They were really hard on white people, but they would keep black and white people accountable of the rights of poor people. . . . They were in the struggle and they were going to fight for their rights.”7
The relationship among organizers and low-income black women was synergistic. Just as organizers inspired black women, black women inspired organizers. For instance, even though Goldie Baker labeled Lively and Carter as mentors, she initially met them because they sought her out. They wanted her advice on how to deal with the welfare department and welfare rights issues. They learned from her even as she learned from them. A Community Action Agency (CAA) neighborhood counselor at Lafayette Courts, Clyde Hatcher joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the civil rights movement partly at the insistence of “a lady I knew [who] lived around the corner.” She urged him to attend CORE’s 1966 national convention, where he heard an impassioned speech by Fannie Lou Hamer. “I mean she talked about how she had [been] picking cotton in the fields and she was trying to organize and how they came down and intimidated her. She was a dynamic person.” A short time later, Hatcher became a CORE member. As a neighborhood counselor, Hatcher interacted with many committed black women activists, some of whom were more radical than he was. One such woman was Goldie Baker, whom Hatcher described as a “legend” and “one of the most dynamic leaders I have ever seen.”8
The War on Poverty also politicized cohorts of public housing residents and the cities they lived in. Men and women antipoverty workers, like Clyde Hatcher, came prepared to coordinate services and rally the poor to action, the most militant aim of a program that otherwise bought into the argument that poor people needed to be altered to succeed. That rhetorical mandate to rally the poor legitimized poor people’s community action and provided them with an infrastructure to contest local city agencies.
Within the first couple of years of the Community Action Program in Baltimore and throughout the 1960s, power struggles emerged. U-JOIN criticized the Baltimore program for its lack of poor people on the Community Action Commission (CAC) board and organized residents in private and public housing in East Baltimore to speak out at numerous city hearings. Eventually the CAC expanded its eleven-member board, appointing four people from poverty areas.9 Even then, neither poor people, nor the CAC board generally, had unhampered decision-making authority.10
Poor people and their advocates consistently charged that because the agency was top heavy, it could not address their economic and social problems. In December 1966, poor people led by Murphy Homes tenant Mattie Parker held an Action Area Convention attended by sixty-three delegates—two-thirds of them women—from twenty-one poverty centers in the city. Several Lafayette Courts and Douglass Homes tenants served on the steering committee, and other public housing tenants, like Daisy Snipes of Perkins Homes (also a welfare rights activist), attended as delegates. Overall, the woman-led and majority-female delegation complained about “poor police protection and discourteous treatment, bad housing, rats, unemployment, money going to the Vietnam War instead of helping them, crime, low welfare payments, management of housing projects, and help for youth of today.” This panoply of issues reflected the breadth of low-income women’s concerns.11
The neighborhood action offices, which had their own staffs, worked more closely with residents on the ground. Although political tussling remained a consistent feature of the local program, and neighborhood action centers were not “fighting organizations,” according to Goldie Baker, some antipoverty workers really did try to help poor people “organize the community.” She recalled that public housing CAAs
put enough literature and material out . . . to bring us together and let [the residents] know what it means to be united. . . . They didn’t get in the forefront of the fight, but they were educational. And as far as resources, you could find out different information on your rights, constitutions, you know, things you [were] entitled to. . . . And bringing people together . . . telling them how to stand up, be strong, and organize. I think that was their basic goal.12
Tenant activists made use of these resources as they struggled for economic stability and resident empowerment.
As public housing tenants talked and learned more about their rights, they also targeted the Housing Authority, questioned management, and sought a participatory role in the decision-making process in their complexes and eventually agency-wide. Lafayette and Douglass tenants Bonnie Ellis and Mildred Lee, respectively, led such a campaign. Mildred Lee moved into Douglass Homes in 1955. A widow, Lee worked as a domestic to make ends meet. She had a history of civic activism and leadership responsibilities. She was a member of the fraternal Elks and Reindeer Association, the Nazarites, and United Baptist Church.” Both Lee, who envisioned Douglass as her permanent home, and Ellis, who struggled to raise her family in Lafayette Courts, were invested in keeping Lafayette-Douglass (the two complexes were jointly administered) safe, and that meant ensuring that management responded to tenants’ needs. In the late 1960s, Lafayette-Douglass tenants formed the Resident Action Committee (RAC) with help from CAA and Legal Aid volunteers. Ellis, RAC’s chair, and Lee requested administrative separation of the two complexes. This request represented tenants’ attempts to secure an official voice and input in the housing policymaking arena.
