COLUMBIA JOURNAL 
OF RACE AND LAW 

 

VOL. 15 May 2025 NO. 1 
 

ARTICLE 

When the Executive Accidentally Supported the Movement: 

Participatory Democracy and the Rise of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex 

Michael Haber1 

 

ABSTRACT 

The critique of the non-profit industrial complex has spread from movement groups and 

movement-aligned scholars in fields like race, gender, and ethnic studies to influence scholars in 

other fields, including legal scholars. Despite this growing influence, studies of the non-profit 

industrial complex devote almost no attention to the importance of the Community Action Program 

(“CAP”), part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to its development. When CAP was 

created, the Johnson Administration sought to capitalize on the rhetoric of “participatory 

democracy” at a moment when that phrase had great cultural cachet but a deeply ambiguous 

meaning. The implementation of CAP exposed a rift between the Administration’s expectations of 

limited participation and the hopes of activists in many low-income communities of color, who had 

been inspired by a collectivist approach to participatory democracy, one that had grown out of 

John Dewey, the Christian pacifist movement, and the Highlander Folk School to be embraced by 

the civil rights movement of the early 1960s. As low-income communities of color began to utilize 

CAP as a tool to support grassroots efforts for social change, the Johnson Administration and 

Congress developed new restrictions on CAP to rein in what it accidentally unleashed without 

suffering the political costs of repealing one of the central components of the War on Poverty just 

months after it had launched. The tactics it developed—stripping funding, influencing board 

selection, new emphases on quantitative outcomes, reporting, and eligibility for services, and 

splitting funding for community organizing from funding for service provision—would become 

core tactics of the non-profit industrial complex. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 Assistant Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. The author wishes to thank Deborah Archer, Michelle Ewert, 

Rebecca Robichaud, and Anita Sinha from the 2024 Clinical Law Review Writers’ Workshop; Michael Menser, 

Omavi Shukur; Jocelyn Simonson, and Richard Winchester; Mengfei Leng and Eric Yap for research assistance; and 

Brooklyn Law School for summer research support. 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1286 
 

Introduction 1287 

I. Participatory Democracy and Its Importance to 1960s Social Movements 1289 

II. The Creation of the Community Action Program 1298 

III. Two Ideas of Participatory Democracy Collide 1306 

IV. The Johnson Administration Tries to Take Back Control Through a Series 

of Tools that Became the Blueprint for the Non-Profit Industrial Complex 1309 

Conclusion 1313 



1287 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

Introduction 

 

Arguments that philanthropy can work against social change are not new.2 But when social 

movement groups, community organizations, and race, gender, and ethnic studies scholars began 

to criticize what they named the “non-profit industrial complex” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, 

they made a more specific claim.3 They argued that in recent decades, government and private 

funders developed a set of techniques to manage dissent, focusing movement energy on service 

provision and opportunities for professional non-profit sector careers, pushing groups toward more 

modest or mainstream social or political goals, and encouraging movement groups to conduct their 

work through well-defined non-profit business entities, rather than as messy, decentralized 

movements.4 This critique largely grew out of social movements, but has been analyzed and further 

developed by movement-aligned scholars in varied fields, including in legal scholarship.5 

This intervention has influenced social movement scholars, movement groups, and some non- 

profit leaders,6 but studies of the non-profit industrial complex have been quite vague about how 
 

2 See, e.g., KARL MARX & FRIEDRICH ENGELS, MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY 76 (S. Moore, trans., 

2008) (1848) (criticizing “philanthropists, humanitarians… [and] organisers of charity” who take small steps to help 

the poor, but only “in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society”). 
3 See Soniya Munshi & Craig Willse, Foreword to THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON- 

PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX xiii, xiii (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence ed., 2d ed. 2017) (describing the 

coalition of activists, organizers, service providers, scholars, and others involved developing and spreading the critique 

to increasingly academic audiences following the 2000 Color of Violence conference); Andrea Smith, Preface to THE 

REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX ix, ix (INCITE! Women of 

Color Against Violence ed., 2d ed. 2017) (noting that the critique had been around “for years” before the publication 

of the first publication of this anthology in 2007). Many of these scholars and activists acknowledge that some came 

to similar conclusions much earlier, and the work of Robert Allen is often cited as a significant early theorist of parts 

of their critique. See generally ROBERT L. ALLEN, BLACK AWAKENING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA (Africa World Press 

ed. 1990). 
4 INCITE!, BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, https://incite-national.org/beyond-the-non-profit- 

industrial-complex/. 
5 Munshi & Willse, supra note 3, at xiii. For leading studies on the non-profit industrial complex from scholars 

of race, gender, and ethnic studies, see, e.g., ALLEN, supra note 3; Dylan Rodríguez, The Political Logic of the Non- 

Profit Industrial Complex, in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL 

COMPLEX 21, 37 (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence ed., 2007); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, In the Shadow of 

the Shadow State, in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 41, 

47 (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence ed., 2d ed. 2017). For examples of the growing influence of these 

arguments within legal scholarship, see, e.g., Sameer Ashar & Catherine L. Fisk, Democratic Norms and Governance 

Experimentalism in Worker Centers, 82 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 141, 145-48 (2019); Megan Ming Francis, The 

Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture, 53 LAW & SOC’Y REV. 275, 298 (2019); 

Leah Goodridge, Professionalism as a Racial Construct, 69 UCLA L. REV. DISCOURSE 38, 44 (2022); Michael Haber, 

The New Activist Non-Profits: Four Models Breaking from the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, 73 U. MIAMI L. REV. 

863, 871-73 (2019); Veryl Pow, Grassroots Movement Lawyering: Insights from the George Floyd Rebellion, 69 

UCLA L. REV. 80, 91-92 (2022); Dean Spade, Keynote Address, 19 COLUM. J. GEND. & L. 1086, 1097-1107 (2010). 
6 See, e.g., Nicole Wires, Making Economic Democracy Work: How to Practice Shared Leadership, NONPROFIT 

QUARTERLY (Nov. 28, 2023), https://nonprofitquarterly.org/making-economic-democracy-work-how-to-practice- 

shared-leadership/ (describing the Nonprofit Democracy Network, a community of practice made of people from 90 

nonprofit groups working to create “participatory self-governance” and work outside of the non-profit industrial 

complex). For a revealing personal narrative from the perspective of a leader of a large legal non-profit on this topic, 

see Justine Olderman, In Defense of Social Justice Upheaval, VITAL CITY (Mar. 5, 2025), 

https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/in-defense-of-social-justice-upheaval-at-nonprofits. Olderman describes how 

she and other executive directors complained about the “new generation of racial and social justice advocates” joining 

their staffs “so often that [their complaints] became almost cliché – the absence of nuance, the rejection of 

incrementalism, the denial of progress, the prioritization of self-care, the refusal to grant grace, the unrealistic 

http://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/in-defense-of-social-justice-upheaval-at-nonprofits


2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1288 
 

 

and when this system developed. Perhaps because the non-profit industrial complex has long been 

associated with—and in many ways enforced by—funding from private foundations, scholars have 

tended to point generally to major foundations, especially the Ford Foundation, as the force behind 

the non-profit industrial complex, but their analyses tend to offer little historical detail.7 

This article argues that the non-profit industrial complex was substantially advanced by the 

Johnson Administration and its Office of Economic Opportunity through the War on Poverty’s 

Community Action Program (“CAP”), part of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. CAP was a 

short-lived program that included a significant element of community-based participatory 

democracy as a central feature of how certain anti-poverty programs would be developed. Upon 

its creation, the program exposed a huge rift between the urban policy “experts” advising the 

Administration and the demands and priorities of low-income communities of color, especially 

those politicized during the early 1960s civil rights movement. The Johnson Administration, 

seeking to minimize the controversy without seeming to abandon one of its signature initiatives, 
 

expectations, the demand for decision-making power and so on.” Id. But after a long time not taking their concerns 

seriously, she was convinced to take a new approach: 

I tried to listen, understand and learn from them…And while it didn’t happen overnight, somewhere 

along the way, what I heard radicalized me. Today, I find myself in agreement with our rebellious staff 

about a lot of things. I agree that a nuanced and incrementalist approach has not achieved the kind of 

transformation that the people we serve need and deserve. I agree that our progress has often been co- 

opted by systems of oppression…I agree that we must grapple with systemic racism within our own 

organizations…I agree that the work is brutally hard and that we should make it as easy as possible for 

people to take care of themselves while doing it…And I agree that our staff members are the ones who 

are doing the work. They are our organizations. And they should have more of a voice in what we do 

and how we do it. Id. 
7 For instance, in Andrea Smith’s discussion of the “history of the non-profit system,” she notes that the Ford 

Foundation was founded in 1936, that it developed an “active involvement in trying to engineer social change,” and 

“became involved in the civil rights movement, often steering it into more conservative directions,” but she covers 

thirty years of history in just a few sentences, not specifying that Ford, according to Robert Allen’s more detailed 

narrative, did not even consider becoming involved with the civil rights movement until the summer of 1966, largely 

after the events described in Part III of this article. Compare Andrea Smith, Introduction: The Revolution Will Not Be 

Funded, in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 1, 5 (INCITE! 

Women of Color Against Violence ed., 2007) with ALLEN, supra note 3, at 70. Allen unfortunately does not address 

the origins of the non-profit industrial complex nor does he discuss the role of the Johnson Administration, as his 

focus is on the role of the Ford Foundation in the Black Power movement later in the 1960s. Id. Dylan Rodríguez 

presents a more detailed theoretical framework, but gives few historical specifics for his argument that the non-profit 

industrial complex was not just developed by foundations, but was “an authentic conspiracy of collaboration among 

philanthropists and state officials, including local police and federal administrators.” Rodríguez, supra note 5, at 34- 

35. 

