[Music] I’m going to save my door. Get away from here. I ain’t going to come back no more. Welfare mothers and their children too feel that they are on a dead end street. That the way things are, there’s not enough money and no way to hold up your head.
And so they’ve begun what amounts to a welfare revolt. You look on TV and you see that poor little kid from another nation. Oh, he looks so pitiful. I feel so sorry for him. But I can’t overlook the fact that we have poor little kids in this nation.
Mrs. Edhorn is a leader of the welfare rights movement. Their principle and their overwhelming complaint is that there simply is not enough money to raise a family and then that it’s given in a self-defeating and self-perpetuating way that it degrades the people who receive it. I have children. I look at my kids’ fight and I think am I going to really prove to them where it starts at.
You know we they’re always screaming about delinquents. American welfare department makes delinquents. There is an evil system around. Martin Luther King believes that welfare is part of that system, damaging to black and white alike. Will not get right until this evil system is removed.
Because as I have listened and as I’ve looked and as I’ve lived in the ghetto, I’ve seen what this evil system has done to my brothers and my sisters. I’ve seen how it has left little children with clouds of inferiority formed in their little mental sky. Yes. I’ve seen how this evil system has transformed nice, decent young women into prostitutes. I’ve seen how this system has transformed nice, decent young men into dope addicts trying to escape the ugliness of their daily lives.
[Music] Maria Ortiz and her children Hilda Wanita Antonio Pedro in their New York appointment. [Music] Mrs. Ortiz gets her welfare check under the Aid for Dependent Children program. It comes to about $117 every two weeks, about $3,000 a year. not enough to pay the rent, feed and clothe the kids, and provide the diet that the doctor has told Mrs.
Ortiz she needs. Another child is on the way. But the father of her children has deserted her. [Music] The fact that governs everything else in Mrs. Ortiz’s life is money or the lack of it.
Her inability to give her children the things they need. [Music] a good boy. [Music] But Mrs. Ortiz is comparatively fortunate. She lives in New York, which has one of the highest welfare standards in the country.
Some places, Mississippi and some other southern states in particular, keep welfare recipients at the edge of starvation. 30 cents a day for each child in some areas, 50 cents a day in others. In those last days before the welfare check arrives, the children subsist on what their mother bought two weeks previously. Mainly cereal, sometimes potatoes. Mrs.
Ortiz, with four children and the fifth on the way, is probably beyond the point of marriage. The men she meets rarely earn more than $80 a week. If she marries, her welfare check would most likely be cut off. The men cannot support her and therefore they cannot marry her. At age 20, she may already be permanently consigned to the welfare roles.
[Music] The problems of the Ortizes are similar to those of welfare families in other cities. Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Detroit. I have never received my check on time. Now, they say they put them out, but now like yesterday, it’s supposed to been here yesterday and it didn’t arrive and I’m waiting today for it. Now, two weeks ago, it was supposed to been on a Friday, so it didn’t arrive.
So, I waited Saturday until the mailman went by. Still no check. So, I called down there for emergency order like they told me to. There is no such thing as emergency order on a weekend. So in other words, my children went without food from Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday until Monday afternoon at 2:00.
Mrs. Jane Wilson is a Detroit welfare mother. The premise of the ADC program is simple. That children without visible means of support must be aided by the state. But to be eligible, a mother and her children must be without a man in the house.
Well, my husband left me in September and then I went down to the emergency shelter, welfare shelter, and uh then I had to go through uh through the welfare, fill out all these papers, drag all five kids on the bus, go down there, sit there, and wait for uh 3 4 hours until they come around to you. I felt like the lowest thing on earth when I went to the welfare. I felt like they were all better than me, that they could walk all over me, which I got down on my hands and knees to them and begged them for coats and boots for these children at at winter time. I actually got down on my hands and knees. And you can ask anybody down at that office.
I actually got down on my hands and knees and begged them. And you know what? Uh, and when I went down there, sure, they gave me the coats and brochure after after you get down on your hands and knees and you beg. That’s the only way you’re going to get anything from the welfare. And to this day, I have never gotten anything from the welfare for myself.
