ABSTRACT

As the nation looked forward to increasing prosperity in the 1960s, many African Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area faced hard times. By the early 1960s, poverty was entrenched in the East Bay. The deindustrialization of Oakland and Richmond after the Second World War left large numbers of black residents unemployed, chronically underemployed, or trapped in low-skill, low-wage jobs. The victory of low-income groups in the battle for control over the poverty program also marked the rise of more militant strain of black liberation ideology in the Bay Area. Many of the federal activists felt that established anti-poverty organizations at local level had stagnated, had failed to reach low-income people, and were afflicted with bureaucratic rigor mortis. Poverty organizers targeted schools and churches as well as pool halls and street corners in an effort to organize the disparate elements of San Francisco’s ghetto community, the “deserving poor” and, as one Washington insider put it, “the cream of the crap”.