One important exception is the work of Megan Ming Francis to excavate the relationship between the NAACP 

and the Garland Fund prior to Brown v. Board of Education. See generally Francis, supra note 5. Her analysis is 

revelatory, but chiefly addresses just one tactic associated with the non-profit industrial complex: the use of funding 

to influence the priorities of a leading movement organization. The high profile and complexity of the case of the 

NAACP—because the NAACP was already the most prominent national civil rights group during the time period she 

analyzes and because of the brilliance of NAACP leaders of that era like W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon 

Johnson—makes it something of an outlier to the critical intervention around the non-profit industrial complex, which 

largely is focused on small, grassroots movement efforts. John Witt argues that the relationship between the NAACP 

and the Garland Fund was not a one-way relationship, but a case of Garland “subtly redirect[ing] the NAACP” while 

the NAACP was simultaneously “coopting the Garland Fund…slyly chang[ing] the Garland Fund’s program.” Megan 

Ming Francis & John Fabian Witt, Movement Capture or Movement Strategy? A Critical Race Exchange on the 

Beginnings of Brown v. Board, 31 YALE J. L. & HUMAN. 520, 529 (2021). Most grassroots movement groups lack the 

resources and sophistication of the NAACP of that era and may be unable to effectively push back against these tactics 

in the kinds of ways Witt describes. 



1289 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

developed a set of tools to tightly control the grassroots groups that were awarded funding under 

the Economic Opportunity Act without unwinding CAP entirely. 

This is not simply the story of one briefly important government program that featured 

interesting opportunities for public participation. It is a story of how two ideas about democracy 

collided, and how that collision helped develop the non-profit industrial complex, which continues 

to exert significant pressure on both social movements and the non-profit sector today. Ultimately, 

this article is about the tremendous power of the executive branch, the power of grassroots 

movements to stand up to it, and the importance of grassroots participatory democracy both to 

those movements and, in the final analysis, to the entire project of liberal democracy. 

Part I presents a history of participatory democracy and how it became so closely 

interconnected with social movements in the twentieth century. Part II describes how the Johnson 

Administration created CAP, believing that if it offered opportunities for participation and funding 

within largely expert-led programs, it could make electoral advances in low-income urban 

communities of color. Part III describes how those two approaches to participatory democracy 

collided in CAP, and Part IV argues that the Johnson Administration developed tools to quickly 

recapture control of the opportunities for participation as soon as they started to be used, and that 

through the Johnson Administration’s efforts to quickly control CAP without admitting defeat, 

they developed a significant part of the blueprint for the non-profit industrial complex. The 

conclusion returns to the present, arguing that small-group democracy gives the public a better 

understanding of, and a deeper commitment to, democratic processes. It further argues that one 

impact of the development of the non-profit industrial complex is that people in the U.S. have less 

of a meaningful connection to democracy than prior generations had. This has had a negative 

impact on both local organizations and the national commitment to democratic principles. It argues 

that to create a bulwark against oligarchy and corruption and rebuild a national commitment to 

equity, institutions that purport to be defenders of democracy need to rethink their tendency to rely 

on expertise at the expense of participatory democracy. 

 

I. Participatory Democracy and Its Importance to 1960s Social Movements 

 

Participatory democracy, a form of governance in which a group of people directly deliberate 

and make decisions about the policies that affect their lives, first developed in the ancient decision- 

making practices of bands of hunter-gatherers, hundreds of thousands of years before written 

records.8 Those ancient practices evolved in various ways with the rise of larger civilizations, and 

forms of participatory democracy were used in Athens and other ancient Greek city-states, in the 

broader Mediterranean and North Africa, including Kongo, Kush, Mali, Mossi, and Phoenicia, in 

traditional Māori practices, in Balanese seka, Bolivian ayllu, Indian panchayats, and in the 

Haudenosaunee Confederacy in North America—different groups with their own ideas of self- 

governance formed in different times and places by people that often had no knowledge of one 

another.9 

In Europe, democracy was widely understood to mean direct deliberation in participatory self- 
 

8 ELEANOR LEACOCK & RICHARD LEE, Introduction to POLITICS AND HISTORY IN BAND SOCIETIES 1, 1-2 (Eleanor 

Leacock & Richard Lee eds., 1982); Mancur Olson, Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development, 87 AM. POL. SCI. 

REV. 567, 567-68 (1993). 
9 DAVID GRAEBER, THE DEMOCRACY PROJECT 163 (2013); FRANK HENDRIKS, VITAL DEMOCRACY: A THEORY 

OF DEMOCRACY IN ACTION 112-14 (2010); MICHAEL MENSER, WE DECIDE!: THEORIES AND CASES IN PARTICIPATORY 

DEMOCRACY 15-17 (2018). Jean-Paul Gagnon, et al., The Marginalized Democracies of the World, 8 DEM. THEORY 

1, 1-2 (2021). 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1290 
 

 

governance for centuries following the mass participatory democracy that lasted in ancient Athens 

from 506-338 B.C.E.10 Two thousand years after the height of Athenian democracy, most of the 

Founders still understood democracy to mean some kind of participatory democracy and they 

rejected it as a form of government for the new nation. Instead, they sought to create a liberal 

“mixed” government that would allow for some input from a section of the public—initially, white 

male property owners—but limit popular power, using checks and balances to control the “mob” 

by giving additional weight to the interests of the wealthiest, most prominent, and best-educated 

men, like themselves.11 But over the centuries since the founding, the term “democracy” was 

appropriated by supporters of the “mixed” U.S. republic and similar governments, redefining the 

term from meaning participatory self-governance. By the twentieth century, leading political 

scientists argued that the primary function of elections in a democracy is to legitimize the 

executive’s power over the citizenry.12 That idea of democracy has largely taken over as the 

 

10 Following reforms brought by the Athenian magistrate Cleisthenes, Athens developed four tools for the demos 

to express itself: in the ekklesia (the People’s Assembly, in which around 30,000 citizens were eligible to deliberate 

and directly administer the government), in the Boulé (regional councils of 500 people who made decisions by 

consensus), through the dikasteria (courts), and through the archai (magistrates). HENDRIKS, supra note 9, at 113. 

Athenian democracy had a robust culture of debate and lawmaking, with thousands of men eligible to vote having the 

right to speak, propose a new law or new tax, or bring a legal case against another member. MENSER, supra note 9, at 

12-17. Athens also democratized governmental administration and had a society-building agenda: government roles 

were elected or appointed through sortition, everyone was called on for brief periods of service, and the entire project 

emphasized philia, community and friendship. Id. But Athenian democracy was only able to thrive because of a deeply 

exploitative economy that relied on domestic labor by women and on the manual labor of enslaved people, whose 

work “permitted the sudden florescence of Greek urban civilization.” PERRY ANDERSON, PASSAGES FROM ANTIQUITY 

TO FEUDALISM 36-37 (1974). The U.S. Founders learned about the Athenian ekklesia through the works of Aristotle, 

Plato, Thucydides, and other classical writers. CARL J. RICHARD, THE FOUNDERS AND THE CLASSICS: GREECE, ROME, 

AND THE AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT 124 (1994). 
11 ROBERT A. DAHL, HOW DEMOCRATIC IS THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION? 24-25 (2d ed. 2003); RUSSELL L. 

HANSON, THE DEMOCRATIC IMAGINATION IN AMERICA: CONVERSATIONS WITH OUR PAST 60-68 (1985); ALEXANDER 

KEYSSAR, THE RIGHT TO VOTE: THE CONTESTED HISTORY OF DEMOCRACY IN THE UNITED STATES 2 (2000); JACQUES 

RANCIÈRE, HATRED OF DEMOCRACY 53 (2d ed., 2009); M.J.C. VILE, CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE SEPARATION OF 

POWERS 83-87 (2d ed. 1998); Roy N. Lokken, The Concept of Democracy in Colonial Political Thought, 16 WILLIAM 

& MARY QUARTERLY 568, 570-74 (1959). 

Even accepting a minimal concept of representative democracy that requires only that subjects get to vote for the 

representatives who govern them, what the Founders created was a very limited democracy. There is no mention of 

the public voting in the Constitution. See U.S. Const. Art. II, § 1 (describing the requirements related to how each 

state legislature may appoint electors, a small group that elects the President). Women could not vote until the 

ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. U.S. Const. amend. XIX (ratified 1920). Most Black Americans 

could not vote until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. No. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437 

(codified as amended in sections of 42 and 52 U.S.C.). Non-citizens, including lawful residents, may not vote in 

federal elections. 18 U.S.C. § 611 (2000). Since the World War I era, states have not allowed non-citizens to vote in 

state elections either. Jamin B. Raskin, Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional, and Theoretical 

Meanings of Alien Suffrage, 141 U. PENN. L. REV. 1391, 1397-1417 (1993). U.S. citizens in Washington, D.C. do not 

have Congressional representation and have only had the right to vote in presidential elections since 1961. U.S. Const. 

amend. XXIII (ratified 1961). Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and 

American Samoa have limited representation based on the Insular Cases. See generally De Lima v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 

1 (1901); Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244 (1901); Goetze v. U.S., 182 U.S. 221 (1901). These cases “have no 

foundation in the Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes. They deserve no place in our law.” U.S. v. Vaello 

Madero, 596 U.S. 159, 180 (2022) (Gorsuch, J., concurring). 
12 The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 book CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY influenced 

a generation of mid-century political scientists called the Democratic Pluralists who shaped both academic and popular 

conceptions of democracy in the second half of the twentieth century. CAROLE PATEMAN, PARTICIPATION AND 

DEMOCRATIC THEORY 3-5 (1970). Schumpeter argues that people could never agree on a set of principles that would 



