Power to the Poor: Black-Brown Coalition and the Fight for Economic Justice, 1960-1974

Justice, Power, and Politics

by Gordon K. Mantler

The Poor People's Campaign of 1968 has long been overshadowed by the assassination of its architect, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the political turmoil of that year. In a major reinterpretation of civil rights and Chicano movement history, Gordon K. Mantler demonstrates how King's unfinished crusade became the era's most high-profile attempt at multiracial collaboration and sheds light on the interdependent relationship between racial identity and political coalition among African Americans and Mexican Americans. Mantler argues that while the fight against poverty held great potential for black-brown cooperation, such efforts also exposed the complex dynamics between the nation's two largest minority groups.

Drawing on oral histories, archives, periodicals, and FBI surveillance files, Mantler paints a rich portrait of the campaign and the larger anti-poverty work from which it emerged, including the labor activism of Cesar Chavez, opposition of Black and Chicano Power to state violence in Chicago and Denver, and advocacy for Mexican American land-grant rights in New Mexico. Ultimately, Mantler challenges readers to rethink the multiracial history of the long civil rights movement and the difficulty of sustaining political coalitions.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, African American, Politics

376 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 2013

Reviews

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful overview of the Poor People's Campaign against the backdrop of larger patterns of interracial organizing in the Sixties. The best material concerns Mexican-American relations with the African American movement. Mantler argues the PPC was less a debacle than memory has it, but most of his evidence supports the standard narrative.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mantler gives an impressive account of the Poor Peoples' Campaign and the economic justice movement in the late 1960s-early 1970s. His work shows how racial solidarity was a goal striven for, but beset by fault lines of conflicting expectations among minority leaders. Mantler sheds needed light into the cross currents of identity politics during a transition in the civil rights movement.