[Music] Breakfast in the home of Carol King, a Cleveland welfare mother with nine children. On the days before the welfare check arrives, there is half an orange for each child. [Music] Mrs. King has become involved in the welfare rights movement because she feels she doesn’t get enough money to raise her family. She gets less than 80 cents a day for each of her children.
The Ohio legislature approves only three4s of the amount that the state welfare department felt was a minimum necessity in 1959. [Music] [Applause] The rise of ADC recipients in the last 6 years has been particularly dramatic among Negro families in the northern ghettos. Giving aid only when a husband is absent pushes the man out of the house. His presence is an economic hardship and a whole class of women and children are growing up in the northern ghettos knowing neither husband nor father only dependence on welfare. Life on welfare means waiting in line for food stamps.
As for everything else after getting her welfare check each month, Mrs. King’s first stop is a food stamp center in the heart of Huff, Cleveland’s negro ghetto. She pays $110 for $158 worth of food stamps which must be spent only on food. The idea is that the state guides the spending of welfare mothers and the women resent the implicit moral judgment that they don’t have the capacity to care properly for their children. We are bitter because we are faced with trying to raise children without money.
People on welfare if they had money to enough to at least exist on. I’m not saying, you know, cuz I don’t have a college diploma that I should have, you know, $300 a week, but I’m saying that people on welfare have a right to a decent living in a rich country like America. and you know like we can always you know send charity overseas and it’s you know for years you know uh we’ve been in poverty as a country and that I’m concerned with your country that you know gets concerned with hunger in India but not concerned with hunger in the United States you know they talk about planning for a future you have to have first have something to plan with you don’t plan a meal you know unless you got you know something to And you don’t plan a future unless you have something to plan with. And this is what, you know, societyy’s going to have to face. They talking about future America.
You know, our kids are part of that future society. And you know, and to deprive them from the time that they’re, you know, babies now. They say, you know, work with 16 year olds. That’s crazy. You know, a 16 year old, you know, it’s too late.
Growing up without enough money is hard enough, but there are other cold realities about growing up on ADC. Welfare kids usually live in neighborhoods like Cleveland’s Huff. They can see the results of violence, even murder around their own homes. [Music] And they must learn to live with it. hate to see these second generations of welfare coming up.
And um one of the things I think is more more crucial to is the youth that’s in the ghetto because most the youth that’s coming up, you know, they’re ashamed to tell their buddies, you know, who say, “Well, yeah, we on welfare, you know, we getting ADC or food stamps and things like this here.” Everybody in my whole neighborhood was on relief. We was just running around the kid about it cuz everybody in my neighborhood was on relief. But I was shamed to go out in my neighborhood and tell somebody I was on ADC. Yeah.
Shame them. If a child does not have adequate clothing, they don’t want to go. If they can’t participate and go to the football games and to the movies, they don’t want to go to school. So, it starts when a child is small. They recognize the fact that they don’t have uh the things that other children have.
Children realize when they’re different. They know. I don’t care how small you are. You know when you’re different. And not only that, when you go to the public schools, many times the teachers make you know that you’re different.
The measurement of square welfare children don’t have I was not able to buy you know white shirts for ties and things if a mother go out like I do I buy my child these knit sweaters and banana sweaters and things like that and he wear them with his pants but Friday he got to wear a shirt and a tie and and I just don’t have it they have sent my child home twice you know last year for not being dressed in a tie and I mean it made me real mad I called the principal told him, you know, I said, “Look, my child ain’t got no a shirt and ties now. If you want to have one, you buy one.” Even in school, constant and subtle discriminations are made between welfare children and other youngsters. To qualify for most free services such as milk, a pupil must be on welfare and thus declares himself a welfare child. The teacher would tell everybody, the kids about him being on welfare and he didn’t want to know he was on welfare.
[Music] That lunch card they give him, it’s only a special lunch that he get for welfare children. And it’s not enough. They don’t get no kind of dessert with it or ice cream. And I always have to give him more uh money to go with it. They ain’t going to give but a a handful of crumbs to a mother.