1291 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

popular understanding of the term, and now, maybe more than ever, Americans see democracy as 

a form of government in which, on the day after Election Day, “once more the business of 

government has become the privilege of the few.”13 The few opportunities for public participation 

under U.S. law that survive—in things like land use processes, civilian police review boards, and 

participatory budgeting—tend to be highly-managed “window dressing” that often reinforces 

existing social hierarchies.14 

But participatory democracy did not disappear entirely in the eighteenth century, despite being 

rejected by the Founders and by liberal states in Europe. More participatory conceptions of 

democracy continued to be debated within political philosophy, and they spread from philosophy 

to twentieth century social movements. In Europe, much of that philosophical tradition derives 

from Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, possibly influenced by his study of democratic practices among 

Indigenous Americans,15 developed a theory of democracy radically opposed to the Hobbesian 

 

promote the common good, so the task of governing is best left to members of the ruling class—and Schumpeter is a 

firm believer in the merits of class hierarchy—who want to use their intellects to try to make those decisions as best 

as possible. JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER, CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY 251-53 (5th ed. 1976). Schumpeter 

rejects democracy’s meaning as a mode of popular participation in government and redefined the term as an 

“institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means 

of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” Id. at 269. It is a model that ties democracy to the logic of the 

marketplace, where citizens are akin to consumers whose only role is to express their preference every few years and 

then, “once they have elected an individual, political action is his business, and not theirs.” Id. at 295. 
13 HANNAH ARENDT, ON REVOLUTION 237 (1963). 
14 Michele Estrin Gilman, Beyond Window Dressing: Public Participation for Marginalized Communities in the 

Datafied Society, 91 FORDHAM L. REV. 503, 555 (2022) (arguing that participatory mechanisms are promising but risk 

“becoming a form of ‘window dressing,’ in which the views of marginalized people are solicited and ignored, while 

giving cover to the entities that deploy the systems.”) See David Alan Sklansky, Police and Democracy, 103 MICH. 

L. REV. 1699, 1807-08 (2005) (describing the substantial differences between the “ambitious varieties of participatory 

democracy that gained currency in the 1960s and 1970s” and the “watered-down, status-quo version of participatory 

democracy…hidden by their common vocabulary.”) Participatory budgeting programs are opportunities for the public 

to engage in city budgeting over a small portion of a city budget by local area within a city. Clayton P. Gillette, The 

Subdivided City, 133 YALE L.J. 2700, 2721 (2024). While appearing to make budgeting more democratic, U.S. efforts 

to implement participatory budgeting can end up with forms of “managed participation” that reinforce hierarchies of 

social power, rather than reduce them. Celina Su, Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory 

Budgeting, 39(1) NEW POL. SCI. 126, 134-36 (2017). The process can end up benefitting wealthy and gentrifying 

neighborhoods at the expense of the neighborhoods that are most in need while, at the same time, forcing community 

activists to fight over small amounts of money instead of organizing for more meaningful political power. Liza 

Featherstone, Participatory Budgeting: Why Not Fix Everyone’s Sink?, SHELTERFORCE (Jun. 5, 2018), 

https://shelterforce.org/2018/06/05/participatory-budgeting-why-not-fix-everyones-sink/. 
15 See DAVID GRAEBER & DAVID WENGROW, THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING: A NEW HISTORY OF HUMANITY 536 

n.49 (2021); Donald A. Grinde, The Iroquois and the Nature of American Government, 17 AM. INDIAN CULTURE & 

RES. J. 153, 166 (1993). The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which formed in the twelfth century and reached its peak 

in the seventeenth century, was widely known among colonists and interested Europeans. Formed initially as a peace 

accord between the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca Nations, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was 

roughly the same size as the democracy in Athens and was also anchored by face-to-face assemblies. MENSER, supra 

note 9, at 17-18. The Tuscarora Nation joined later, and the federation has historically been called the Kanonsionni, 

the Six Nations Confederacy, and the Iroquois Confederacy; they use the name Haudenosaunee today. Id. Founders 

like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were closely familiar with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which 

some argue may have been a source of inspiration for the U.S. Constitution. Robert J. Miller, American Indian 

Constitutions and Their Influence on the United States Constitution, 159(1) PROCEEDINGS OF THE AM. PHIL. SOC. 32 

(2015); Samuel B. Payne, Jr., The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, 53 WILLIAM 

& MARY QUARTERLY 605 (1996). The Haudenosaunee had a far more inclusive understanding of who could 

participate in their democracy than the Athenians, both by not having a class of enslaved people deemed unfit to 

participate and by allowing women to participate in the democracy through a bicameral system that required approval 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1292 
 

 

view of the state as a form of protection from a “nasty, brutish, and short” life of perpetual war in 

a cruel, violent state of nature.16 Rousseau acknowledges the social contract offers some physical 

protections, but argues that it also robs humans of their “natural liberty” and that the role of 

government should be to maximize natural liberty by encouraging as much collective community 

participation as possible.17 This kind of participation has an integrative effect, helping each 

participant come to see themselves as a part of the whole, where people can ultimately grow to 

perceive no conflict or distinction between private and public, between freedom and community.18 

Rousseau’s idea that collectivity is a source of liberty rather than an infringement on individual 

freedom would influence a small movement of early twentieth-century intellectual, pacifist 

Christians—Quakers, Unitarians, Congregationalists, and others—who began to synthesize their 

religious views with Progressive Era liberalism and the ideas of the labor-focused, broadly socialist 

left.19 John Dewey was already an established professor when this movement was developing in 

the 1910s, but his later political philosophy reflects a deep engagement with the ideas being 

debated within this group. Dewey’s theories of democracy were also deeply Rousseauean, calling 

for greater participation in face-to-face democratic decision-making processes and arguing that 

democracy is not just a matter of government institutions, but “a form of moral and spiritual 

association”20 between people that should be “put in force in the attitudes which human beings 

display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life.”21 He also argued that 

individual liberty can exist “only in rich and manifold association with others…an individualized 

self making a distinctive contribution and enjoying in its own way the fruits of association.”22 To 

Dewey, democracy requires that “means and ends” are in alignment, rejecting both liberals who 

would impose top-down government reforms and socialists who tolerated anti-democratic means 

to further egalitarian ends.23 

In the early 1910s, when Dewey was teaching at Columbia University, a group of young 

Christian pacifist students at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary in New Jersey, including 

A.J. Muste, would travel to Columbia every week to take classes with him.24 After completing 

seminary, Muste joined the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in Manhattan, where he led study 

groups sponsored by the YMCA on topics like child labor, peace, and Marxism.25 At the outbreak 
 

by both a men’s and women’s council before many proposals were approved. MENSER, supra note 9, at 17-18. Their 

system had an egalitarian, communal economic component as well, as parcels of Haudenosaunee land were owned 

collectively and temporarily granted to families to care for based on their family size, agricultural talents, and equity 

principles. Id. at 20-21. 
16 THOMAS HOBBES, LEVIATHAN 97 (Oxford Univ. Press 1965)(1651). 
17 MENSER, supra note 9, at 11-12; PATEMAN, supra note 12, at 24-25 (1970); JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, THE 

SOCIAL CONTRACT 65-68 (Maurice Cranston trans., 1968). 
18 PATEMAN, supra note 12, at 26-27; ROUSSEAU, supra note 17, at 61. 
19 LEILAH DANIELSON, AMERICAN GANDHI: A.J. MUSTE AND THE HISTORY OF RADICALISM IN THE TWENTIETH 

CENTURY 38-39 (2014). 
20 JOHN DEWEY, The Ethics of Democracy, in THE POLITICAL WRITINGS 59, 59 (Debra Morris & Ian Shapiro eds., 

1993). 
21 JOHN DEWEY, Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us, in THE POLITICAL WRITINGS 240, 242 (Debra Morris 

& Ian Shapiro eds., 1993). 
22 JOHN DEWEY, THE PUBLIC AND ITS PROBLEMS 150 (1946). 
23 JOHN DEWEY, Democracy is Radical, in AMERICA’S PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER: ESSAYS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE, 

ECONOMICS, EDUCATION, AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 19, 22-23 (Eric Thomas Weber ed., 2021); JOHN DEWEY, 

Why I Am Not a Communist, in AMERICA’S PUBLIC PHILOSOPHER: ESSAYS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE, ECONOMICS, 

EDUCATION, AND THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY 88, 90-92 (Eric Thomas Weber ed., 2021). 
24 DANIELSON, supra note 19, at 41-43. 
25 Id. at 46. Muste would leave the Reformed Church, but much of the infrastructure he helped to establish 



1293 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

of World War I, the British Quaker Henry Hodgkin founded a group called the Fellowship of 

Reconciliation, which tied Quaker beliefs in pacifism and democracy26 to a broader philosophical 

commitment to equality and social justice.27 In November 1915, as the U.S. was preparing to enter 

World War I, Hodgkin came to a YMCA in Garden City, New York, to promote the Fellowship 

of Reconciliation within the community of study groups that Muste helped to found.28 

The Fellowship of Reconciliation espoused the Deweyan view that “the means and the end are 

so intimately related that it is impossible to get a coordinated and co-operative world by destructive 

methods.”29 The group adopted Quaker Meeting traditions, like using consensus decision-making, 

“laying aside” issues for future reflection, and invoking the concept of “fellowship” to soften 

members’ criticisms of other members’ ideas.30 These ideas spread after World War I, and pacifists 

in this tradition built cooperatives, communes, and consensus-driven anti-war organizations that 

all aimed to embody participatory democracy,31 spreading their ideas through publications like 

