Poverty Rebels

216 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, 1 map, 2 tables

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8467-3
Published: March 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8466-6
Published: March 2025

Justice, Power, and Politics

Paperback Available March 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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In 1960s Los Angeles, a powerful network within Black and Chicana/o organizations transformed the War on Poverty and Model Cities program. Black and Brown activists worked together and separately to use the US federal government's War on Poverty as an opportunity to establish programs that would counteract the neglect that led to underfunded schools, inadequate housing, and a lack of community institutions. Casey Nichols examines this diverse group of intentional and unintentional collaborators she calls "poverty rebels," which included politicians, activists, youth, professionals, community members, and local people.

Poverty rebels leveraged federal antipoverty funding to work around the limited capacity of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address the dual impact of race and class in African American and Mexican American communities. They understood that unequal policy had created their urban realities and sought to redefine antipoverty legislation in a way that improved their material lives. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including local and federal government documents, oral histories, and organizational records, Nichols examines vital links between the nation's social and political spheres. Ultimately, she argues that Black-Brown relations gained greater national significance during the mid-1960s amid important civil rights victories and social policies to address so-called disadvantaged communities. By coming into social and political proximity, African Americans and Mexican Americans constructed a national dialogue about Black-Brown relations that had shared benefits, and that continues to shape policy debates today.

About the Author

Casey D. Nichols is assistant professor of history at Texas State University.

For more information about Casey D. Nichols, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A nuanced, clear argument for the central role that Black and Brown actors played in making the Los Angeles civil rights movement more racially inclusive and class-conscious."—Sonia Song-Ha Lee, author of Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City

"Casey Nichols takes a compelling new tack in the study of Los Angeles's civil rights struggles by front-ending the activism and agency of Black and Brown Angelenos in the fight for economic justice. By focusing on the War on Poverty and the Model Cities program, she makes an important contribution to our understanding of antipoverty crusades at the local level."—Brian D. Behnken, author of Borders of Violence and Justice: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Law Enforcement in the Southwest, 1835–1935