In public housing, residents’ growing poverty had resulted in a concomitant decline in the operating budget, which depended on rent collections. In 1963, housing officials, who had hoped to realize “substantial financial savings,” combined the staff of Douglass Homes and Lafayette Courts.13 Within five years, however, the cost-cutting measure proved neither efficient nor desirable to tenants. Tenants argued that one staff could not efficiently manage and maintain more than one thousand units nor address the entire tenant population’s needs. Julia Matthews, who after twenty-five years of residency became Douglass Homes’ tenant council president in 1971, argued that tenants felt Douglass was neglected: “This place was coming down. They was doing more for Lafayette. . . . Well, [we thought, if] we separate and have our own staff, it would be better.” RAC and tenant leaders also argued that the residents of Douglass and Lafayette had different needs. Over one-third of Douglass’s households were elderly people, while in the newer high-rise complex of Lafayette Courts, 89 percent were families. Ellis and Lee told officials that Douglass’s elderly residents found it difficult to walk several blocks to Lafayette Courts to pay their rent, and they wanted their own community facilities for meetings and recreation. Tenant leaders maintained as well that Lafayette needed a “seasoned manager” to deal with the problems of highrise complexes like safety, elevator maintenance, and servicing families and children. In 1968, after six months of tenant-management meetings and negotiations, the administration of Lafayette-Douglass was separated.14
Challenging the housing agency’s administrative purview, tenant leaders also fought for input in personnel decisions by demanding the right to choose their managers. In Douglass and Lafayette, tenant-management relations were so strained that even housing officials considered it “a matter of extreme concern to this Agency.” Managers’ condescending attitudes spurred fear and discontent and stymied tenants’ complaints. Goldie Baker of Lafayette and Ann Thornton of Perkins Homes (and, later, Rosetta Schofield of Murphy Homes) criticized Joel Newton, who served as a manager in all three complexes. Newton, Clyde Hatcher remembered, “was the man that [tenants] used to hate.”15 Never late with her rent, Ann Thornton recalled Newton’s hostility when she requested a payment extension. At the time she was working, but her paycheck was short because she missed a week and did not have sick leave. She recalled: “Oh, he got to hollering at me. . . . I said, Hey slow down. . . . Don’t holler at me no more. Am I hollering at you? You treat me like you want to be treated and we going to get along fine.” According to Thornton, that was when Newton uttered: “Well, just one of them welfare . . . ” She immediately cut him off, told him that she worked, and that, no matter, he had no “business classifying nobody. . . . You understand what I’m saying? See, people classify you and if you don’t nip it in the bud and stop ’em, they’ll continue.”16
Managerial mistreatment exposed how some housing officials viewed tenants as “worse than, less than a dog.” In one instance, Baker simply wanted housing maintenance to remove the ancient icebox in her apartment so she could make more space for a refrigerator—one of a few remaining possessions from her days as a homeowner. The refrigerator sat in the middle of her floor and took up vital space in the small three-bedroom apartment. When she went over to maintenance to put in her request, she experienced unexpected condescension:
I didn’t know the residents, tenants had to go through all that kind of stuff they had been going through. . . . I had rights, you know. I was one of them . . . sassy niggers who had some right. They ain’t know where I come from. They ain’t know who I was listening to all them years. So I said, you know, “I don’t know who you think you talking to.” . . . And then I went over to the manager’s office to report them. . . . So anyway, Joel Newton, he talked to me and asked me was I crazy. Get out of his office. Honey, that’s when I went to see the commissioner. And I told him, I don’t know who he [Newton] think he’s talking to. I am not nobody’s slave. I am not nobody’s slave, and he ain’t talking to no slave. Slavery’s over. . . . I said, he don’t have no respect for me, he don’t need to be over there.17
Given their experiences with the managers, a cadre of outspoken Lafayette and Douglass tenants sought the right to be treated decently in their homes and communities. Tenants asked for input in managerial selection because the manager represented, as RAC secretary and CAA tenant worker Margaret E. Johnson maintained, a “king in his kingdom.” He set the “tone” for the complex and “controlled daily decisions like the flexibility of rent payment procedures.” Echoing the laments of black tenant dissidents in the 1940s, Lafayette and Douglass tenants wanted to secure managers they believed would help them, “not talk down to them” because they were poor black people.
