Seattle Woman Got New Start--Then It Ended : Case History of a 20-Year War on Poverty

It has been 20 years now, but Mary Louise Williams still remembers 1965.

She lived day to day, trying to rear four children alone in Seattle’s small but grim black ghetto. Her husband was somewhere in California. Welfare barely provided the food and rent.

She sometimes cooked on the overnight shift at the Honeysuckle Cafe, but could not get any other jobs. No place was willing to train a 41-year-old black woman who had left school in the 10th grade.

That spring, she remembers, everything changed. She was in the county hospital, recovering from an operation, when she read in the local black paper that something called the war on poverty was coming. It would bring new jobs--good jobs with a future--for the poor.

“My minister came to see me in the hospital,” she recalled. “And I told him, ‘I just can’t stay on this welfare any longer. I want one of those jobs.’ That was what I wanted--a way off that welfare and a better life for my kids.”

The minister made a call, and Mary Lou, as everyone knew her, made good. The same month that Watts exploded in Los Angeles, she signed up for a job with the first anti-poverty project in Seattle. She learned how to survive in the business world and graduated to jobs with the American Red Cross and the Seattle Parks Department.

Her confidence at an all-time high, she enrolled in college on a government scholarship and made the dean’s list. She even bought a house and served on the board of directors of the local United Way.

President Lyndon B. Johnson called it an “unconditional war” that would end poverty in the world’s richest nation by this year. Washington paid the bill, but the battles were fought in rural pockets of deprivation such as Appalachia and in such cities as Seattle, where the poor ghettos were growing like cancer cells.

Mary Lou was a textbook success. But instead of putting her cheerful face on a recruiting poster, they canceled the war.

Before Johnson left office, the grandiose plan was dumped. The money was needed to fight the Vietnam War, and the anti-poverty programs had generated political opposition in some cities. Even scaled back, the programs cost billions.

Today there is little doubt that the war on poverty did considerable good, though at enormous cost. Many poor citizens like Mary Louise Williams got a new start, and hunger was relieved.

“The Great Society did not eliminate poverty, but the number of poor was reduced and their deprivation significantly reduced,” wrote Sar Levitan, a poverty expert at George Washington University, and Robert Taggart, a former Carter Administration economist. “(While) the Great Society did not have any magic formula for prosperity, its politics contributed to the longest period of sustained growth in the nation’s history.”

The Los Angeles Times Poll recently surveyed a national sample of Americans and found that 55% believe the war on poverty helped the poor.

Symbol of Waste

But by the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration came to power, the war on poverty had also become a symbol of waste and corruption to many Americans. More than 80% of the persons polled said they assume that the poor will always be with us, and more than half said that anti-poverty programs are seldom or almost never effective. Even if the federal government had all the money it needed, 70% said it would not know how to eradicate poverty.

Drawing on such sentiment, President Reagan was determined to use his first term to reduce the federal government’s self-imposed role as the first source of help for the poor.

Mary Louise Williams has a close-up view of how that plan is working today in Seattle, an average American city when it comes to poverty.

Tried to Hide

Mary Lou was laid off from her job as coordinator of volunteer services for the Seattle Parks Department in 1982--18 months shy of retirement and loaded with debts. She had to move, depressed and ashamed, into a rented house just a few doors from an apartment where she lived when last on welfare. She pulled down the shades, she recalls, and tried to hide.

Conditions for the poor have improved since Mary Lou was last poor. Welfare grants are higher, food stamps are available and Seattle activists have built a good system of nonprofit health clinics to supplement federal Medicaid benefits.

New parks, a community center, even a swimming pool, were built in Mary Lou’s neighborhood during the war on poverty.

But her neighborhood in the Central District is still the poorest in town, and still mostly black.

Poverty Rate Up

Under Reagan, the poverty rate has gone up, yet thousands of Seattle poor have lost welfare and food-stamp benefits. Poverty agencies such as the one Mary Lou helped start in 1965 are strapped for money, untouched by the President’s call for more volunteers to pick up where the federal government has left off.

Back in 1965, Mary Lou had vowed to stay off welfare forever. Even after she lost her job, she succeeded for a time. She receives a monthly check under the Social Security disability program because she has diabetes. There are no medical benefits, but a hospital supplies her with insulin as part of a research project.

