NET Journal; 158; The Welfare Revolt

[beep] [tone] [Man's voice, NET, Welfare Revolt, take one. [silence] [opening music] [announcer] The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. [sirens] [Host] This boy and 8 million other Americans are on

welfare. For him, like the others, the welfare check means food, shelter, and a sort of security. The present framework of welfare laws was enacted thirty two years ago under President Roosevelt. He described the long term dependence on relief as "a narcotic, subtle destroyer of the human spirit." Today these children and four million more probably will grow up on welfare. What will that narcotic to do him, to his spirit? Three and a half million on relief are old or disabled or blind. Less than one percent are men capable of work who cannot find jobs. The great majority of welfare families are those who subsist, and just barely, under the program called

Aid for Dependent Children. More than half live in the slums of northern cities. Many of them are migrants from Appalachia and the farms of the deep south. A total of eight million people on welfare, a cost of eight billion dollars and more every year. [music] [more music] [music continues] [music continues, ends] Welfare mothers and the children too, feel that they are on a dead end street.

With 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. [Etta Horne] 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. [Host] Mrs. Etta Horne is a leader of the welfare rights movement. Their principal and their overwhelming complaint is that there is simply not enough money to raise a family and then that it is given in a self defeating and self perpetuating way, that it degrades the people who receive it. [Horne] I have children I look at my kids and I think "am I really going to prove to them where it starts at," you know always they're always screaming about delinquents, America welfare department makes delinquents. [Martin Luther King, Jr.] There is an

evil system around. [Host] Martin Luther King believes that welfare is part of that system, damaging to black and white alike. [MLK] Will not get right until this evil system gets removed because as I have listened and as I have looked and as I have lived in the ghetto, I have 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 scars. 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] [Host] Maria

Ortiz and her children: Hilda, Juanita, Antonio, Pedro, in their New York apartment. [music] Mrs. Ortiz gets her welfare check under the Aid for Dependent Children program. It comes to about one hundred and seventeen dollars every two weeks, about three thousand dollars a year. Not enough to pay the rent, feed and clothe the kids, and provide a diet that a doctor has told Mrs. Ortiz that she needs. Another child is on the way. But the father of her children has deserted her. 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. [speaking in Spanish]

[sound] [speaking in Spanish] [Spanish] [child sounds] 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 a fifth on the way is

probably beyond the point of marriage. The men she meets rarely earn more than eighty dollars 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 twenty she may already be permanently consigned to the welfare rolls. [music] The problems of the Ortizes are similar to those of welfare families in other cities, Los Angeles, Denver, Chicago, Detroit. [Jane Wilson] I have never received my check on time. They say they put them out, but now yesterday, it was supposed to be here yesterday, then

it didn't arrive, and I'm waiting today for it. Now two weeks ago it was supposed to have been on a Friday, so it didn't arrive, I sat waiting Saturday until the mailman went by, still no check, so I called down there for an emergency order, like they told me to. There is no such thing as an emergency order on a weekend, so in other words my children went without food from Friday afternoon, Saturday, Sunday, until Monday afternoon at 2 o'clock. [Host] Mrs. Jane Wilson is a Detroit welfare mother. The premise the ADC program it's simple: the 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. [Wilson] Well my husband left me in September and then I went down to the emergency shelter welfare shelter and then I had to go through through the welfare, fill out all these papers, drag all five

kids on the bus, go down there, sit there and wait for three, four 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, like 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 wintertime. 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 do you know what? And when I went down there they gave me the coats and boots, sure after you get down on your hands and knees and 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. [Host] Breakfast in the home of Carole