The RAC supplied officials with the names of candidates, but central administration told tenants that personnel decisions lay with housing administration. Dissatisfied RAC representatives, accompanied by CAA and VISTA workers, went to the February 6, 1968, housing commissioners’ meeting. Margaret E. Johnson conveyed tenants’ desires to select the new manager; she also told commissioners that Bonnie Ellis believed that management had retaliated against her after she ignored warnings to suspend organizing meetings. In what became a three-hour hearing, commissioners devised a compromise that incorporated tenants. Arguing that “the success of a housing project is a direct result of the tenant council,” board members encouraged the establishment of a joint panel to develop criteria for the selection and evaluation of the manager. While commissioners incorporated tenants, the plan fell short of the RAC’s demand to pick the manager. Tenant representatives, however, accepted the compromise even as they realized that management retained decision-making power. To this end, Johnson remarked that she hoped housing officials would not select managers whom tenants “violently opposed.”18
The RAC’s campaign marked Baltimore residents’ entry into the policymaking arena. Their complaints and actions revealed their attempts to alter the institutions dispensing services, and that meant carving out a concrete, officially acknowledged space for tenant involvement. Tenants secured recognition and the power to negotiate policy. But local officials ultimately did not relinquish authority when acquiescing to residents’ demands. The institutions, by incorporating tenants’ voices, may have become more democratic, but the systems of inequality that kept poor women impoverished and reliant on public housing remained firmly in place. Even so, these women had achieved a primary goal—the right to affect the systems that structured their daily lives. And they also made clear, and public, tenants’ expanding displeasure with public housing’s living conditions.
These stories also illustrate the power that managers had, and some did wield, against tenants who protested a mite too forcefully about poor housing conditions. The repercussions could be detrimental, affecting the comfort and very survival of poor families who already found themselves relying on government subsidies to make ends meet. In 1967 in Durham, North Carolina, the Housing Authority evicted tenant leader Joyce Thorpe and her three children without a hearing and for no apparent reason, except that she was organizing tenants. Her case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and would forever change housing policy: retaliatory evictions were outlawed. Eviction and grievance procedures were established. While the fear of losing one’s residence still endured, activist women like Julia Matthews remained resolute. Matthews argued that tenant participation, community responsibility, black empowerment, and advancement went hand in hand: “I have always been active in the community. What they say, charity starts at home. . . . This is my neighborhood. This is my tenant organization. All of us, get yourself together, have more say, input. . . . They’ve been too quiet. For how long we been slaves?”19
Politicized by their personal histories, daily circumstances, black freedom movements, and the efforts of antipoverty workers, black women activists also benefited from federal housing officials’ incorporation of the maximum feasible participation concept. In 1967, HUD staff members focused on addressing two urgent problems—deteriorating housing and residents’ burgeoning discontent. Soon thereafter, HUD established the modernization program, which sought to upgrade the physical condition of public housing.20 The program also aimed to improve tenant-management relations by requiring tenant involvement in developing local modernization plans, altering management policies, and expanding services. In a 1968 HUD circular titled “Social Goals for Public Housing,” the federal government suggested that municipal housing authorities “undertake a mutual commitment to cooperative action and trust with tenant organizations.”21