Politics, Direct Action, and Liberation.32 

This Christian pacifist movement and its emphasis on participatory democracy would make 

inroads within the labor movement, even as many union leaders were fighting against union 

democracy in favor of a top down, professionalized “business unionism.”33 Labor educators in 

union education departments, independent labor colleges, and union summer schools drew on 

Dewey’s theories to develop participatory, self-directed pedagogy.34 The Brookwood Labor 

College recruited Muste to lead it, and Muste trained Myles Horton, who came out of his 

experience with the goal of creating a southern school to train labor activists and educators, which 

he formed as the Highlander Folk School in 1932.35 Ella Baker—who would popularize 

participatory democracy as a leader in the 1960s civil rights movement, most notably as an advisor 

to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (“SNCC”)—came to Brookwood the 

following year, and together Baker and Horton would use the pedagogical emphasis on 

participatory, collective decision-making that they experienced at Brookwood as both a teaching 

model and an organizing tool.36 

Horton, a working-class white southerner, grew out of this Christian pacifist movement, 

studying with Muste at Brookwood and, at Union Theological Seminary, with Reinhold Niebuhr, 

who had been a leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation but who was increasingly questioning 
 

remained in the New York metropolitan region. Id. at 47-49. 
26 Quakers had long been tied to pacifism and democracy in England and the U.S., both stemming from their 

belief that God lives within every individual and that every individual is therefore sacred. FREDERICK B. TOLLES, 

QUAKERISM AND POLITICS 18-23 (1956). Earlier in U.S. history, Quakers were prominent abolitionists and played a 

leading role in developing a non-denominational, multiracial abolitionist movement. DANIEL AKST, WAR BY OTHER 

MEANS 56-58 (2022). 
27 AKST, supra note 26, at 59-60; DANIELSON, supra note 19, at 53-54. 
28 AKST, supra note 26, at 59-60; DANIELSON, supra note 19, at 54. 
29 FRANCESCA POLLETTA, FREEDOM IS AN ENDLESS MEETING: DEMOCRACY IN AMERICAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 

27 (2002) (quoting Fellowship of Reconciliation member Paul Jones). 
30 Id. at 49. 
31 Id. at 28; IRWIN UNGER, THE MOVEMENT: A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN NEW LEFT 1959-1972 15 (1974). One 

notable creation is non-commercial public radio, which a pacifist named Lewis Hill started as Pacifica Radio in the 

late 1940s after developing the concept in dialogue with other conscientious objectors during World War II. RALPH 

ENGELMAN, PUBLIC RADIO AND TELEVISION IN AMERICA: A POLITICAL HISTORY 44-46 (1996). 
32 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 28. 
33 Id. at 29-30. 
34 Id. at 28-35. 
35 Id. at 36. 
36 Id. 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1294 
 

 

the philosophy of nonviolence.37 Horton formed the Highlander Folk School in rural Tennessee, 

originally with the goal of supporting the development of labor movement leaders in the South.38 

But as the labor movement turned increasingly to business unionism, Highlander began to pivot 

away from its focus on labor. Highlander’s transition began with a series of multiracial workshops 

for community leaders and students, which grew into a project focused on integrating schools and 

communities.39 This is where the participatory democracy of Dewey, Muste, and Horton first 

meaningfully crossed paths with the civil rights movement. 

In 1955, Rosa Parks attended the Highlander desegregation workshop and when she returned 

to Montgomery, “she was so happy and felt so liberated and then as time went on she said the 

discrimination got worse and worse to bear after having…been free of it at Highlander.”40 Parks 

famously refused to give up her seat to a white bus passenger that December 1, and the 

Montgomery Bus Boycott ensued, led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the newly-formed Southern 

Christian Leadership Conference (“SCLC”). SCLC received support from Christian pacifists 

seasoned in Gandhian non-violence tactics through their experience in the Fellowship of 

Reconciliation, including Glenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin.41 Rustin saw his role as a supportive, 

advisory one, and he aimed to not overstep those bounds, but he later became deeply critical of 

SCLC, calling Dr. King’s leadership “autocratic.”42 Baker agreed.43 

The Montgomery bus boycott was a compelling tactic because the city could not force people 

to travel by bus despite the boycott’s economic impact, but a few years later, when groups of 

students began holding sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, it was an affirmative demand for fair 

treatment, a significantly more confrontational tactic.44 Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters were 

started by just a few college students in Greensboro, North Carolina but spread across the South 

rapidly; between February and April 1960, more than 50,000 people participated in sit-ins.45 These 

were locally organized, autonomous actions not coordinated by any larger group,46 but 

Highlander’s influence was evident: the summer before the sit-ins began, prominent sit-in leaders 

from across the South attended Highlander’s 1959 college workshop, including Marion Barry, 
 

 

37 JOHN M. GLEN, HIGHLANDER: NO ORDINARY SCHOOL, 1932-1962 10 (1988). Niebuhr was moving away from 

pacifism and toward a philosophy of Christian “realism” that he would popularize in his 1932 book, Moral Man and 

Immoral Society. He had come to see pacifism as simply an unrealistic tool to fight the most important problems of 

the 1930s: capital would not realistically yield to labor without force; African Americans would never realistically 

have equality without force; and the militaristic, authoritarian governments rising in Europe could not be stopped 

without military force. IRA CHERNUS, AMERICAN NONVIOLENCE: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA 112 (2004); Andrew J. 

Ballou, From Pacifism to Nonviolent Direct Action: The Fellowship of Reconciliation and Social Christianity, 1914- 

1947, 7-8 (2013) (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston University), http://open.bu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/34c435e1- 

afb5-41f8-a045-0e3100640c97/content. By 1940, Niebuhr distanced himself from both the Socialist Party and 

pacifism advocated for war against Nazi Germany. CHERNUS, supra, at 123. 
38 GLEN, supra note 37, at 10. 
39 Id. at 125-30. 
40 Id. at 136 (quoting Parks’s friend Virginia Durr) (emphasis in original). 
41 Ballou, supra note 37, at 355-56. POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 40. Smiley was an officer of Fellowship of 

Reconciliation and Rustin was a leader of Fellowship of Reconciliation, the War Resisters League, and the Congress 

of Racial Equity (CORE). UNGER, supra note 31, at 15-16; Ballou, supra note 37, at 355-56. 
42 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 40. 
43 Id. 
44 BARBARA RANSBY, ELLA BAKER AND THE BLACK FREEDOM MOVEMENT: A RADICAL DEMOCRATIC VISION 237 

(1998). 
45 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 57. 
46 Id.; VAN GOSSE, RETHINKING THE NEW LEFT: AN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY 38 (2005). 

http://open.bu.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/34c435e1-


1295 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

James Bevel, Julian Bond, John Lewis, and Diane Nash.47 

Baker had been active in various leftist and civil rights groups since her youth,48 including a 

cooperative economic project called the Young Negroes’ Co-Operative League, which informed 

her opposition to organizational hierarchy.49 She helped to foster a similar spirit at Highlander, 

where she spoke against “leader-centered groups” and urged instead the creation of “group- 

centered leadership,” emphasizing the leader as a facilitator, not a person who controls the group 

or seeks to have clout with “Establishment People.”50 Despite having helped to found SCLC, Baker 

always felt herself to be “an outsider within” the group because of its hierarchy, gender bias, 

tendency toward unilateral decision-making, and, ultimately, what she saw as a “cult of 

personality” forming around Dr. King.51 

Under the auspices of SCLC, Baker organized a convening of the student sit-in activists at her 

alma mater, Shaw University,52 but Baker believed that SCLC leadership—Rev. Wyatt Walker, 

Ralph Abernathy, and Dr. King—were trying to “capture” the student activists and bring them 

under SCLC’s control.53 In contrast, Baker wanted to nurture the radical impulses of the young 

activists, urging them to see their mission as broader than desegregation and as part of a global 

struggle for freedom, warning them against organizational bureaucracy and reliance on charismatic 

public-facing leadership, and counseling the students to watch out for manipulation by movement 

elders.54 In the words of Julian Bond, Baker “didn’t say ‘Don’t let Martin Luther King tell you 

what to do,’…but you got the real feeling that that’s what she meant.”55 The students formed 

SNCC as a separate body from SCLC, adopted a broad political agenda, and emphasized 

participatory democracy, all largely inspired by Baker, who remained involved in SNCC as an 

“adult advisor,” but not SNCC’s leader.56 

Baker was deeply committed to participatory democracy because she wanted to make sure that 

she and others who might be outsiders in a world of male leaders would be fully heard through an 

inclusive, consensus-oriented process.57 The philosophy was not just to let the members vote, but 

to have the marginalized members of the group have their voices centered, so that the views of all 

participants could be heard.58 This required a change in mindset; individual members needed to 

develop new interpersonal relationships based on a more humane order than the exploitive 

relations of the larger culture.59 She sought to instill in SNCC members an insistently democratic 

way of living, being, and interacting that in itself reflected a deep commitment to inclusivity.60 

 

47 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 64. 
48 RANSBY, supra note 44, at 6. 
49 JESSICA GORDON NEMBHARD, COLLECTIVE COURAGE: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN COOPERATIVE 

ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 119-20 (2014). 
50 CAROL MUELLER, Ella Baker and the Origins of “Participatory Democracy”, in THE BLACK STUDIES READER 

79, 85 (Jacqueline Bobo et al. eds., 2004). 
51 Id. at 4-6; JOANNE GRANT, ELLA BAKER: FREEDOM BOUND 38 (1998). 
52 RANSBY, supra note 44, at 239-42. 
53 Id. at 242-43. 
54 Id. at 244-46. 
55 In Memoriam: Ella Baker, SNCC LEGACY PROJECT, https://sncclegacyproject.org/in-memoriam-ella-baker/. 
56 For a detailed history of the creation of SNCC, see CHARLES M. PAYNE, I’VE GOT THE LIGHT OF FREEDOM: 