King, a Cleveland welfare mother with nine children. On the days before the welfare check arrives, there is half an orange for each child. 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 three fourths of the amount that the state welfare department felt was a minimum necessity in 1959. The rise of ADC recipients in the last six years has been particularly dramatic among negro families in the northern ghettoes. Giving aid only when the husband is absent pushes the man out of his 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 up is a food stamp center in the heart of Hough, Cleveland's negro ghetto. She pays a hundred and ten dollars for a hundred and fifty eight dollars 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. [Mrs. King] We are bitter because we are faced with trying to raise children without money. People on welfare, if they had money, enough to at least exist on, I'm

not saying, because I don't have a college diploma, that I should have, you know, three hundred dollars a week but I'm saying that people on welfare have a right to a decent living and in a rich country like America and you know, we can always you know send charity overseas and that you know for years you know we've been in poverty as a country and that our concern with your country that you know gets concerned with hunger and India is not concerned with hunger in the United States. They talk about planning for a future, you have to first have something to plan with. You don't plan a meal unless you got something to eat, and you don't plan a future unless you have something to plan with. And this is what you know society is gonna have to face, they talk about the future of America. Our kids are part of their future society. You know, and to deprive them from the time they are babies, now they say, you

know, work for a sixteen year old that's crazy. Sixteen year old, you know, it's too late. [Host] 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 Hough. They can see the results of violence, even murder around their own homes. And they must learn to live with it. [Male speaker 1] Hate to see these second generations of welfares coming up. And one of the things that I think is more more crucial to the youth that's in the ghetto, because most of the youth is coming up, they're ashamed to tell their buddies, you know "oh yeah, we on welfare, we gettin' ADC or food stamps and things like this here." [Male speaker 2] Everybody in my whole neighborhood was on relief, we used to run around and kid around about it. Because everybody in my whole neighborhood was on relief,

but I was ashamed to go out of my neighborhood and tell somebody that I was on ADC. Yeah, ashamed. [Female speaker 1] 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 or to the movies, they don't want to go to school. So it starts when the child is small. They recognize that they don't have 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 are different. And not only that, you go to the public schools, many times the teachers will make you know you're different. [chalkboard sounds]

[Female speaker 2] Welfare children will have-- not angel about it, white shirts or ties and things, if a mother goes out like I do, I'll buy my child a use-knit sweater and van Loren sweaters and all that, but he went in with his pants, but on Friday he got to wear a shirt and a tie. And I just don't have it, they have to send my child home twice, you know, last year for not being dressed in a tie. And I mean, it made me real mad so I called the principal and told him "look my child ain't got no shirt and tie, so now if you you want him to have one, you buy him one." [school sounds] [Host] 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. [Female speaker 2] The teacher would tell everybody

the kids about him being on welfare, and he didn't want nobody to know he was on welfare. And the lunch card they give him, it's only a special lunch that he gets for welfare children and it's not enough, they don't get no kind of dessert with it, or ice cream, I always have to give him more money to go with it. [male speaker] They ain't gonna give but a handful of crumbs to a mother, what do you think a young teenager is gonna do, why do you think they're standing on Hough you know, because when it gets dark they have to go out here and survive. [music] [more music] [music]

[music continues] [Host] This is survival and escape in Hough. Music, movement, and this moment. But in the morning, no job that will pay a living wage. [music] [music] [music continues] [music] [more music] [Host] And it begins again.

Brenda is nineteen, 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. [Brenda] I mean, I would have married him, you know, for -- while I was carrying the baby but he didn't have no job and couldn't support us, so it didn't make sense to get married. So I said wait. I plan on marrying him next year, no sooner than next year. Have to give him time to work first. I mean what's the sense of marrying somebody if he can't support you? 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'll marry him. And I think he's able to take care too. [Host] 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 D.C. is a high school for pregnant girls. A psychotherapy session is a weekly part of the curriculum. [Female speaker 3] Afterwards 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 poeple, and that I

was going to be an outcast, but when I came into Webster, it seems that I have more more to, say, people on my side and more attention going towards my way, and with the help of Ms. Gill and with the help of some of my good friends here I'm seem to be making it and all. [Female speaker 5] Being here with these girls you know they are closer to you, I think that all of us are closer together than girls that have not been pregnant, because they all have their opinions and they can easily say things, but we have, you know, we're all going through the experience. [Host] Mrs. Patricia Schiller is a clinical psychologist. She directs the conversation toward future plans and prospects. [Female speaker 6] Well, I've got a job, I'm going for an interview today and I applied for support from the father in the court. And it should be coming through