Friends at nearby food banks set aside bags of groceries, so she does not have to wait in the lines that grow longer every month. Not that the food is all that great--frozen waffles, marshmallow cream, wilting cauliflower, sugar, soda pop and apple juice on a recent day.

Back to Welfare Office

Finally, Mary Lou went back to the welfare office. She needed welfare to get medical coverage for bad teeth and arthritis, and to pick up about $20 a month in food stamps.

The experience was not pleasant. The national concern for the poor that motivated her in 1965 has been replaced by a hard edge, she says.

“If you need help now you have to beg for it,” she said bitterly. “It isn’t there just because you need it.

“They make it for people to exist in the world, they have to lie and steal. Who wants to be telling somebody a lie just so you can get something to eat?”

There was no public clamor for a war on poverty in the early 1960s. America was prospering.

Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy had discovered the numbing poverty of Appalachia while campaigning in 1960 and talked of it in speeches. But the Republican nominee, Richard M. Nixon, accused Kennedy of providing “grist for the Communist propaganda mill,” and dismissed the tales of misery.

But the stories were real. A few days before his assassination in November of 1963, President Kennedy gave tentative approval for a plan to attack what he called the paradox of poverty in a nation of wealth.

He was alarmed by the high failure rate for young men taking draft physicals and mental exams. He also saw the poverty issue as a political tool for pushing civil rights without alienating powerful Southerners in his own party.

Johnson Declares War

As Kennedy’s successor, Johnson accepted the task with passion. “This Administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty. . . . It will not be a short or easy struggle . . . but we shall not rest until that war is won,” he proclaimed in his first State of the Union message.

Task forces composed of scholars and government officials came up with a mishmash of programs. Rather than increase welfare, the programs were intended to create new job opportunities that would help the poor pull themselves out of poverty permanently.

It would work within a generation, said R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy confidant who commanded the war. “Perhaps by 1985, these job and social programs can bring poverty down to a minimum level,” he wrote to Johnson in October, 1965. “Those who remain poor would do so primarily because of scattered, fortuitous circumstances.”

In Seattle, this massive social experiment was aimed at the Central District, an older, hilly section above the waterfront where the city’s original gentry had settled. By 1964, the pleasant tree-shaded streets and large houses concealed the city’s worst poverty. Most of the black families in Seattle lived there.

Not Her First Choice

Mary Louise Williams has lived in the Central District since she came to Seattle from Sacramento in 1962. But it wasn’t her first choice.

She was supposed to get an apartment in the same suburban building as the white woman whose children she watched, she recalls. But the manager had a firm rule against renting to blacks, so she was forced into the ghetto.

With her minister’s help, she joined the war on poverty in August, 1965, as one of 10 block organizers for the new Central Area Motivation Program. The agency was started with a federal grant given to some middle-class parents and black civil rights leaders who believed in the community action idea endorsed by Shriver and Johnson.

Community action theory said the plight of the poor could be improved by organizing them into strong communities able to pressure the government and society at large for more jobs and better treatment. Thousands of community action programs were started around the country.

Study Centers Opened

CAMP, as the agency became known, opened study centers in local schools. Poor students could come after class to study or receive tutoring in better surroundings than at home. But community action was the key.

“We thought if we could just get the whole community organized, we could have a 10,000-person march anytime,” recalls Carol Richman, who drafted the group’s original request for funding. “The idea was we were going to have this great uprising and bring about massive social change.”

Williams and the other organizers--most of them poor and over 30--were paid to knock on doors and get persons interested. They were the foot soldiers of Shriver’s war.

Doors were slammed in their faces by persons who did not believe that the federal government was paying welfare mothers to walk around and tell people how to apply for benefits, find jobs and fight City Hall. They were accused of being snooping welfare agents.

A Turning Point

Christmas of 1965 was a turning point, Williams recalls. The block workers spent Christmas Eve in a driving snow delivering gift packs they had scrounged.

“We were good beggars . . . food, clothes, just anything we could put together. That really broke the ice. Word of mouth began to get around, and doors started to open up a little more.”

The Central Area Motivation Program grew into the main anti-poverty effort in Seattle. It moved to new quarters in one of the Central District’s spacious Victorian houses and became a prominent voice for the black community. Morale was high.

If you were poor in the Central District, you could get a loan from the CAMP credit union. The neighborhood needed sprucing, so people were hired to plant trees and help repair homes. Few had cars and bus service was bad, so drivers were recruited for a fleet of vans and buses. More than 20 neighborhood groups were started to push for better bus routes, new stoplights and fair treatment by landlords. The staff grew to more than 300 persons, most of them formerly poor.