What do you think the young teenager going to do? You know, why do you think that’s down here on Huff? You know, you know, because when it gets dark, they have to go out here and survive. [Music] [Applause] This is survival and escape in Huff. Music, movement, and this moment.
But in the morning, no job that will pay a living wage. Yeah. Heat. [Music] Yeah. [Music] And it begins again.
Brenda is 19, unmarried, and she has just had a baby. She’s learning to care for him on her own. She’s trying to get a job to support him, and she lives with her aunt, who has five children of her own. Money was the reason she decided not to marry Kenneth, the father of her child. Uh I mean I would have married him you know before while I was carrying the baby but he had no job and couldn’t support us any getting married for no sense in getting married so I said wait I plan on marrying him next year not no sooner than next year have to give them time to work nurse.
I mean, what’s the sense of marrying somebody if he can’t support you? That’s that’s his job to support you and the baby, not my job to support him and the baby. So, after he start working, you know, work more than he been working, then I married and I think he’s able to take care of two. Many hills, not necessarily. Many of the girls who go on welfare never graduate from high school.
A girl who gets pregnant in most high schools is automatically expelled. Usually, she doesn’t come back. She’s on her way to a lifetime of dependence on welfare. The Webster School in Washington DC is a high school for pregnant girls. A psychotherapy session is a weekly part of the curriculum.
When I first found out that I had become pregnant and when I found out that there was this school called Webster, I thought that I was going to be shut out away from the other people and that I was going to be an outcast. But when I came into Webster, it seems that I had more more what you would say people on my side, more in more attention going towards my way. and with the help of Miss Gil and then with the help of some of my good friends here, I’m I seem to be making it and all being here with these girls. Uh you know, they are closer to you. I think that all of us are closer together than girls that that have not been pregnant because they all have their opinions and they it they can easily say things but we have you know we’re all going through the experience for the Mrs.
Patricia Schiller is a clinical psychologist. She directs the conversation toward future plans and prospects. Well um I’ve got a job. I’m going for interview today and um I filed for support from the father in the court and it should be coming through by the time I get back in school in September. For a long time I was under the firm belief that no one really has any excuse for being on public assistance.
But when I my grandparents and my father found out I was pregnant, the their first attitude was we aren’t going to do anything for you. And my grandmother told me from the beginning, “You may not bring this baby in into my house. Now, she has responsibility for me until I’m 18 years old. I talked to my social worker here at school and I have talked to people down at child welfare and it’s being made possible right now for my baby’s born in September for me to put that child in a foster home and to visit it. And they’ll take care of it until after I finish the 12th grade and I’ll be 18.
I’ll be on my own and then I can provide for my child in my own way and therefore I think that it can be a good program. When a girl drops out before completing her high school education, she finds it difficult to get a job to take care of the baby. In many instances, this would force a girl to go on public welfare if she get Mrs. Fabola Gill is the school’s principal which is terrible and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of this for me. She is likely to have another out of wedlock child and as the babies continue coming.
She gets farther and farther uh down into her state of depression. Many of our young girls would like to work and they have tried. They really have tried to support their family, but the system and every everything else just tears them down and eventually they just become satisfied with welfare and they don’t try anymore because they see there’s no sense of trying until and until this whole system has changed. Janette Salters, a welfare mother, works in Head Start and receives a small supplement to her check. You know, people talk about the ABC mothers don’t want anything and they’re not going to ever get anything.
This is the same feeling that they have. They have tried and they want jobs, but nobody’s going to give them a job. And the first thing they holler, well, you on ADC, you know, and you don’t have any experience and how can you have experience when you’re just coming out of school and nobody’s willing to try, you know, to give them a chance. And I’m beginning to believe and so I’m most of the parents that people want you on ADC. They like you there.
You know, they can control you on ADC. And a lot of them just feel, well, I might as well sit here and give what I can. and they do have to cheat and lie and steal and to try to beat the system and try to just survive, not really live. Most of them are just surviving. Welfare departments claim that they want to encourage marriage and thus get women off the welfare roles, but the investigation of a woman’s eligibility for ADC discourages the beginning of any relationship with the man and marriage.