by the time I get back in school in September. [Female speaker 7] For a long time I was under the firm belief that no one really has any excuse of being on public assistance but when I-- when my grandparents and my father found out I was pregnant, 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 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 in 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 twelfth 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. [Mrs. Fabola Gill] 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-- [Host] Mrs. Fabola Gill is the school's principal. [Gill] And there doesn't seem to be any way out of it for me, she is likely to have another out of wedlock child, and as the babies continue coming she gets farther and farther down into her state of depression. [Jeanette Salters] Many of our young girls would like to work and they have tried, they really have tried to support their families the system and everything else just tears them down and eventually they just become satisfied with welfare, they don't try anymore because they see there's no sense of trying until the whole system's changed. [Host] Jeanette Salters, a welfare mother, works in head start and receives a small settlement to her check. [Salters] People talk about ADC mothers don't want anything, they're not ever going to get anything, it's the same feeling they have, they have tried and they want jobs but nobody is going to give them a job, and the first thing they how are you is are you on ADC, and you don't have any experience, and how can you have experience when you're just coming out of school, and nobody's going to try to

give 'em a chance. And I began to believe, and most of the parents said people want you on ADC, they like you there. They can control you on ADC. And a lot of them just feel that I might as well sit here and get what I can, and they do have to cheat and lie and steal to try to beat the system. Try to just survive, not really live, most of them are just surviving. [Host] Welfare departments claim that they want to encourage marriage and thus get women off the welfare rolls, but the investigation of a woman's eligibility for ADC discourages the beginning of any relationship with a man and marriage. [Female speaker 8] If he's someone who isn't-- who is sincerely interested in you, you would like perhaps to invite him to dinner, 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 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 claim you're not feeding him out of your funds then their answer will be "then he's giving you money". [Speaker 9] And she said "Oh, 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 I said "I still don't see what that have anything to do with me with a boyfriend" and she said "you'll have to get rid of him or 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 said "look, you're gonna tell me here I am, 37 years old, at that time, and I had been married got 5 kids here in the home, and had been married to this one man for 16 years and you're gonna tell me I can't have a boyfriend?". And so she says "well we doesn't allow the ADC with boyfriend." And I couldn't understand that. So she left. And when she left

well then she come back to tell me that my case was denied, this is what happens, she come back to tell me that they denied me and I could not get aid. [Female speaker 10] If a man marries you that he should take on the initiative of supporting your family and you know to tell a man that makes, you know, a hundred and twenty five or a hundred thirty five dollars a week, that he should accept me and nine kids and support us is crazy. Because you know, this, realistically I would feel that if I married a man in this position that you know it wouldn't take maybe six months, if it took that long, he would begin to resent my kids, he would hate me, he would beat me and scream at the kids, he start beating the kids, out of frustration, and maybe it 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 a pair of shoes on his feet and proper food for himself, for kids that he wasn't responsible for, and this is, you know, thinking realistically. [children singing] [Host] In Cleveland and elsewhere very little economic incentive exists

for women to get off welfare. [Female speaker 11] They would like for you to go out and go to work, or even to seek part-time employment. But if you do this, most of what you make is taken away from you. [Host] They receive only a small part of the extra income if they work. 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 Segal, a Cleveland social worker, visits Mrs. Fanny Brooks, who has left a Title 5 job training program to care for her children. [Beverly Segal] 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 onto ADC alone it will be cut back to regular ADC, which will be a $92 dollar difference and 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. [Fanny Brooks] Yes, it will be but I would rather have a small amount and have peace and happiness and harmony in my home, than to have a lot and have a lot of difficulty. 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. [Instructor] Wise man did yesterday. Alright, you want to try that for us, Mr. McQueen? [Host] 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 rolls are filled with able bodied men. Less than one percent of those on welfare are capable of working. In 1962, realizing that ADC ignored man 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 seven 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 by himself. The welfare department gave him a temporary professional homemaker. A midday snack is water and Jell-o. Now he remains on the welfare rolls as he gets an education. He has the added burden of raising a family. He does the cooking and cleaning up himself.