This federal program, like CAP, provided residents, some of whom had confronted management already, with the necessary weapons to challenge municipal policies. The requirement of tenant participation and consultation in the modernization program helped transform the character of many tenant groups, which were clubs concerned with “activities and group interests of the tenants . . . not with management of the project.”22 In Minneapolis, the first city to receive modernization money, HUD delayed the program until the local housing agency satisfactorily showed that tenants had participated “in drawing the proposals.” Shirley Wise, the self-described “Malcolm X of public housing” in Baltimore, maintained that the modernization program became a key residential “organizing tool.” Wise recollected: “I know people, now as they look back, they’re sorry that HUD” required that “a resident group sign off on the modernization plan. . . . Because that gave [residents] their true rights to sit at the table with the decision-makers and effect some changes in their community.”23
Federal dictates, however, did not necessarily translate into local agency cooperation with tenant activists. Some public housing authorities refused to share power with tenants and “told HUD to ‘keep the money.’ ” Subterfuge also occurred. In 1970 in Nashville, according to Mattie Buchanan, president of the Nashville Tenants Organization, the Housing Authority disregarded tenants’ participatory claims and still sought the grant—so local intransigence to federal mandates did occur.24
Nevertheless, the new federal regulations gave black women public housing activists the authority to elevate their rights and to claim a voice in central administration matters. Drawing on their organizing experiences with RAC and alliances with federal workers, activists in Baltimore mounted a campaign to push for decision-making power in agency matters and demanded citywide tenant representation. Led by Margaret E. Johnson of Lafayette, the nine-member delegation requested a meeting with Robert C. Embry, Jr., the newly appointed executive director of the Housing Authority, in 1968.
Residents from Lafayette, Flag House, and Perkins—accompanied by representatives from Legal Aid and CAA—met with Embry on August 16, 1968, and with the board of commissioners on August 17. The delegation demanded that housing officials withdraw the $3 million modernization budget for 1968–1969, since tenants were not consulted—a stipulation of the new program. Margaret E. Johnson also told Embry that the delegation wanted a “recognized channel for [citywide] representation.” Although Embry acknowledged the validity of tenants’ demands, he refused to withdraw the modernization budget, saying it was too close to approval and that Washington had expressed “no concern . . . that Baltimore was lagging in tenant participation.” However, he did promise future participation—but only for tenants. Embry disapproved of the presence of Legal Aid lawyers and CAA workers and did “not intend to be harassed by persons who are not tenants.”25 Tenants’ demands and Embry’s promise resulted in the formation of the citywide Resident Advisory Board (RAB).
Black female tenants’ fight for tenant participation and power in Baltimore between 1967 and 1968 made them part of a vanguard of community activists in the civil rights and black power eras. Through the actions of many female tenant activists, Baltimore became one of the first cities to establish a formal citywide advisory board. Poor black women’s early 1960s activism in East Baltimore had laid the groundwork for their citywide success. On October 3, 1968, Van Story Branch recognized the critical role of the RAC. Branch stated that the new RAB was “an opportunity to have total involvement for our residents.” However, Branch added: “This did not begin today. It began about a year ago when Mrs. Ellis and Mrs. Lee from Lafayette and Douglass Homes requested the separation of Lafayette and Douglass and the right to help in the selection of their managers.”26 The extension of poor black women’s traditional roles to the community garnered representation for all public housing tenants, black and white, women and men.