Well, if he’s someone who isn’t who is sincerely interested in you, uh you would like perhaps to invite him to dinner. You would like to maybe he would like to spend the day with you. And if this happens and you have a neighbor who particularly don’t care for you, then uh the welfare department will hear about it. And then they suppose that this man is living there or that you are supporting him out of your funds, you’re feeding him with your funds. Or if you if you claim you’re not feeding him out of your funds, then their answer will be then he’s giving you money.
And she said, “Oh, we can’t you can’t have a boyfriend. We don’t allow that.” And I wanted to know why. And she said, “Because it doesn’t look right, you know, with the kids.” And so I said, “I still don’t see whether that have anything to do with me with a boyfriend.
” And uh she said, “Well, you’ll have to get rid of him. Uh you have to make plans to marry him.” And I told her I wasn’t getting married. I wasn’t ready for it. I had just got out of one and I I said now look you’re going to tell me here I am 37 years old at that time and and I been married got five kids here in the home and has been married to this one man for 16 years and you going to tell me I can’t have a boyfriend and um so she said well we doesn’t lie the 80 some mothers with boyfriend and I couldn’t understand that so she left when she Well, then she come back to tell me that my case was denied.
This is what happened. She come back to tell me that they had denied me, that I could not get on aid. if a man marries you that he should, you know, take on the initiative of supporting your family. And, you know, to tell a man that makes, you know, 125, $135 a week that he should accept me and nine kids and support us is crazy because, you know, this, you know, realistically, I would feel that if I married a man in this position that, you know, it wouldn’t take but maybe 6 months. If it took that long, he would begin to resent my kids.
He would hate me. You know, he would beat me and he’d scream at the kids. He stopped beating the kids out of frustration. And you know, maybe wouldn’t be because he didn’t love me and the kids, but because he was, you know, being deprived of, you know, just having, you know, pair of shoes on his feet and proper food for himself, you know, for kids that he wasn’t responsible for. And this is, you know, thinking realistically [Music] in Cleveland and elsewhere, very little economic incentive exists for women to get off welfare.
They would like for you to go out and go to work or even seek part-time employment. But if you do this, then most of what you make is taken away from you. They receive only a small part of the extra income if they work. The jobs which they can get rarely offer very much more money than the welfare check itself. In a pilot project in Cleveland, they are allowed to keep only enough to bring them up to the state’s welfare minimum.
They are encouraged to go to school and get training, but even after training, good jobs are scarce. Beverly Seagull, a Cleveland social worker, visits Mrs. Fanny Brooks, who has left a Title 5 job training program to care for her children. One thing I wanted to talk to you about today is the fact that you’ll be going off of the training program. And now that you’re going back on to ADC alone, it will be cut back, you know, to regular ADC, which will be $92 difference.
And that that’s quite a bit of difference. And it’s going to be difficult, I imagine, to get used to living on that type of budget again. Yes, it will be. But, uh, I would rather have a small amount and have peace and happiness and harmony in my home than have a lot than have a lot of difficulty and different problems. I didn’t choose this position that I’m in.
And I wouldn’t want my kids to do it for nothing in the world. I say today itself too late. the wise man did yesterday. All right. You want to try that one for us, Mr.
McQueen? Leroy McQueen, who is getting his high school diploma and hopes to go into computer work, is a welfare father on a training program. It’s a myth that the welfare roles are filled with able-bodied men. Less than 1% of those on welfare are capable of working. In 1962, realizing that ADC ignored men and tended to break up families, Congress passed the ADCU program, aid for the dependent children of the unemployed.
Mr. McQueen worked in a print shop for 7 years. One day, the shop went out of business. Mr. McQueen could not find another job.
Shortly after he went on welfare, Mr. McQueen’s wife died and he was faced with the prospect of raising his five children himself. The welfare department gave him a temporary professional homemaker. [Applause] Good. Rita, maybe you’ll have some more sometime, huh?
[Music] You still don’t want any water? A midday snack is water and jell-o. Now he remains on the welfare roles as he gets an education. He has the added burden of raising a family. Hi.