[calling kids for dinner] Dinner is usually beans with some ham hocks and as in most welfare homes, no milk. Almost all starches, little meat. Mr. McQueen's dilemma is compounded by the fact that he must find help for his children while he is at school or at work. [talking to baby] Mr. McQueen has many problems. He lives for the day

when he can earn enough so that his children have proper meals. A day when he can provide for his family adequately, when he can relax with some assurance about the future. [music] The electric guitar is in and out of the pawn shop, a reflection of Mr. McQueen's financial fortunes. [music] [singing] [singing continues] [singing]

[music] [bedtime sounds] [noise] [children sounds] Today Mr. McQueen does not go to school because the homemaker didn't show up. His children play in the backyard. [Leroy McQueen] If I could get a house, this would help me more than anything else, just someone to clean the house, cooking I do generally most myself, but even then

with the right person cooking, right? I could stand that, I think. But I think mostly what we need here is just a person to be in the house and help with the cleaning and getting the kids off to school, you know, now that I go to school myself, and give them their lunches, and I could take over in the evenings. [Segal] 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 said she that's in charge of referrals says she certainly will be having someone come out here as soon as possible but I know that in the meantime you can't afford to miss any more school. [McQueen] I really want to finish school and get back to work, this is my most important objective. And and that just seems like it's so far away. The more I look after it, the more it seems like it just gets farther away and then problems come along 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. [Segal] Hello, Mr. McQueen. [McQueen] Hi Ms. Segal, how you doing? [Segal] Okay, how are you? [McQueen] What happened with the babysitter, you find anything? [Segal] As far as I know they still haven't gotten any

one. She told me that she'd keep trying and as soon as she'd find one, she'd call. [McQueen] What about the school? The pants that the boys wear are just about gone, they got a lot of holes in them, and the kids need shoes. [Segal] I can't promise anything because of course it has to be approved several times along the line, but I will give them a try. [Host] Of the 8 billion dollars spent on welfare every year, less than half ever reaches welfare clients. [Segal] The welfare beaurocracy grinds extremely slowly. The total paperwork, the total number of approvals needed, the total number of departments that 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 leaves, is the fact that there is a volume of paperwork to do, there's a terrific beaurocratic 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 casework that one would actually like to do. [office sounds] 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'd rather work with people that did have the basic necessities of life, it would make it simpler, they could feel worthwhile if they were given enough money to live on. [Eugene Burns] I think since '62 the emphasis has been on providing service rather than just becoming an agency that provides the dole, or just the money that's needed. [Host] Eugene Burns is the welfare director of Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland. [Burns] Which services are we going into now.

With the emergency service that we are providing, I think which is a big improvement over what it was before. In addition to the regular caseworker services. [Host] The emphasis on services, money for clients, has left 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 the sense of deprivation. [music] [Gaston] I feel that just because we are on welfare doesn't mean that we are down in the dumps, we're still people. They still are fond of their father, my daughter, she doesn't care for him, but I try to teach her that after all he is her father. He takes the welfare he doesn't come to see them, he doesn't support them. I am having proceedings filed for divorce. It's been hectic trying to raise them all by myself

but I haven't had too much problems, even though they are teenagers. [Host] 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. [Gaston] Organizing takes quite a bit out of you. You tired, sometimes you're bitter, you get out of it because people don't seem to like what you do, 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 it anyways, so what am I going to fight for? What am I going to knock on a door for?" I mean these things make me angry, but you learn to look at them and feel sorry for them. [Host] 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. [Female speaker 12] I was under the impression, and I was told that no one, no one person have to join a local to get any kind of help, of aid, from the local. That's right, you don't have to. [Other women] But all the other groups don't see it, and I've brought it back to my group, like "how you all feel about this?"