Baltimore’s RAB was one of the first in the country. New York, while having representation in individual complexes, did not establish a citywide tenant council until 1970. That same year, Pittsburgh also formed a citywide group, and the Chicago Housing Tenants Organization, which sought “resident control,” became embroiled in a fight with the Chicago Housing Authority to gain recognition as well as address its demands for participation in policymaking and management decisions. In 1971 a Journal of Housing article featured Baltimore’s story, claiming the city was “one of a number of communities that report that greater tenant participation in management under the modernization program has also led to greater tenant responsibility for and understanding of the problems involved in operating public housing projects.”27 By 1972, Baltimore’s RAB served as a liaison between the Housing Authority and 12,598 tenant families in twenty public housing complexes and 945 families in leased or renovated housing.28
Throughout the nation, poor black women emerged as leaders in public housing tenant struggles—some of which resulted in the establishment of similar representative groups—in their local communities in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, the same year that Baltimore tenants questioned their local agency’s modernization budget, Philadelphia Housing Authority officials had refused to negotiate with their tenants. Represented by Legal Services lawyers and led by black resident activist Rose Wylie, Philadelphia public housing tenants successfully barred the agency’s access to modernization money. In March 1969, Philadelphia housing officials finally entered into a “memorandum of understanding with the project organizations, recognizing the right of the tenant groups to help determine and to be regularly consulted on the modernization programs.”29 In Baltimore, Goldie Baker worked with a group of tenants who called themselves Residents in Action. Baker described the group, which had forty to fifty participants and pushed for improvements in Lafayette Courts and other complexes, as “an action group that was fighting.” Residents in Action had, for instance, threatened a rent strike if the Housing Authority did not supply residents with new refrigerators. In 1969 in St. Louis, public housing tenants resorted to a citywide rent strike to address rent, repair, and maintenance issues. That action resulted in the withholding of more than $300,000 in rent. Led by tenant activists, including the “more militant strike leader” Jean King, the action had numerous results, including the selection of an entirely new board of commissioners and housing manager and the establishment of a tenant affairs board.30 According to one private manager of middle-class and luxury apartments in Boston, women were the “big organizers,” “the biggest complainers,” and “some of them drive you nuts with their constant bitching.”31
As poor black women struggled to democratize systems of social welfare and alter the housing service delivery system, they eased the pangs of daily living and garnered new rights for tenants in public housing. Just as important, by occupying critical leadership roles in their communities, many poor black women managed to alter public poverty policy on the local and national levels. No longer were they simply clients who received services from housing and welfare bureaucracies and engaged in cooperative social service activities within their own communities. They also were consumers and constituents who fought successfully to influence the institutions that served them. And as active constituents, they engaged in social actions that earned poor people an official voice in welfare institutions and resulted in concrete policy changes on the local and federal levels.32
Tenants across the city pushed for a greater voice in the operation of their communities and the policy decisions affecting them. Like Lafayette Douglass’s RAC, the Murphy council eventually sought to gain greater control of housing operations by choosing its own manager. However, there was a difference. While Lafayette Courts’ tenants complained that they were tired of managers treating them in nasty ways, Murphy tenants sought to replace their manager in part because he was white. The Murphy struggle illuminates a particular constellation of political empowerment in public housing. Not merely the result of “actual” oppressive treatment, Murphy tenants acted on the oppressive history linked to whiteness. The campaign in Murphy reflected much more overtly racial cultural politics, particularly as the rhetoric of black power began to envelop the nation and black nationalist groups moved into the Murphy Homes neighborhood.
These links among race, representation, and power became apparent in Murphy tenants’ direct encounters with the grassroots black nationalist group Soul School. The Soul School on Fremont Avenue served as a meeting place and cultural center. Black junior and senior high school students gathered there to organize a citywide Black Student Union. And police kept surveillance on Soul School leaders, particularly Benjamin McMillan (also known as Olugbala), a former CORE member. Members of the group exuded militancy.33
On June 11, 1969, Gladys Spell and the youth committee of the Murphy improvement council invited Soul School members to a tenant council meeting as part of their two-day Black Seminar series. The tenant council wanted Soul School members to display and talk about their African carvings and paintings. The recreation room at the George Street School, where they held meetings, was filled to the brim—and that included their white manager, Walden Gorsuch, who left Perkins Homes in 1965 to head the Murphy management team. Spell recounted the event:
But instead of bringing it and talking about that, first they said when they went up . . . our office was integrated then. Honey, McMillan and them, they insulted everybody with a white face that was there that night. And told me, “I wouldn’t even be here if I had known you were going to have the blue-eyed devils sitting in here. . . . I thought it was just going to be the tenant council members. I thought it was just going to be a black audience. I had no idea.” [Laughs] Oh, they carried on. . . . The black people in the management were there. But he begged their pardon, said he wasn’t after insulting nobody black, but he was after getting rid of them blue-eyed devils. “They don’t mean you no good. You should kill them right now. . . .” We didn’t have to kill them. They got up and walked.34
Soul School members clearly wanted to oblige black tenants; white people had no space in their vision of black power politics. The white managers and staff represented the oppressors, and their presence conjured up a long history, as well as the contemporary practice, of black subjugation—not a glorious past of African rule and innovation. They were “blue-eyed devils”—a popular phrase evoked in Nation of Islam (NOI) parlance and often used by Malcolm X before his separation from the NOI in the early 1960s. Gladys Spell maintained that she felt so awful that she apologized to management the next day, “because I felt really bad over that because you know some whites lost their lives in the civil rights struggle because they believed in right. . . . But [Soul School members] didn’t look at it that way.”35
Gladys Spell presented this incident as a turning point for some residents in the Murphy Homes Improvement Council. Shortly thereafter, according to Spell, residents started circulating a petition requesting a black manager and excluded white management from the meetings. Black nationalism had influenced some tenants, who believed that racial solidarity and self-determination led to black power and community control. Rosetta Schofield recalled the campaign for black management: “One of the guys, I remember in particular . . . was coming around knocking on the door, because he was then working here. And he said we need a change, and we need all black management, because the whites don’t understand the blacks.” Schofield asked the petitioner, “Who will take the white people’s place?” And he answered, “We don’t know, but we want black power. We want all black. We want black power. We want black power.” Schofield responded, “Well it doesn’t matter to me. ’Cause all I want is to have a place to stay, pay my rent. And I respect them, and in return they respect me. There you go.”36
The black nationalist critique of white supremacy, particularly white participation in black affairs, shaped the responses of some of Murphy Homes’ tenants and influenced broader political activities throughout Baltimore. Before the March 1968 rebellions in Baltimore, black activists “covering all shades of beliefs,” including Homer Favor of Morgan College’s Institute of Urban Affairs, Walter Lively, and Olugbala of the Soul School, participated in a conference to consider forming a united black front.37 Unlike her characterization of CAA, which experienced financial difficulties by the 1970s and closed down one-third of its neighborhood centers, Goldie Baker described the Black United Front as “a fighting group” in the forefront of the black struggle.38
Murphy Homes represented a microcosm of these larger political debates on the black political scene. Just as all tenants did not connect with the black power insurgency, some black political and religious leaders disagreed with the militant separatist wings. While Baker worked with black power advocates, she labeled herself as a human being interested in liberation: “If you fighting for my rights and all the poor people’s rights, I’ll join you.”39 Maxine Stephenson, who worked with the Murphy Homes council, argued that equality and freedom did not mean separatism. Stephenson, who also had spoken out against the urban rebellions, stated that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “wanted equal rights for everybody. He didn’t say kick the whites over that side and we jump on this side.” 40
In Murphy Homes, cultural and political nationalism won. Activists’ efforts exposed a simplistic belief: that a black manager would look out for their best interests. The knowledge of troubled black tenant-management relations in the 1940s, or even in the 1960s across town, seemed lost on those who decided that “black” was automatically better and unproblematic. The tenant campaign was successful, according to Gladys Spell. Murphy Homes received its first black manager in the early 1970s. Ironically, that manager was Joel Newton, about whom black tenants and activists had complained in the late 1960s. Having a black manager neither enhanced tenants’ positions nor countered the demise of Murphy Homes, which, along with its low-rise and high-rise counterparts across the city, continued to decline in the wake of budget and security issues and a neglected urban landscape.
Black female tenants engaged in struggle in “customized wars” within their communities.41 They took advantage of the spaces open to them, whether through the Community Action Program, Legal Services, VISTA, HUD, or grassroots civil rights and black power organizations—all in an attempt to improve their lives, fulfill their roles as caretakers of their homes and communities, and achieve the rights of citizenship. They infused their activism with the empowering messages of equality, rights, and self-determination, which undergirded the more generally held black struggles for freedom. And they demanded a form of tenant power to address quality-of-life issues, like poor maintenance and increasing vandalism. Tenants’ search for rights, whether through the RAC, RAB, or tenant councils, not only encompassed a sense of what residents believed were their rights as Americans but also revealed a more expansive notion of community participation.