How you doing? He does the cooking and cleaning up himself. You guys know not too much noise in there. Not so much noise. Come on.
Eat. Gregory, Jay, Stevie, come on. Eat. [Music] [Music] Dinner is usually beans with some ham hawks and is in most welfare homes. No milk, almost all starches, little meat.
Sweet very much. You know that Mr. McQueen’s dilemma is compounded by the fact that he must find help for his children while he is at school or work. time. Take your time.
It’ll cool off. Mr. McQueen has many problems. We’re going to eat. Okay.
He lives for the day when he can earn enough so that his children have proper meals. The day when he can provide for his family adequately. When he can relax with some assurance about the future. How many roads must the man walk down? The electric guitar is in and out of the pawn shop, a reflection of Mr.
McQueen’s financial fortunes. And I already se [Music] before she sees in the sand. And how many times must those cannonballs be fired before they’re forever? Oh yeah. Let me tell you the answer.
It is going in the wind. Answer is gone in the world. Oh yeah. Let me tell you how many years [Music] exist before us to the sea. The answer is blowing.
You get your ticket. Go to bed. Come on, baby. You went to sleep. Yeah.
Huh? Yeah. Want to go to bed? Yeah. Lay down.
Today, Mr. McQueen does not go to school because the homemaker didn’t show up. His children play in the backyard. If I could get a housekeeper, this would help me more than anything else. Just someone to clean the house.
cooking I do generally most myself but even then well the right person cooking right I could stand that I think but u I think mostly what we need here is just the person to be in the house and help with the cleaning and uh getting the kids off to school you know now that I go to school myself and giving them their lunches and I could take over in the evenings in the past I was able to get you an emergency homemaker and this seems to be a very bad month they’re completely filled up but the woman says she that’s in charge of the referral says that she certainly will be having someone come out here as soon as possible. Uh, but I know that in the meantime, you can’t afford to miss any more school. I really want to finish school and get back to work. This is my most important objective. And um, I don’t know, it just seemed like it’s so far away.
You know, the more I look after it, the more it seems like it just gets farther away. And then problems come along and you can’t get a babysitter or a housekeeper when you need it. Like for instance, today I’m home all day today because I don’t have one. Hello. Hello, Mr.
McQueen. Hi, Mr. D. How are you doing? Okay.
How are you? Okay. What happened on the babysitter? Did you find anything? As far as I know, they still haven’t gotten anyone.
Uh, she told me that she’d keep trying and as soon as she would find one, she’d give me a call. Uh, where was the pants that the boys wear just about gone now and uh they have a lot of holes in them. and uh give me juice, too. I can’t promise anything because of course it has to be approved uh several times along the line, but I will give it a try. Of the 8 billion spent on welfare every year, less than half ever reaches welfare clients.
The welfare bureaucracy grinds extremely slowly. The total paperwork, the total number of approvals needed, the total number of departments a request has to go through takes an awful long time. The most frustrating thing that I run across and I feel is the reason why many social workers leave is the fact that there is a volume of paperwork to do. There’s a terrific bureaucratic structure through which every piece of paper must go through making processes very long and drawn out and there isn’t the time to do the case work that one would actually like to do. Also, it takes an awful long time for a caseworker to get to know the system, the welfare system, and to try and live within it and perhaps even beat it on occasion.
I think I’ I’d rather work with people that did have the basic necessities of life. It would make it much simpler. They could feel worthwhile if they were given enough money to live on. I think since uh ‘ 62 the emphasis has been on providing services rather than just becoming an agency that provides the dole or you know just the the money that’s needed. Eugene Burns is a welfare director of Kyhoga County which includes the city of Cleveland with services that we’re going into now with the emergency service that we we are providing I think which is big improvement over what it was before in addition to the regular casework services.
The emphasis on services not money for clients has led Cleveland women like Louise Gaston into the welfare rights movement. She wants more money for welfare clients so that welfare children can grow up without a sense of deprivation. Well, I tell them just because we’re on welfare, that doesn’t mean that we are uh down in the dust. We’re still people. They still aren’t fond of their father.