THE ORGANIZING TRADITION AND THE MISSISSIPPI FREEDOM STRUGGLE 67-102 (1995); see generally MUELLER, 

supra note 50. 
57 RANSBY, supra note 44, at 309-10. 
58 Id. at 368. 
59 Id. at 369. 
60 Id. at 258. 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1296 
 

 

Years before “the personal is political” became a slogan or prefigurative politics were theorized in 

those terms, Baker prioritized “interaction, discussion, debate, and consensus” above lobbying and 

electoral politics.61 This did not mean that each person got to direct every decision, but rather that 

everyone was encouraged to participate; facilitators aimed to not direct the conversation but to ask 

questions to help members clarify and refine their positions, and aimed for responsibilities and 

procedures to be clear to all.62 Above all, Baker pushed for SNCC to focus on building capacity 

and leadership in local Black communities, not just on mobilizing people to show up for specific 

demonstrations or events.63 Having big rallies and giving speeches on television was not as 

important as what she called “spadework”: the behind-the-scenes, interpersonal community 

building that prepares the ground for social change, just as tilling the dirt can prepare it for growing 

something new.64 

Baker’s model would become a significant inspiration for the emerging, largely white student 

New Left as well. Students for a Democratic Society (“SDS”) formed at the University of Michigan 

in 1959 when graduate student Al Haber renamed an older socialist student organization—the 

Student League for Industrial Democracy (“SLID”), a small student branch of the League for 

Industrial Democracy.65 A conference Haber had planned in Ann Arbor on “Human Rights in the 

North” came to focus on the student sit-in movement, and the conference attracted civil rights 

leaders from across the country, including Bayard Rustin and James Farmer, leaders from the 

Congress of Racial Equality (“CORE”) and the NAACP, as well as Tom Hayden, the 

undergraduate student editor of the Michigan Daily.66 Hayden studied with a Michigan political 

philosopher named Arnold Kaufman, who had recently coined the phrase “participatory 

democracy,” articulating an individualistic idea of participatory democracy that sought “the 

development of human powers of thought, feeling, and action.”67 

Haber and Hayden began to travel around the country to find like-minded students to join 

SDS.68 Hayden went to Georgia and Mississippi and was deeply inspired by SNCC’s participatory 

organizing model, later reflecting: “Mechanics, maids, unemployed people taking things into their 

own hands. I kept wondering, ‘where did these people come from? Really, where have I been?’”69 

 

61 Id. at 370. “The personal is political” was a slogan of second wave feminism, popularized by Carol Hanisch’s 

essay The Personal is Political, written in 1969 and published in 1970, though Hanisch says the phrase itself likely 

was written by her editors, Shulie Firestone and Anne Koedt. Carol Hanisch, Introduction to The Personal is Political 

1, 1 (Jan. 2006), https://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PersonalIsPol.pdf. Prefigurative politics are forms of 

political action in which the processes used in organizing and building a political movement are designed to already 

be constructing the future world the movement wants to see. For early definitions of prefiguration, see Carl Boggs, 

Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers’ Control, 6 RADICAL AM. 99 (1977-1978); Wini 

Breines, Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ “Iron Law”, 27(4) SOC. PROBS. 419, 421 (1980). 
62 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 55-57. 
63 Id. 
64 Payne, supra note 55, at 85. 
65 JAMES MILLER, DEMOCRACY IS IN THE STREETS: FROM PORT HURON TO THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO 22-36 (1987); 

KIRKPATRICK SALE, SDS 7-13 (1973). The Student League for Industrial Democracy had just three chapters, at 

Columbia, Yale, and Michigan; the chapters at Columbia and Yale did not even use the name SLID, they went by 

“John Dewey Discussion Club.” Id. This convention reflects the continuing importance of Dewey to the intellectual 

left even into the 1950s and 1960s. 
The author has no knowledge of a familial relationship with Haber. 
66 SALE, supra note 65, at 13. 
67 See Arnold S. Kaufman, Human Nature and Participatory Democracy, 3 NOMOS: AM. SOC’Y POL. LEGAL PHIL. 

266, 272 (1960). 
68 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 125. 
69 MILLER, supra note 65, at 57. 

http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PersonalIsPol.pdf


1297 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

Much of SDS’s initial work was inspired by and related to the work of SNCC.70 Coming out of a 

traditional socialist organization, SDS wanted to emphasize that they were a new left, and when 

Hayden began to draft a mission statement for the group, he sought inspiration outside of the 

dominant Marxist-Leninist tradition, instead drawing on the writings of Dewey and Muste and his 

observations of SNCC.71 Hayden wrote a first draft of a mission statement. A group of 59 students 

and a few advisors met in a union work camp in Port Huron, Michigan, to develop Hayden’s draft 

into an official group mission statement.72 

The revised draft that came out of their collaborative review, which would become known as 

the Port Huron Statement, became the key 1960s text that brought the phrase “participatory 

democracy” from Kaufman to the general public.73 The first mimeographed copies of the Port 

Huron Statement emerged in July 1962 and “[f]rom the start…had an almost mythic stature.”74 As 

a phrase, “participatory democracy” captured readers’ imaginations like a “stick of conceptual 

dynamite,” but the term was just vague enough that it seemed to simultaneously appeal to people 

who sought a return to the Founders’ ideals, modest social reform, and revolutionary movement 

politics.75 This broad appeal sparked a sudden “participation explosion.”76 Participatory 

democracy, however it was interpreted, was in the air and it quickly became a huge influence on 

the “popular political vocabulary.”77 Jumping on the trend, the Johnson Administration did not 

call for some limited opportunities for community participation when it drafted the text of CAP, 

but mandated that programs receiving funding would be “developed, conducted, and administered 

with the maximum feasible participation of the residents of the areas and members of the groups 

served.”78 This “maximum feasible participation” mandate seems to almost echo the language of 

SDS or the organizing approach taken by Baker,79 but the Johnson Administration had a 

completely different understanding of how participatory democracy would function in CAP. 
 

 

70 SALE, supra note 65, at 13. 
71 POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 126; SALE, supra note 65, at 25. Although associated with SDS in the U.S., the 

term New Left first appeared in the U.K., from a group of socialist students and younger intellectuals around the New 

Left Review who sought to reinvigorate the Labor Party, including the later prominent cultural theorist, Stuart Hall. 

UNGER, supra note 31, at 18; GOSSE, supra note 46, at 4-5; Stuart Hall, Life and Times of the First New Left, 61 NEW 

LEFT REV. 177 (2010). 
72 MILLER, supra note 65, at 13; POLLETTA, supra note 29, at 126. Hayden began the first draft from a jail cell in 

Albany, Georgia, after travelling South to support the sit-in movement on a “Freedom Ride,” and was inspired by the 

students coming from all over the country, risking jail or worse, to support the civil rights movement. Tom Hayden, 

Participatory Democracy: From the Port Huron Statement to Occupy Wall Street, NATION (Mar. 27, 2012), 

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/participatory-democracy-port-huron-statement-occupy-wall-street/. 
73 MENSER, supra note 9, at 27. The discussion of participatory democracy in the Port Huron Statement reflects a 

tension that might be more broadly present in the student left of the 1960s, a tension between a desire for a collectivist 

politics and a commitment to authenticity, individualism, and self-fulfillment: “politics has the function of bringing 

people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning 

in personal life.” STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY, PORT HURON STATEMENT 7 (2d ed. 1964), 

https://archive.org/details/PortHuronStatement/Phs00-211Copy/page/n1/mode/2up. 
74 MILLER, supra note 65, at 141. 
75 Id. at 152. 
76 GABRIEL ALMOND & SIDNEY VERBA, THE CIVIC CULTURE: POLITICAL ATTITUDES AND DEMOCRACY IN FIVE 

NATIONS 2 (1965). 
77 PATEMAN, supra note 12, at 1. 
78 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-452, § 202(a)(3) (1964). 
79 See JAMES A. MORONE, THE DEMOCRATIC WISH: POPULAR PARTICIPATION AND THE LIMITS OF AMERICAN 

GOVERNMENT 227 (rev. ed., 1998) (arguing that “to many observers, the loose organization and participatory ethos of 

[CAP] reflected the style of the civil rights movement from the start”). 

http://www.thenation.com/article/archive/participatory-democracy-port-huron-statement-occupy-wall-street/


2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1298 
 

 

II. The Creation of the Community Action Program 

 

The War on Poverty emerged at a time when U.S. urban policy was due for a serious reckoning. 

The Depression had brought widespread home foreclosures in cities and the federal government 

had intervened through massive efforts: the Home Owners’ Loan Act of 1933 created the Home 

Owners’ Loan Corporation, which offered refinancing for home mortgages;80 the National 

Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration to insure mortgage loans;81 the 

United States Housing Act of 1937 created the U.S. Housing Authority, which provided loans to 

state and local authorities to create public housing;82 the Federal National Mortgage Association 

(“Fannie Mae”) was created to provide capital for housing finance through the creation of the 

secondary mortgage market in 1938;83 and, after World War II, the Veterans Administration 

guaranteed mortgages for veterans through the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (the “GI Bill”).84 

But through both de jure accommodation of Jim Crow states and privately-enforced segregationist 

mechanisms like redlining and blockbusting, these programs expanded white homeownership in 

the suburbs while Black and other racially-marginalized communities in cities were given little or 

no aid, stripping cities of their tax bases and deepening geographic inequalities.85 

 

80 Home Owners’ Loan Act of 1933, 12 U.S.C. §§ 1461-1468 (1934). 
81 National Housing Act of 1934, Pub. L. 73-479, 48 Stat. 1246 (1934). 
82 United States Housing Act of 1937, Pub. L. 75-412, 50 Stat. 888 (1937). 
83 National Housing Act Amendments of 1938, ch. 13, § 1, 52 Stat. 8. (1938). 
84 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, Pub. L. 78-346, 58 Stat. 284 (1944). 
85 The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (“HOLC”) helped homeowners obtain mortgage refinancing while 

simultaneously creating a uniform system for appraising real estate in order to underwrite its loans. KENNETH T. 