Jobs Given to 500

By the end of 1966, a little more than a year after Mary Louise Williams began, more than 9,700 persons had come into contact with CAMP, according to an evaluation study published in 1968 by the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. More than 500 persons had been placed in jobs, another 450 in training programs.

CAMP’s community center became home for a whole range of services that did not exist before the war on poverty. Volunteers in the VISTA program--the domestic Peace Corps--helped write grants and run events. Upward Bound and other programs helped ghetto students prepare and enter college. Legal problems were referred to the local Legal Aid office.

About this time, Mary Louise Williams and another block organizer, Gloria Martin, convened the city’s first group to work on behalf of welfare mothers. They knew that women felt abused and degraded by the welfare bureaucracy, but it was hard to persuade women that they would not risk losing their benefits if they joined.

Williams remembers that they managed to interest about a dozen mothers by offering an outing at the zoo, complete with free food and baby-sitting. They scrounged for the food, she says, “and my son and a couple of VISTA volunteers took care of the kids while we had our first meeting.”

Many Moved On

CAMP employees were to stay a year or two, then use their new skills to get better jobs. Many did move on.

Williams remembers being pushed by a particularly stern supervisor to develop her work habits.

“He made us write everything down, and God, I hated him for it,” she said. “But he said CAMP was not there for us to sit back and get comfortable. He trained us in politics, he trained us in social work, he trained us in how to go about getting a job. He trained us how to live in the world, really.”

Marches and sit-ins established the Central Area Motivation Program as a force to be listened to in City Hall. It took the lead in starting a summer festival to ease racial tension. Black stars such as Bill Cosby and musician James Brown appeared at community events sponsored by CAMP.

“Nobody had a grand plan,” said King County Superior Court Judge Charles Johnson, the agency’s former chairman. “Everybody knew the poor needed upward mobility, but nobody was sure how to do it. But that’s what was good about CAMP, you could experiment.”

Poverty Rate Down

Life changed for the poor in America in those years. The poverty rate never fell as dramatically as Shriver predicted, but the combination of poverty programs and a growing economy driven by Vietnam War spending reduced the rate from 19% in 1964 to 12.8% by 1968.

For those left in poverty, welfare benefits were increased in most states and eligibility extended. Food stamps became widely available. Social Security benefits were raised and expanded.

Before the war on poverty, half of all Americans had no medical insurance. Today nearly all of the elderly have some coverage through Medicare, and most families on welfare receive at least some Medicaid coverage. Low-cost health clinics were started with federal help in many areas.

Before the Johnson program, there was also no general federal aid for local schools. Federal assistance for disadvantaged students was a key part of the war on poverty and helped countless poor students.

Find a Future

In Seattle, Mary Louise Williams and others who participated say that hundreds of persons who had no hope for a future found one after they began working at the anti-poverty programs.

Blacks were the poorest, and they benefited the most.

“There were countless individuals who got some kind of start and maintained it,” said Harry Thomas, the top non-elected official in Seattle’s King County. Thomas, who is black, grew up in a Seattle housing project and became director of an anti-poverty program. “It was the first job for a lot of people. . . . Those kinds of things had a tremendous payoff. To have a job and lose it is not as bad as never having a job.”

The first executive director of the Central Area Motivation Program was named to run the Model Cities program when it came to Seattle. He later became the city’s chief budget officer and is now superintendent of parks. Another director became the highest-ranking black woman in state government in Washington. Alumni of CAMP and similar programs say they run into fellow graduates in all walks of life.

“We had the education, what we needed was the opportunity,” said Harold Whitehead, a former CAMP executive director who was an official of the federal agency overseeing poverty programs for 10 years until it was eliminated by the Reagan Administration.

Original Fury Wanes

Across the nation, though, the original fury of the war on poverty waned after the first few battles. The escalating Vietnam War ate into the money earmarked for anti-poverty programs. Perhaps more important, the political tone of the anti-poverty programs had alienated big-city mayors and eroded support in Congress.

By the time Nixon was elected President in 1968, Shriver’s promise was seldom mentioned. The Nixon Administration distrusted the political role of community action activities and put the brakes on federal spending for social programs.

The Central Area Motivation Program in Seattle underwent a temporary resurgence under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. The act distributed $10 billion in its peak years that allowed nonprofit agencies such as CAMP to hire temporary employees to keep their poverty programs operating.

