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Review
| Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty, by Annelise Orleck. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 368 pages. $29.95, cloth.
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| During the Reagan Administration the government and press vilified poor black women as Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" who took public funds to support lavish lifestyles. In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck counters this stereotype with the remarkable story of six poor black mothers in Las Vegas, Nevada who, with their neighbors and allies, transcended poverty and racism to shape a powerful grassroots welfare rights movement. This history of the antipoverty movement in Nevada captures the point of view of Ruby Duncan, Mary Wesley, Alversa Beals, Essie Henderson, Emma Stampley, and Rosie Seals. Their story is both highly personal and emblematic of a generation. |
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A surge of African-Americans migrated to Las Vegas from the South during the 1950s seeking work in the casinos and federal defense plants. They were segregated in the tumbledown shacks of the Westside neighborhood. Many of them had eft the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta only to find physically exhausting jobs as maids and dishwashers in casinos and hotels. Eventually, worn down by job-related injuries, some wound up dependent on welfare for the support of themselves and their children. The conservative Nevada state government then decided to reduce welfare benefits by two-thirds and this affected 7,500 women and children. The mothers, however, had learned the knack of organizing through their experience with the powerful Hotel and Culinary Workers Union, and by the late 1960s, organizers for the National Welfare Rights Organization had also arrived in Las Vegas. Buoyed by these two influences, Las Vegas welfare mothers challenged the anti-welfare movement, beginning with a sit-in at the state Welfare department in 1969. In early 1971 this led to "Operation Nevada"—a series of civil disobedience actions highlighted by 1,500 people marching down the Las Vegas Strip and into the glittering casino of Caesar's Palace. Shocked by the singing and chanting mothers and children, Caesar's Palace in an unprecedented move suspended gambling for half an hour and other casinos also briefly closed their doors. Working with such allies as Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Ralph Abernathy and Dave Dellinger, the marchers gained national press attention and later that month a federal judge reversed the welfare cutbacks. Subsequently the welfare mothers organized an "eat in" with their children at casino buffets to advocate for food stamps, and a "read in" at a segregated library. |
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But colorful public protest was just one strategy. The welfare activists also followed two other paths in their quest for social change. First, they became involved in electoral politics, with three of them winning election to the county Democratic convention. And second, led by Ruby Duncan, a hotel maid and mother of seven children, they founded a nonprofit community development and antipoverty organization named "Operation Life" in 1972. For the next twenty years, Operation Life won millions of dollars in government funding to establish health clinics, a children's center, job training, and a neighborhood library with the largest collection of books on African-American life in the state. Ruby Duncan became a symbol of welfare rights activism, and was invited by President Jimmy Carter to visit the White House in 1977 and to advise him on jobs programs. She was also consulted by Ted Kennedy on healthcare reform and contributed to U.S. Women's Bureau discussions on how to bring women into the male-dominated trades. |
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Storming Caesars Palace uses archival and government records to supplement the extensive oral interviews Orleck conducted over a twelve-year period with welfare activists, politicians, and people connected with the antipoverty movement in Nevada. The history of race and desegregation of Las Vegas—which had been a Jim Crow town where African-Americans entertained at hotels which would not admit them as guests until the late 1950s—is told as a fascinating background to the larger story of the welfare rights movement. Orleck convincingly demonstrates the power of the movement of poor women for social justice, characterizing the Las Vegas activists as "poster women for a new model of welfare reform—from the bottom up." (p. 3). This book is an important contribution to the understanding of poverty, race, and social welfare in twentieth century United States, and will be especially of use to scholars of social and political history, and to university students studying U.S. history, women's and gender studies, and African-American Studies. Not least, it is an excellent corrective to the cliches still too often offered in the political arena about the nature of poor people and government aid. |
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| Roosevelt University |
Lynn Y. Weiner |
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