JACKSON, CRABGRASS FRONTIER: THE SUBURBANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES 196 (1985). To assess property 

values, HOLC developed a ranked list of racial and ethnic groups to gauge their value, creating a scale that ranked 

ethnicities from the top category—English, Germans, Scotch, Irish, and Scandinavians—to increasingly racialized 

categories at the end of the list: “(7) Russians, Jews (lower class); (8) South Italians; (9) Negroes; (10) Mexicans.” 

Calvin Bradford, Financing Home Ownership: The Federal Role in Neighborhood Decline, 14 URB. AFF. Q. 313, 323 

(1979); Charles L. Nier, III, Perpetuation of Segregation: Toward a New Historical and Legal Interpretation of 

Redlining Under the Fair Housing Act, 32 J. MARSHALL L. REV. 617, 622-23 (1999). 

The Federal Housing Administration (“FHA”) stimulated new mortgage issuance by insuring new private 

mortgages that met standardized terms, dramatically hastening the growth of inner-ring suburbs through an “antiurban 

bias” that favored single-family homes and new construction over the repair of existing housing stock. Jackson, supra, 

at 207-08; Leonard S. Rubinowitz & Elizabeth Trosman, Affirmative Action and the American Dream: Implementing 

Housing Policies in Federal Homeownership Programs, 74 NW. U. L. REV. 491, 497-510 (1979). The FHA continued 

the HOLC’s ethnicity-based property assessments but aimed for slightly more subtlety: the FHA Underwriting Manual 

that was in use from 1934 to 1947 counseled against making loans in “crowded neighborhoods” full of “older 

properties,” that might be home to “inharmonious racial or nationality groups.” JACKSON, supra, at 207-08; Robert 

W. Collin & Robin A. Morris, Racial Inequality in American Cities: An Interdisciplinary Critique, 11 NAT’L 

BLACK L.J. 177, 182-83 (1989). The maps developed to demarcate neighborhoods that were less desirable under both 

HOLC and the FHA used red ink to clearly indicate less desirable areas, and this process of “redlining” led private 

banks to refuse to lend in those communities on favorable terms. JACKSON, supra, at 202-03. The Veterans 

Administration had a direct loan program and a mortgage insurance program, both of which engaged in similar 

redlining practices. Rubinowitz & Trosman, supra, at 515 n.88. 

“Blockbusting” is a related practice, in which real estate speculators identified white urban communities that were 

adjacent to communities of color, made representations that people of color were moving to their neighborhoods and 

causing home values to sink; they would purchase homes from white residents at a discount, and then flip those homes 

to Black people at a substantial markup. Dmitri Melhorn, A Requiem for Blockbusting: Law, Economics, and Race- 

Based Real Estate Speculation, 67 FORDHAM L. REV. 1145, 1151-53 (1998). The process was widespread, inflamed 

racial tensions, and increased residential segregation. Id. at 1153-56. The Public Housing Authorities created by the 

United States Housing Act of 1937 also furthered segregation by siting most low-income housing in communities of 



1299 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

Following years of urban disinvestment and suburban growth, advocates for “slum clearance,” 

buoyed by the lobbying power of industry associations of urban planners and real estate lenders,86 

successfully pushed for the National Housing Act of 1949, which provided grants and other 

support for “Urban Renewal”—“the clearance of slums and blighted areas and the realization as 

soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American 

family.”87 Urban Renewal let states designate an area as blighted, which allowed municipal 

agencies to join with private investors to create a plan of investment and use municipal powers 

like public finance, land use regulation, and eminent domain to raze and rebuild the area.88 The 

Urban Renewal process led to widespread displacement of low-income, largely Black urban 

residents by destroying affordable rental housing in low-income neighborhoods, with the goal of 

replacing it with single-family housing and facilities for wealthier, typically white, populations.89 

These impacts were obvious to commentators across the political spectrum,90 as they were to 

residents of low-income urban neighborhoods themselves, who mockingly referred to Urban 

Renewal as “Negro Removal.”91 

While the stated goal of Urban Renewal was to displace high-density, low-income, “blighted” 

neighborhoods with lower-density, higher-income neighborhoods, Urban Renewal succeeded at 

tearing down residential properties in communities of color and incentivizing white people to move 

to the suburbs, but was far less successful at replacing housing taken by condemnation with new 

private development.92 In many cities, housing was eliminated and, following the passage of the 

Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, new urban expressways were constructed to encourage white 

commuters to come downtown from the suburbs, often furthering segregation by using 

infrastructure to physically separate neighborhoods.93 After decades of deeply segregationist 

federal policies ransacked urban communities of color, cities were left with poor housing 

conditions and inadequate social services, but with very few wealthy residents to pay taxes, forcing 

cities to take on more and more debt “in a frenzied quest to head off the day of judgment.”94 This 

serious economic crisis would not be addressed directly, but instead would bleed into popular 

narratives about a different, far more dubious kind of urban crisis: the “crisis” of culture, family, 

and morality of low-income people of color, and of Black people in cities in particular.95 The most 
 

color. Jon C. Dubin, From Junkyards to Gentrification: Explicating a Right to Protective Zoning in Low-Income 

Communities of Color, 77 MINN. L. REV. 739, 752 (1993); Comment, The Limits of Litigation: Public Housing Site 

Selection and the Failure of Injunctive Relief, 122 U. PA. L. REV. 1330, 1337-38 (1974). 
86 Wendell E. Pritchett, The “Public Menace” of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain, 

21 YALE L. & POL’Y REV. 1, 20-21 (2003). 
87 Housing Act of 1949, § 2, Pub. L. 81-171, 63 Stat. 413 (1949). 
88 WILLIAM H. SIMON, THE COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT: LAW, BUSINESS AND THE NEW 

SOCIAL POLICY 8 (2001). 
89 Id. at 8-9; Pritchett, supra note 85, at 32-37. 
90 See Herbert J. Gans, The Failure of Urban Renewal, 39(4) Commentary 29, 29 (Apr. 1965) (citing criticisms 

from the conservative scholar Martin Anderson, progressive social critic Jane Jacobs, and the novelist Norman Mailer, 

along with data from the Urban Renewal Administration). 
91 DOUGLAS S. MASSEY & NANCY A. DENTON, AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND THE MAKING OF THE 

UNDERCLASS 56 (1993). 
92 Pritchett, supra note 86, at 32-37. 
93 RICHARD ROTHSTEIN, THE COLOR OF LAW: A FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF HOW OUR GOVERNMENT SEGREGATED 

AMERICA 127-131 (2017). See Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, Pub. L. 84-627 (1956). 
94 FREDERICK K. HUNTINGTON-VIGMAN, CRISIS OF THE CITIES 42 (1955). 
95 Timothy Weaver, Urban Crisis: The Genealogy of a Concept, 54(9) URBAN STUDIES 2039, 2045. This urban 

crisis narrative would later find perhaps its fullest articulation in the so-called Moynihan Report, Daniel Moynihan’s 

1965 study that argues that centuries of racism, slavery, and Jim Crow had led to a “tangle of pathology” at the level 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1300 
 

 

influential of these crisis narratives in the early 1960s came from Michael Harrington, a political 

writer who, in a strange coincidence, was also a member of the League of Industrial Democracy, 

SDS’s parent group, and a vocal opponent of the Port Huron Statement who tried to stop it from 

being released.96 Harrington published The Other America: Poverty in the United States in early 

1962, and it quickly became “obligatory reading in Washington’s Democratic policy circles.”97 

Advisors to Kennedy and Johnson were deeply influenced by Harrington’s ideas, and they would 

help shape the conceptual framework of the War on Poverty. 

Harrington argues that poverty is not caused by a lack of income or personal pathology, but 

rather by an all-encompassing “culture of poverty” that traps people in poverty against their will. 

He asserts that poor education means a low-paying job, which means low-quality housing, which 

can affect health, which means problems with family stability, which can affect employment and 

housing, each factor building on the others. As a result, problems can only be remedied if attacked 

on different fronts simultaneously; working on health or housing in isolation does little good.98 

Harrington’s conclusion was that the existing government bureaucracies are too siloed and lack 

the flexibility and dynamism necessary to break this cycle.99 While that part of Harrington’s thesis 

might have some merit, his broader argument relies on a deeply problematic dichotomy, asserting 

that earlier generations of low-income Irish, Italian, and Jewish communities were able to break 

free from poverty because they had strong senses of community, but Black and Latino 

neighborhoods lacked community. The “culture of poverty” had so taken hold of communities of 

color that they had become full of “people who are lost to themselves and to society.”100 

Unfortunately, Harrington’s argument about the need for holistic approaches to fighting poverty 

had only a brief influence on policy, but his theory that communities of color were ensnared in an 

intractable “culture of poverty” became a kind of quasi-sociological justification for longstanding 
 

of the family and community—unemployed fathers, high crime, a lack of male role models—that slowed progress 

toward more fulsome civil rights. DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN, THE NEGRO FAMILY: THE CASE FOR NATIONAL ACTION 1- 

4, 29-38 (1965). Moynihan’s study is among the most controversial texts of the twentieth century, one that has 

continued to spark debate in the twenty-first century. See, e.g., JAMES T. PATTERSON, FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH: THE 