My daughter, she doesn’t care for him. But I try to teach her that after all that still is her father. He takes him nowhere. He doesn’t come to see him. He doesn’t support him.
Take that trash out. [Music] I am having proceedings now for our divorce. It’s been uh hectic. because I’ve had to raise them by myself. I haven’t had too much problem even though they are teenagers.
Pop off the table. Mrs. Gaston protests what she feels is the injustice of the American welfare system in not providing enough for families. But organizing against it is not easy. But organizing takes quite a bit out of you.
You’re tired. Sometimes you’re bitter. you get angry because people don’t seem like like you do. Uh especially when things are that you’re trying to push are for their benefit as well as yours. I’ve had women slam the door in my face and tell me, “Well, whatever you’re fighting for, if you get it, I’m going to get anyway.
So, what I’m going to fight for? What I’m going to knock on door for?” I mean, these things make you angry. Uh but you learn to look at them and and feel sorry for them. Cleveland women meet in Mrs.
Gaston’s home. The desire to change and improve the system has brought hundreds of Cleveland welfare recipients into welfare locals. The movement is a young one in Cleveland and nationally it’s about a year old. The experience of being in an organization is a new one for most of the women. Building a membership means gaining a strategy for organizing.
in our local meetings that I was under the impression and uh I was told that no one no one person have to join a local to get uh any kind of help or aid from the local. That’s what your group says. That’s right. You don’t have to. But all the other groups don’t see it like you feel cuz I brought it back to my group how you all felt.
remember that this was primarily the women believe that the first step in reforming the welfare system is for them to get adequate money. They do not feel they need rehabilitation by case workers who make continual investigations into their eligibility for welfare. They want enough money to raise their families. They want a chance at jobs which will pay them decently. They want a share in making the decisions which affect their lives.
$50 cut in their check and you’re going to tell them to give them you a dollar and you’ll see that that check is right. He said, “Yeah, if they want to get it raised or if they want their money back.” Now, this is this is what he said the National Coordinating Committee was supporting. And I I’m, you know, in thorough disagreement with that. I think we went over this ground before and I think we did agree that um in terms of Cleveland organizing that the denial of service wasn’t to take place if a person didn’t have their dues.
Yeah, that was the understanding I think we all had. Paul Younger is a Protestant minister who has worked with the poor for a decade. point is that we’re trying to get folks from all over the city into our locals and they’ll be coming to the food stamp Santa. Okay. We we trying to sign people up to join welfare rights locals and what’s been happening is people on welfare for years have really been dismissed and now we batting together to really get something going.
We have locals already set up and somebody will get in touch with you. I can’t run it. I have I print it. Okay, that’s fine. Yes, you can.
An interviewer from a local television station. Mrs. Palmer, today is your beginning of recruitment. Yes. Uh we’re out here to take uh recruit uh relief clients to take and join u our local uh union, welfare union all over the city.
Specifically, what is it you want in a property? We want to accomplish better relationships uh with the uh relief department and we want to take and get the things that the our workers tell us that we can’t have like household furnishings and uh clothing orders and car going back and forth to the hospital. Ladies want to sign up. Success in organizing is more than getting people to sign a piece of paper. It means creating an organization which can build effective pressure on welfare departments which can deliver economic benefits to its members.
And that means helping persons to receive their full welfare payments under the present laws. We’re trying to help you get some of the things that you’re eligible for getting in and the union will help you because we’re trying to get everybody to stick together. One person just don’t have to fight for itself. All us fight for each other. Welfare authorities in Washington disagree with the emphasis of welfare clients groups.
Washington believes that rehabilitation through employment training will solve welfare problems. How is this to be done? The head of the department of social and rehabilitation services is Mary Switzer. I think you have to have uh it organized. You have to find ways to take care of the children if the mother is reluctant to leave home with the children.
You have to have increased daycare facilities. And you have to begin in many ways uh at a different level than you did with a handicapped person who may have had some schooling even though they may have been out of the mainstream of life. I think you have to find the right kind of training with uh jobs at the end of it and I think all elements in the community have to be uh involved in this employment problem. We should encourage employment not only with the end result of getting people um not dependent upon public welfare or public assistance but to help them if there is a low welfare standard adequately to supplement it. And this has been one of the chief failures I think of the administration of public welfare in this country.