Nationally, about 400,000 jobs were lost when the Reagan Administration terminated the program.

But the war designed by Johnson and Shriver was long over by the time Ronald Reagan was elected.

Mary Lou Williams thought her job would last until she retired. She had worked hard to put the welfare system behind her forever.

After she left the Central Area Motivation Program in 1968, she got a temporary job with a state program that paid the college expenses of ghetto youth.

The students were supposed to be handicapped, but “every minority I knew was handicapped, so I just gathered them all up and sent them to school. A lot of them graduated. A lot of them who had their BA degrees went on and got their Masters.”

She was working for the American Red Cross when she decided that lack of a degree blocked her advancement. Mary Lou enrolled at Seattle University on a scholarship from the federal Model Cities program. With a year left to graduation, she went back out to find a job.

‘There Was Always a Fear’

“My arthritis began to bother me quite badly at that time, and I began to get afraid,” she said. “The (poverty) programs were running out, and I wasn’t working, I was just on scholarships. There was always a fear in the back of my mind that I was going to have to go back on welfare. I said I better get me a job while jobs are still available.”

She got a job with the city women’s commission. She held her last job with the parks department eight years before being cut loose.

Her layoff came at a bad time. There were more poor than at any time since the war on poverty began.

The national economy was in recession. Washington state’s failing timber industry was adding to the state’s woes.

State legislators reduced welfare grants 3% in 1980 and another 12% in 1981. A number of state programs for the poor were cut back or eliminated, including dental care for poor adults.

New Budget Troubles

Welfare payments were restored to their old level in 1983 by a new Democratic majority. But new budget troubles this year, brought on by the state’s reliance on unpredictable sales tax collections for most revenue, forced the Legislature to delay a 3% increase in benefits for six months. Plans to improve health coverage for the poor were dropped in a special session called to deal with the state’s budget crisis.

Seattle’s free food banks, which gather unsalable food from markets and unharvested produce from the fields, report that demand for food has doubled. So many homeless street people clutter downtown sidewalks and wander through Central District neighborhoods that the city is considering a law to punish aggressive beggars. The southeast section of town has become another poor area--and home to most of the city’s large Asian refugee population.

When the Rev. Chuck McAlister ran activities for 50 to 60 southeast Seattle youths on Friday nights, he found that many of the children had not eaten for a day or two. “They’re neat kids, but you wonder what’s going to happen to them,” said McAlister, pastor of a Presbyterian church in south Seattle.

Change in Approach

At the same time that more people were becoming poor, President Reagan was leading and winning his revolution to change the federal government’s approach to the problem.

Rules changes cut 400,000 families off Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the nation’s largest welfare program, and reduced the benefits of another 300,000. Food stamp amounts were cut and about a million persons lost their food stamps altogether.

Cuts were needed to help reduce the federal budget deficit, Reagan said. But in return, he called on businesses and charities to step in and contribute more to helping the poor.

In response, businesses in Seattle contributed an extra $2.6 million over two years to the United Way. The money gave the charity its largest increase in several years and allowed United Way to begin financing emergency needs such as food and shelter.

Far Short of Demand

But Project Transition, as it was called, fell far short of demand. Instead of receiving 15% to 20% more contributions every year as expected, last year United Way’s donations increased less than 4%.

“They tried to do what the President wanted, but it was nowhere near what is needed in the community,” said Frank Chopp, director of Fremont Public Assn., an anti-poverty group in the city’s more affluent North End.

Respondents to the Los Angeles Times poll would not be surprised. About 78% said substantial federal government involvement is needed to reduce poverty. When asked which American institution had the greatest responsibility for the poor, 34% said the federal government. About 21% said the poor themselves, and only 7% said charity. Nearly 60% of the persons surveyed said the government should spend more to reduce poverty.

More Successful

Fremont Public Assn. is the only Seattle anti-poverty group that has flourished under the Reagan Administration. Its budget has tripled in three years, in part because it has been more successful in competing for federal funds than other agencies.

It provides free food, shelter and advice on welfare matters, puts out a community newspaper and led the forming of a coalition of activists who have become effective lobbyists for the poor.