MOYNIHAN REPORT AND AMERICA’S STRUGGLE OVER BLACK FAMILY LIFE FROM LBJ TO OBAMA (2010); Symposium 

Issue: The Moynihan Report: 50 Years Later, 8 GEO. J. OF L. & MOD. CRIT. RACE PERSPECTIVES (2016). The phrase 

“blaming the victim” was coined by William Ryan in response to the report. See WILLIAM RYAN, BLAMING THE 

VICTIM (1971). 
96 SALE, supra note 65, at 39; DAVID ZAREFSKY, PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S WAR ON POVERTY: RHETORIC AND 

HISTORY 24 (1986). Harrington was present at Port Huron as a representative of the League of Industrial Democracy 

(“LID”) and was no fan of the youthful interest in participatory democracy. He told the convention their statement 

would make LID “go through the roof,” pushing for the group to take a more moderate and explicitly anti-communist 

stance, and, upon his return to New York, immediately “gave LID a blow by blow report of what the convention had 

wrought.” SALE, supra note 65, at 39. LID called Haber, Hayden, and other leaders of SDS into a hearing before LID, 

and SDS members were left feeling that “America’s best liberals were on the lip of red-baiting us out of 

existence….[It] was Kafkaesque.” Id. at 39-41 (quoting SDS’s Bob Ross). Harrington later became a founder of the 

Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which became the Democratic Socialists of America. Harold Meyerson, 

Why Michael Harrington Matters, JACOBIN (Jul. 31, 2019), https://jacobin.com/2019/07/michael-harrington-dsa- 

dsoc-democratic-socialism. 
97 BENJAMIN LOOKER, A NATION OF NEIGHBORHOODS: IMAGINING CITIES, COMMUNITIES, AND DEMOCRACY IN 

POSTWAR AMERICA 141 (2015). See James L. Sundquist, Origins of the War on Poverty, in ON FIGHTING POVERTY: 

PERSPECTIVES FROM EXPERIENCE 6, 7 (James L. Sundquist ed., 1969) (arguing that Harrington’s book caused Kennedy 

to want to pair his tax cut with a new poverty program). 
98 MICHAEL HARRINGTON, THE OTHER AMERICA: POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES 162 (50th anniv. ed., 1997). 
99 Tara J. Melish, Maximum Feasible Participation of the Poor: New Governance, New Accountability, and a 

21st Century War on the Sources of Poverty, 13 YALE HUM. RTS. & DEV. L.J. 1, 20 (2010). 
100 HARRINGTON, supra note 98, at 10-11. 



1301 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

racist stereotypes, and this may have been the more lasting legacy of his book.101 

A less offensive but somewhat aligned analysis was emerging at the same time out of studies 

of “juvenile delinquency.” In the prior decade, the Eisenhower Administration saw juvenile 

delinquency as a health problem; young troublemakers were sick and in need of social- 

psychological treatment.102 But in 1960, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin from the New York 

School of Social Work at Columbia University criticized this theory in their book Delinquency 

and Opportunity, arguing that delinquency is not an individual pathology, but a social problem 

that derives from the hopelessness of “slum communities.”103 Soon after the 1960 election, 

President-elect Kennedy asked his friend David Hackett to develop a program to combat 

delinquency. Hackett, with Ohlin and, later, Richard Boone, began to explore tools to combat 

delinquency by offering education and employment opportunities—the “opportunity theory”—to 

young people in low-income neighborhoods through the President’s Committee on Juvenile 

Delinquency and Youth Crime.104 

The idea of a nimbler, more responsive social services sector appealed to the Ford Foundation, 

which sought to explore how community-centered solutions to urban issues that embraced the 

“culture of poverty” hypothesis from Harrington and “opportunity theory” from Cloward and 

Ohlin might work.105 The Ford Foundation in the early 1960s was the largest private foundation 

in the world, and had become closely intertwined with Democratic Party leadership, growing into 

a “domestic policy incubator” for the Kennedy administration, initiating and piloting social 

programs before they would be implemented more widely.106 Ford Foundation leadership, 

politically disinclined to fund anything that might question existing social and economic 

hierarchies,107 framed the problems of cities as not rooted in long histories of racism, economic 

exploitation, and segregationist urban policy, but geography—the problem was simply that certain 

areas have had the resources drained from them.108 

To combat the “culture of poverty” that arose in such geographies, Ford created Gray Areas, a 

new program that would rely on a new local institution, a “Community Action Agency,” that would 

facilitate the coordination of programs and the assimilation of local residents from within their 

own neighborhoods.109 Ford would fund its pilot in four cities—Oakland, Philadelphia, Boston, 

and New Haven—and it would, along with a similar anti-delinquency program in New York 

connected to Cloward and Ohlin called Mobilization for Youth (MFY), generate attention from 
 

101 This dichotomy “became a pervasive motif for liberal urban commentary,” in which “ethnic” neighborhoods 

became “situated as the very prototype of neighborhood health,” where hard work and community lifted immigrants 

into the middle class, while racialized communities were unable to take this step. LOOKER, supra note 97, at 142-143. 

Many commentators tried to identify some cultural or social-psychological reason for this, sometimes seeming to 

argue that Black people in U.S. cities mysteriously lack a culture at all: “Without a special language and culture, and 

without the historical experiences that create an élan and a morale, what is there to lead them to build a life, to patronize 

their own?” NATHAN GLAZER & DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN, BEYOND THE MELTING POT: THE NEGROES, PUERTO RICANS, 

JEWS, ITALIANS, AND IRISH OF NEW YORK CITY 33 (1962). The bizarre argument that Black people might simply lack 

values and culture “went virtually uncontested in the early avalanche of praise from white reviewers” and would later 

become part of the narratives around the “urban crisis” of the 1960s. LOOKER, supra note 97, at 147. 
102 Sundquist, supra note 97, at 9-11. 
103 Id. at 11. 
104 Id. 
105 ROBERT FISHER, NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZING IN AMERICA 119 (2d ed. 1994). 
106 KAREN FERGUSON, TOP DOWN: THE FORD FOUNDATION, BLACK POWER, AND THE REINVENTION OF RADICAL 

LIBERALISM 5-6 (2013). 
107 Id. at 6-7. 
108 Id. at 89-90. 
109 Id. at 59. 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1302 
 

 

urban policy experts in and around the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.110 Both 

Administrations “cultivated an antibureaucratic and community-oriented ethic that valued 

experimentation, flexibility, and decenteredness. It sought the guidance of elite experts, to be sure, 

but it also sought out the knowledge and desires of ‘the other America.’”111 But the turn to 

marginalized communities in their search for “innovation, new ideas, new imaginations”112 was 

intended to be a modest modification, a technocratic tweak, a slight check on expert-designed 

initiatives. In the early 1960s, MFY and Gray Areas seemed to strike the right balance. 

MFY and Gray Areas were not bold experiments in participatory democracy.113 Community 

Action Agencies were, consistent with “opportunity theory” and the “culture of poverty” thesis, 

aiming to coordinate modest sources of funding for more efficient use outside of entrenched 

bureaucracies.114 They were formed as private non-profit corporations that would develop plans 

with input from city government and neighborhood leaders,115 but the main program goal was to 

replace messy disagreements, factionalism, and unending bureaucracy with expert-driven 

processes led by sophisticated leaders from academia, government, and Ford Foundation staff; 

opportunities for community input were a part of the program design, but were never a significant 

focus.116 

Although Kennedy picked Johnson as his running mate, he did not totally trust Johnson, his 

Southern rival for the 1960 Democratic Party nomination, and Johnson was never a part of 

Kennedy’s inner circle of advisors.117 Just days after President Kennedy was assassinated in 

November 1963, Walter Heller, Kennedy’s chief economist, began to talk to President Johnson 

about ideas for an anti-poverty effort that had been discussed in Kennedy’s Council of Economic 

Advisors, ideas along the lines of Gray Areas and MFY.118 Johnson was interested, perhaps to tie 

himself to Kennedy’s legacy, possibly out of a genuine desire to reduce poverty,119 probably 

because Johnson felt he needed to do something in response to both the growing civil rights 

movement and the growing backlash to it,120 but above all out of a political interest in courting 

urban Black voters, as the Democrats were hemorrhaging white voters in the South due to the 

 

110 Id.; ROBERT HALPERN, REBUILDING THE INNER CITY: A HISTORY OF NEIGHBORHOOD INITIATIVES TO ADDRESS 

POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES 89 (1995). 
111 MARK KRASOVIC, THE NEWARK FRONTIER: COMMUNITY ACTION IN THE GREAT SOCIETY 7 (2016). 
112 Id. 
113 FERGUSON, supra note 106, at 60. 
114 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 92. 
115 Id. at 92-93. 
116 At the Gray Areas cite in New Haven, for example, the Community Action Agency hired Mitchell Sviridoff— 

a former president of the Board of Education with close ties to the New Haven mayor and to Ford Foundation 

leadership—to be the director, where he developed programs around education, job training, and employment 

opportunities, excluding “local schools, social service and health departments…and poor people themselves” from 

input into program design. Id. at 95. Sviridoff would go on to help draft the Economic Opportunity Act. George Adler, 

Community Action and Maximum Feasible Participation: An Opportunity Lost But Not Forgotten for Expanding 

Democracy at Home, 8 NOTRE DAME J.L. ETHICS & PUB. POL’Y 547, 568 (1994). 
117 

JEFF SHESOL, MUTUAL CONTEMPT: LYNDON JOHNSON, ROBERT KENNEDY, AND THE FEUD THAT DEFINED A 

DECADE 64-78 (1997). 
118 FERGUSON, supra note 106, at 62-63; MICHAEL L. GILLETTE, LAUNCHING THE WAR ON POVERTY: AN ORAL 

HISTORY 1-10 (2d ed., 2010); Sundquist, supra note 97, at 21. 
119 ZAREFSKY, supra note 96, at 24-25. 
120 Historian Michael Katz argues that the War on Poverty was principally a response to three major civil rights 

events of 1963: the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist 

Church in Birmingham that killed four Black girls. MICHAEL B. KATZ, THE UNDESERVING POOR: AMERICA’S 

ENDURING CONFRONTATION WITH POVERTY 106-10 (2d ed. 2013). 



