| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jennifer Frost. "An Interracial Movement of the Poor": Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s. New York: New York University Press. 2001. Pp. xi, 257. $35.00.

Jennifer Frost has provided a coherent examination of the role of American women during the poor people's movement of the 1960s. Mining a variety of sources, Frost incorporated private diaries, and personal interviews as well as manuscript collections to make her case. Frost investigated community organizers at the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), a grass-roots organizing program, with major offices in Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Newark, Baltimore, Trenton, and Philadelphia. ERAP challenged the previous reliance on the working class, focusing instead on a vision of "an interracial movement of the poor" to attack racial inequality. The agency's mission was to collaborate with the civil rights movements and voice "problems with welfare, housing, urban renewal, children's welfare, police brutality, as well as jobs" (p. 96). 1

The author incisively argues that ERAP encouraged women to become organizers. For many, being a community organizer was better than the likelihood of a future of low-paying jobs. Since females were the most active constituency, it was not long before they helped shape the culture of ERAP, adding a maternal aspect that called for programs for children, food, clothing, and health care. Accordingly, ERAP staff provided babysitters for female activists when they held rallies. Women were closely associated with programs such as Head Start and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), and in Chicago they established a program in which girls went door-to-door testing children for lead poisoning. . . .

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