[Host] 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 caseworkers who make continual investigations into their eligibility for welfare. They want enough money to raise their families. They want a chance of jobs which will pay them decently. They want to share in making the decisions which affect their lives. [Female speaker 13] A 50 dollar cut in their check and you gonna tell them to give you a dollar, and you'll see that the check is right-- he say "yeah, if they want to get erased, or if they want to get their money back." This is what he said the National Coordinating Committee was supporting, and I'm in thorough disagreement with. [Paul Younger] I think we went over this ground before, and I I think we did agree that in terms of Cleveland organizing that the denial of service wasn't to take place if a person didn't have their dues, that was the understanding I think we all had. [Host] Paul Younger is a protestant minister who has worked with the poor

for a decade. [Younger] The point is that we are trying to get folks from all over the city into our locals, and they'll be coming to the foodstamps. [Female speaker 14] We're trying to sign people up for their welfare rights. [Host] An interviewer from the local television station. [Interviewing for TV] [Female speaker] We want to accomplish better relationships with the relief department and we want to get the things that our workers tell us we can't have, like household furnishings, and clothing orders, and cars for going back and forth to the hospital.

[Host] 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 law. [campaigning outside] 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. [Switzer] I think you have to have it organized, you have to find ways

to take care of the children if the mothers is reluctant to leave home with the children, you have to have increased daycare facilities and you have to begin in many ways 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 the jobs at the end of it, and I think all elements in the community have to be involved in this employment problem. We should encourage employment not only with the end result of getting people not dependent upon public welfare, 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. 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 are inadequate. But usually what happens is that if they earn a little, they are penalized by having it taken out of their assistance payment so the incentive to work is not quite as great as it otherwise would be. [Host] Ms. Switzer puts her emphasis on the training programs and other services which will lead to the employment of welfare mothers. 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 Riley is a key organizer of the welfare rights movement. [George Riley] We're 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 a panaceas to solve the problems of the poor. Well welfare was supposed to be a panacea thirty years ago and all 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 welfare recipient is enough money to feed and clothe and house 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 in that with the welfare rights movement is going to have to bring across to 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. The second thing is that there must be a system of income distribution that gives to people the money that they're entitled to as a right, and you are entitled to your welfare as a right, it give it to them 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: 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 -- [singing] [singing] [Host] On June 30th welfare clients in Cleveland marched Along with welfare recipients in forty other cities. They sought to build pressure on local welfare departments to give more money to clients. [chanting] [overlapping talking, singing]

[singing] [Female speaker 14] We are walking for more money now, and basic needs now. Our checks are too small to buy suitable clothing and household items. We call on the county welfare to write us 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. We call on the state welfare departments to raise their standards for rent and utilities now

because our children cannot live decently on 83 cents of a bare minimum of what it costs in December of 1965. [Male speaker] This type of demonstration, an orderly, well-mannered, demonstration that was existed today brings out to the public, brings out to those public officials in Columbus, that there is a real need and that something should be done and has to be done, and I hope that they're successful. But as far as staff, 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 accountable for that type of service that is mandated by the statue that we have to work. [overlapping voices] [overlapping speech]

[Host] The usual press coverage of demonstrations pits a different reaction for the welfare client and the welfare administrator. [overlapping speech] [overlapping speech] [more overlapping speech] [overlapping speech continues]

[general talking] [Host] Complaints were filed and hearings conducted throughout the summer of 1967 to bring welfare payments up to the highest possible level. [music] [guitar music] [music] At the end of the summer, wefare mothers from across the country met in Washington for the first national convention of the organized poor in the sixties. [guitar music] [music continues]

A bill have passed the house of representatives which would freeze the welfare rolls at the 1967 level, would increase employment training and 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 condescended to see them. [protesting] George Wiley was one of the speakers. Dick Gregory was another speaker. [George Wiley speaking] [cheering]

[Female speaker 15] [Continues] [Protesters continue] [continued protest] [Female speaker 15 continues] [Host] The doors of the department of Health, Education, and Welfare were locked. They could not gain entrance. [protesters] [protesting] They did get into a few congressional offices, but at least in one instance the reception was somewhat less than friendly. [protesting]

[protesting, yelling] A black power advocate tried to capitalize on the dilemma of welfare recipients. [yelling] [baby sounds] Poverty destroys hope. It breeds crime and revolution. It has 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 a battle cry of the welfare revolt, although it's in simple word, "more money now." But what the welfare mothers desperately want is a chance in life for themselves and even more for their children. [music] [more music] [music] [funky music] [music continues]

[music keeps going] This has been NET Journal, a weekly look at the events, issues, and people of the world today. National Educational Television Network.