Um I think that it has been a great mistake to not allow and not to give the incentive to people to keep what they earn up to a point. Now obviously when they have a job that is going to be permanent and they are secure in it then of course you wouldn’t want them to be dependent on public welfare but until they reach that point what they earn they ought to be encouraged to earn in order to supplement welfare payments particularly where they’re inadequate but usually what happens is that if they earn a little uh they are penalized by having it taken out of their assistance payment so the incentive to work is not as great as it otherwise would be Miss Switzer puts her emphasis on the training programs and other services which will lead to the employment of welfare mothers able to welcome the welfare rights movement puts its emphasis on giving enough money to welfare clients to enable them to live decently. The form of the welfare grant is not considered as important as its size. Dr. George Wy is a key organizer of the welfare rights movement and we are finding across the country that there has been increasing discussion in high places of such things as the guaranteed annual income and other things that are supposed to be panaceas to solve the problems of the poor.
Well, welfare was supposed to be a panacea 30 years ago. And all of those people who are poor today know that those kinds of easy solutions did not work. The thing that every welfare recipient knows is that there are two or three basic issues. And the welfare rights movement is beginning to articulate those issues loudly and clearly. That is that the most basic issue for a welfare recipient is enough money to feed and clothe and hose the members of his family.
And very few people who are talking about a guaranteed annual income are talking about giving poor people amounts of money that would allow them to live in decency and with a sense of adequacy. And it is that that the welfare rights movement is going to have to bring across this country that we won’t have any guaranteed annual income or any family allowance or any other scheme that doesn’t provide people with at least the basic necessities of life for their families. And the second thing is that there must be a system of income distribution that gives to people the money that they are entitled to as a right. And you are entitled to your welfare as a right. That gives it to him with a sense of decency, a sense of dignity and respect.
That you needn’t be the subject of these investigations. This June, the National Coordinating Committee has organized and set up a campaign. A campaign with a very simple theme that every welfare recipient understands. And that is that welfare recipients are tired of waiting. We are tired of waiting for checks.
We are tired of waiting for the little pittance that people give out. But it is going to be a campaign to demand more money now. And so all over this country, welfare recipients will be organizing to go to the welfare department to present a very simple form outlining the most basic needs that they have for food, for clothing, for shelter, and to demand that the welfare department fill those needs now. Basic needs. Amen.
For children, [Applause] sleep in housing, [Applause] walking for our sisters and the little children. [Applause] On June 30th, welfare clients in Cleveland marched along with welfare recipients in 40 other cities. They sought to build pressure on local welfare departments to give more money to clients. More money. Up and down Ohio’s roads.
This is a history lesson. It tells you how you got where you are. And it ain’t nowhere. Okay. Up and down Ohio.
Up and down we go. [Music] The kids on ABC. How can they stay in line when welfare checks are smaller than 1959 up? [Music] We are walking for more money now and basic needs now. Our checks are too small to buy essential clothing and household items.
We call on county welfare to write a special orders to meet these needs now because our rent and utility allowance is too small to rent our families decent adequate housing or pay our utility bills. to call on the state welfare department to raise the standards for rent and utilities now because our children cannot live decently on 83 cents of a bare minimum of what it cost in December of 1965. This type of demonstration, an orderly, well-mannered demonstration that existed today brings out to the public and brings out to those public officials in Columbus that uh there is a real need and that something should be done and has to be done. And I think I hope that they’re successful. But as far as as staff, I as I mentioned, staff has an obligation.
We’re a service organization. We’re government employees. We have to serve the public. Our doors are open every day. Our staff is accountable for that type of service that is uh is mandated under the statute and we have to perform.
I This is my captain. I stepped down off that big turn. Well, we can get the case staff on immediately and just see, you know, who are eligible and what Gaston will come over here. G A N T W O D. Want a couple more over here?
