ABSTRACT
“Bread, Justice, Dignity, and Adequate Income” was the rallying cry of a powerful welfare rights advocacy group that emerged in the 1960s. Women— of all races but mostly African American—on AFDC came together in their local communities to discuss their problems with the welfare department: inadequate assistance, delayed checks, intrusive caseworkers who monitored and scrutinized their daily activities. These politically and emotionally charged kitchen-table conversations spurred women to harness their collective power by forming local welfare rights groups to assist individual recipients and change welfare practices. With the help of middle-class allies, in 1966 these local groups established the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), a federation of local organizations to represent the interests of AFDC recipients on a national level. The NWRO passionately and unapologetically proclaimed poor mothers' demands for a right to raise their children in economic security and in the process hoped to transform the miserly and punitive nature of AFDC.