Under the coalition’s prodding, Seattle Mayor Charles Royer approved funds to try to make up some of the federal loss. This year the city put up $1.3 million for “survival services” from its share of general revenue sharing funds. But the amount was minor compared to the need, Royer said, and the funds are in jeopardy because the Reagan Administration would like to eliminate revenue sharing. The city also spends a higher percentage of its other federal funds on social services than most cities, but the Administration is seeking cuts in those funds too.

So when Mary Louise Williams rejoined the poor, her old friends at the Central Area Motivation Program could not help much.

Staff Trimmed

In 1981 the agency had a staff of 48 and saw 20,000 clients a year. Despite rising demand, the staff was cut to 28 and the client load limited to 12,000 persons a year, most of them looking for food and help paying their winter heating bills. More than half of CAMP’s $1.1-million budget goes for the heating program and a small job placement service.

Federal funds through the Community Service block grant--the last of the original war on poverty money--have been cut every year since Reagan took office. The agency received $440,000 from the grant in 1981, and only $146,000 this year. The Reagan Administration is attempting to eliminate all funding next year.

“Right now we’re really a survival agency,” said Larry Gossett, a former student militant who became executive director in 1978 after a financial scandal almost closed the agency.

Every Friday morning, Delores Lindsay walks about a mile to CAMP’s headquarters in an old fire station. Her marriage of 25 years recently ended, and she has struck a deal that helps both her and CAMP survive.

Sorts Clothes

She sorts donated clothes into bins and supervises while people picking up a shopping bag of groceries at the weekly food bank also look for a needed pair of jeans or shoes.

She grew up in the Central District but never paid much attention to CAMP. “I didn’t figure I needed it,” she said. “I was with my husband then.”

By volunteering, she is guaranteed a food bag even on days when stocks run out. Her welfare check of $346 a month plus $165 in food stamps is not enough to support her and two sons, she says.

The welfare grant provides Lindsay 62% of her official “need,” which is determined by a statewide study of food and other costs.

Standards are austere. Women are allowed four pairs of underwear and two pairs of panty hose a year, and a new raincoat every 10 years. A typical 9-year-old girl gets a pair of oxford shoes a year and new sneakers every two years. She is allowed a bathrobe every three years, a nightgown every two years. The grant assumes no money spent on restaurants, television, entertainment and travel, or tobacco and alcohol.

Tuition, Costs Paid

Jenny Dorsey is enrolled in one of the few programs still directed at helping persons escape welfare for good. The state Department of Vocational Rehabilitation pays her tuition and costs at the University of Washington rather than require her to apply for low-paying dead-end jobs through the Work Incentive program.

By allowing her to complete her degrees in math and psychology, Dorsey says, she has a chance to escape poverty forever and earn a good living.

But she had to argue with welfare officials who wanted her to leave school and take immediate work as a nursing assistant.

Dorsey lives in a city housing project with her two daughters. As projects go, those in Seattle are not bad. They are called “garden courts” and sport more lawns and open space than the high-rise projects common in many cities.

Still, Dorsey says she is looking forward to the day she is not stung with the stigma of welfare.

Life ‘Really Controlled’

“I think the biggest thing I notice about public assistance is your life is really controlled by these agencies,” she said. “When the public assistance office says jump, you have to jump. When Housing says those curtains are four inches too long, you have to take the curtains down.”

Mary Louise Williams is better off than most who receive welfare. She collects $492 a month in disability payments and about $20 in food stamps. Rent takes $300 a month. Her house is heated by electricity, and the bills sometimes go over $150 a month in winter. But officially, she is $504 above the official poverty line for the year.

When she went to apply for medical help at the welfare office, she found the welfare system even more degrading than it was 20 years ago.

“You got to be almost dead to get on these programs now,” she said. “It’s a book that you have to fill out to get any kind of welfare help. You can go for months just trying to get the correct papers up there.

Poor ‘Play the Game’

“It’s a steady game that the Administration plays against the poor, and the poor learns, and they play the game back. If you can play the game, you can live. It’s a shame that people can’t be honest and live like decent people.”

Three of her children are making it alone. One daughter is on welfare.

If the war on poverty had not come to town, she said, she would have remained on welfare. Blacks in the Central District would have remained separated from the rest of the city.

“It was never, never meant to be as much of a success as it was. Instead, some of us learned. Some of us actually took advantage of the poverty program by getting an education.”

But those days are over. Now, Mary Lou wonders about the future.

“The reason the doors were opened was because there was money for the doors to be opened. The doors have all been closed because the money is gone.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.