The usual press coverage of demonstrations gets a different reaction from the welfare client and the welfare administrator. [Music] I want you two to hang on to this together as if you’re handing them. Well, I can’t hand I’ll only hand what I No, this is all of for all of it. You’re representing all of them for the moment. We got other pictures if that’s all right with the rest of you.
I’m sure it’s all right. Is it Is it okay? They’re all smiling, so it must be all right. Get in fairly close. You smile a little bit.
Smile. Smile. And I want you to grab a hold of them, too. Look at her. Don’t look at me.
Don’t look at her. Don’t put it in front of my face, though. Closer together, please. That’s it. I can smile a little.
Look right up. All right. Oh, that’s a give him a good smile. All right. Your picture being a paper.
You want to smile? Listen. I’m serious. I mean, this is no plane, man. This is serious.
We’re serious, too. I just think it makes sense. Thank you. All right. Anyone else like their picture taken?
Huh? All right. Turn up. Please convey to the group my appreciation for their demonstration and the manner in which they conducted. Thanks again.
Come back again. Oh, I’m tired. I want to take a bath and go to bed. Complaints were filed and hearings conducted throughout the summer of 1967 to bring welfare payments up to the highest possible level. At the end of the summer, welfare mothers from across the country met in Washington for the first national convention of the organized poor in the 60s.
We need money, Lord. on my [Music] money. A bill had passed the House of Representatives which would freeze the welfare roles at a 1967 level, would increase employment training in other services, and would compel women with children to leave their homes to work under threat that their assistance would be cut off. They came to lobby, but less than half a dozen officials consented to see them. and they won’t meet with us and talk to us about our problems.
They locked the doors. They locked the doors when we came up here on the steps, but it’s our building. George Wy was one of the speakers. Dick Gregory was another speaker. We’d like to say thank you very much because what you’re doing here today, unborn babies will be grateful for.
We want to put the Senate and Congress on notice that we are here today and we’re not mad. We just tired. [Applause] But I hope they don’t make the same mistake they made with the freedom movement. Come in there. We came here four years ago with the freedom movement.
We weren’t mad. We were just tired. Today, the freedom movement could not come back because we’re not tired. We mad now. [Applause] Final word.
Give me back what you stole from me. You don’t have to talk to me. I mean what I say. People say to me, “Is it just words?” No, babe.
It ain’t words in me. I mean what I say. I got seven children. I got two sons. All they can see is the Vietnam War.
But my son say, “I won’t go.” I said, “Praise be your name, child. You ain’t going no damn place.” And we spreading the word. You know what Rescuers is doing?
I tell you what they doing. We know we need a new welfare system. We going to control that system. We don’t need them people telling me what I need, what I should do, where I should go, how I should act. I’m going to act like me.
The doors of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare were locked. They could not gain entrance. [Music] I wish I had some some gas. I wish I had some tear gas. I wish I had some tear gas.
Lock them in. Wait a minute. Lock them in. Lock them in. Where the signs at?
They did get into a few congressional offices, but at least in one instance, the reception was somewhat less than friendly. What we got to have, we going to tell him. He’s not going to tell us. And today, they really are under the wrong impression about this whole thing. They think it’s a black power thing, but it’s not a black power.
What the hell you mean? You’re black and a black power advocate tried to capitalize on the dilemma of welfare recipients. Doesn’t matter whether it’s black or white damn we are just as many white people it doesn’t make any difference whe you know what poverty only thing I’m worried about is my welfare check being cut off and I don’t want it and I don’t want if I decide to have another child I don’t want them to take my child away [Applause] poverty destroys hope it breeds crime and revolution it is perpetuated under a welfare system conceived in and for the depression that does not work today. This is the only western country that degrades the poor in the way it gives welfare aid. In most others, the state provides a family allowance that amounts to an income floor below which no one can fall.
An adequate guaranteed minimum income would help to destroy the welfare cycle. It could be given in such a way that families would not be broken up, breadwinners would not be penalized for working. And that’s the battlecry of the welfare revolt. Although it’s in simpler words, more money now. But what the welfare mothers desperately want is a chance in life for themselves and even more for their children.
I ain’t going to come back to this
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