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1960s Welfare Activism
1media/WelfareRightsorganization_thumb.jpg2022-08-01T23:40:05+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a4913Activists marching under the NWRO banner in the Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., May–June 1968. 1960s/70s Welfare activists were mostly working-class black and some white mothers, and the majority of them were themselves welfare recipients. As welfare recipients, women of color, and working-class people, they faced a wave of policies and ideologies that stigmatized them, policed their behavior, and made receiving benefits increasingly difficult. These policies were but one element of a larger political crisis, wherein the California government stoked racialized and gendered fears in order to shrink the welfare state. Rather than simply acquiesce to this reality, welfare-rights groups in California refused to accept it. In 1963, Johnnie Tillmon—a black single mother on welfare—decided to get in touch with fellow welfare recipients in Los Angeles. She was tired of enduring the stigma that came with being on welfare—and she did not want to endure it alone. She envisioned a group of welfare recipients that would support one another, exchange advice, and even pressure the California government for policy changes. In putting this group together, the first step was to find out who else was on welfare, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). “That was a hard job”, said Tillmon, “because that kind of information was not made public. We were in the housing project manager’s office one day when he was called to the phone. Instead of taking the call in his office, he took it from outside. While he was out, we started looking through the papers on his desk.” Among those papers was a list of neighborhood welfare recipients, and Tillmon “copied the names”. Soon after, she went door-to-door, spoke with neighbors in her housing project, and a group of welfare recipients began to form. This group came to be called Aid to Needy Children-Mothers Anonymous ([1], p. 18), or ANC-MA: one of many local welfare-rights groups across the country.plain2022-08-01T23:45:06+00:001960sGina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49
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12023-03-06T21:49:37+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49Women's LiberationGina Leon2Photographic Research and Illustrationsgallery2023-03-24T00:30:48+00:00Gina Leonf0ac362b4453e23ee8a94b1a49fbeeafde2a0a49