1303 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

national party’s support, tepid as it was, for integration.121 Johnson wanted to act quickly, with the 

country saddened by Kennedy’s death and the next presidential election just a year away.122 Less 

than two months later, President Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America” 

in his January 1964 State of the Union address.123 He quickly appointed Sargent Shriver, 

Kennedy’s brother-in-law and the first leader of the Peace Corps, to lead a task force to develop 

legislation toward that end.124 Shriver enlisted the support of Adam Yarmolinsky from the 

Department of Defense, Daniel Moynihan from the Department of Labor, and James Sundquist 

from the Department of Agriculture to be his initial team to prepare the bill, but that group would 

expand to include people from across the administration, along with outside urbanists, some 

affiliated with the Ford Foundation.125 

The bill this team drafted, which became the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (the “EOA”), 

marked a sharp break from past anti-poverty initiatives. It was focused not on welfare, but on 

enhancing opportunity and preparing people to take advantage of those opportunities, and it 

envisioned the War on Poverty being fought mostly within low-income communities 

themselves.126 The bill was a hodgepodge of programs: job training and education, college work- 

study programs, adult education programs, programs for children in poverty, a loan program for 

rural families and assistance for migrant agricultural workers, funding for very small businesses, 

and the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program, a sort of domestic Peace Corps.127 

Hackett and Boone from the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime 

suggested that community organizations play a role in the effort,128 and Heller and Shriver agreed 

to support a “community action” pilot that, like Gray Areas and MFY, would help coordinate funds 

outside of city bureaucracies.129 

But in the hurried drafting process, this “community action” component of the EOA changed 

from a small pilot program to become the key mechanism that held together all of the disparate 

EOA programs.130 Johnson promoted the draft legislation as a more conservative program than 

cash assistance to help the poor: it would not be a handout but would instead create new 

 

121 ZAREFSKY, supra note 96, at 24-25. The Democratic Party had been somewhat non-committal on civil rights 

issues because they were controversial and divided the party’s support, but the growing civil rights movement, the 

controversy over Brown v. Board of Education, and the Montgomery bus boycott pushed the party to offer limited 

support for civil rights, causing them to lose white voters in the South and making Democratic constituencies in urban 

areas in the North electorally essential, ultimately leading to a “rapid-fire…series of service programs for the ‘inner 

city.’” FRANCES FOX PIVEN & RICHARD A. CLOWARD, REGULATING THE POOR: THE FUNCTIONS OF PUBLIC WELFARE 

251-56 (1971). Many Republicans saw the War on Poverty as pure politics, just an attempt to “buy” the votes of the 

poor. MARK MCLAY, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE WAR ON POVERTY 14 (2021). 
122 Sundquist, supra note 97, at 25. 
123 President Lyndon Baines Johnson, Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union (Jan. 8, 1964), 

https://www.lbjlibrary.org/object/text/annual-message-congress-state-union-01-08-1964. Kennedy and members of 

his Council of Economic Advisors (“CEA”) had been inspired to take action against persistent poverty prior to the 

assassination, in part because of Heller’s influence. ZAREFSKY, supra note 96, at 24-25. 
124 Sundquist, supra note 97, at 25; Martha J. Bailey & Nicolas J. Duquette, How Johnson Fought the War on 

Poverty: The Economics and Politics of Funding at the Office of Economic Opportunity, 74 J. ECON. HIST. 351, 355- 

357 (2014). 
125 JOHN C. DONOVAN, THE POLITICS OF POVERTY 29-30 (1967). 
126 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 109. 
127 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-452, 78 Stat. 508 (1964). 
128 Sundquist, supra note 97, at 22-23. 
129 Adam Yarmolinsky, The Beginnings of OEO, in ON FIGHTING POVERTY: PERSPECTIVES FROM EXPERIENCE 

34, 35 (James L. Sundquist ed., 1969). 
130 Robert L. Rabin, Federal Regulation in Historical Perspective, 38 STAN. L. REV. 1189, 1273 (1986). 

http://www.lbjlibrary.org/object/text/annual-message-congress-state-union-01-08-1964


2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1304 
 

 

opportunities, turning “tax-eaters into taxpayers.”131 The EOA’s focus on poverty without any 

mention of race, civil rights, or cash assistance allowed the Johnson Administration the political 

flexibility to portray the bill as totally race-neutral or as deeply connected to their civil rights 

agenda, depending on their audience.132 

President Johnson and Shriver urged Congressional Democrats to reject Republican 

amendments to the bill and the EOA was approved with relatively little controversy and signed 

into law in August 1964.133 The EOA would come to be viewed as the central initiative of the War 

on Poverty, “the most dramatic and highly publicized of the Great Society’s programs.”134 CAP 

quickly became the most controversial part of the EOA, one that would receive $2.64 billion (over 

$25 billion in current dollars), half of the EOA’s funding between 1965 and 1968.135 

The statutory language of CAP authorizes the creation and funding of “community action 

programs” that (1) use public or private resources in a geographical area (2) to provide services to 

work toward the alleviation of poverty, that (3) are “developed, conducted, and administered with 

the maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served,” 

and (4) are administered by one or more public or private nonprofit agencies.136 Much depends on 

the third prong of that definition—the “maximum feasible participation” of residents in 

communities that would receive funding. But within the Johnson Administration, there was little 

consensus on how, exactly, “maximum feasible participation” would work.137 

The group drafting the legislation, many of whom would take positions within the federal body 

administering the EOA, the Office of Economic Opportunity (“OEO”), after the EOA’s passage, 

did not agree on the goals for CAP: some thought it could be a planning mechanism, some saw it 

as a way of encouraging productive experimentation, some as a way to coordinate the work of 

local government and other interests in a new, less bureaucratic forum, and some as a form of 

social therapy that would energize apathetic local residents.138 The details of “community action 

simply [were] not much on the minds” of the drafters of this legislation, even though they made 

CAP central to its operations.139 

Many of the drafters were influenced by “culture of poverty” arguments or otherwise had 

paternalistic assumptions that low-income communities of color would be apathetic and lack the 

kind of community pride that would lead to meaningful participation in CAP. These assumptions 

led the Johnson Administration to ignore basic questions about how participation in CAP would 
 

131 President Johnson, telephone conversation with House Appropriations Committee Chair George Mahon (Jul. 

29, 1964), https://lbjtapes.org/conversation/turning-tax-eaters-taxpayers. The term “tax-eaters” was coined by Ludwig 

von Mises in 1953, who used it to refer to the railways in the mixed economies of Europe and the subsidized New 

York City subway, contrasting them with private U.S. railways that did not rely on public support but charged market 

prices to cover their expenses. LUDWIG VON MISES, ECONOMIC FREEDOM AND INTERVENTIONISM 73-75 (1990). 

Private U.S. railroads would be bailed out by the government in the Rail Passenger Service Act, which created Amtrak. 

Pub. L. 91–518, 84 Stat. 1327 (1970). 
132 To white audiences, EOA allowed “the monetary costs of fighting poverty to substitute for the high emotional 

costs involved in combating racial prejudice. The white liberal, the urban public official, and the southern politician 

all benefited from the exchange.” ZAREFSKY, supra note 96, at 31. But in discussions with Black leaders, Shriver 

frequently linked the EOA with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the two pieces of legislation were discussed as 

directly related in Congressional debates. Id. at 32. 
133 DONOVAN, supra note 125, at 33-36. 
134 SAR A. LEVITAN, THE GREAT SOCIETY’S POOR LAW: A NEW APPROACH TO POVERTY 3 (1969). 
135 Bailey & Duquette, supra note 124, at 358-360. 
136 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-452, § 202 (1964). 
137 ZAREFSKY, supra note 96, at 33; Melish, supra note 99, at 18. Yarmolinsky, supra note 129, at 48. 
138 KATZ, supra note 120, at 124-25. 
139 DANIEL P. MOYNIHAN, MAXIMUM FEASIBLE MISUNDERSTANDING 86 (1969). 



1305 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

actually function: among the planners discussing the implementation of the mandate, “the question 

of resident control of community-action agencies never arose.”140 A participatory democracy that 

was collective, resident-led, and that looked anything like SNCC in its participatory processes was 

never considered as a possible outcome of requiring the “maximum feasible participation” of low- 

income people in the decisions impacting their communities. They simply “believed that poor 

people lacked the will and organizational capacity to use this power to help themselves.”141 The 

Johnson Administration envisioned planning would largely happen in a top-down manner, 

imagining that the first step would be an expert-driven study of local poverty, identification of the 

areas of the greatest need, and then planning a specific program for those areas, connecting schools, 

social services, job opportunities, and local political leadership.142 

Daniel Moynihan called their approach the “professionalization of reform,” which he saw as a 

move away from an older, naively populist model of social change in which “the impulse to 

reform…[comes] those groups most oppressed by existing conditions, or most likely to benefit 

from equitable change.”143 Moynihan imagined a government that would not need to hear from 

oppressed or marginalized people at all; developing mechanisms for social change would come 

from “persons whose profession was to do just that.”144 

The drafters’ goal for the “maximum feasible participation” mandate should be understood in 

the context of this model of “professional” reform in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. 

The role of the community in CAP was, at most, expected to be an important but minimal check 

on top-down planning: some “voices representing the poor” would be included in the process to 

keep the planners “’honest’ to its purposes.”145 CAP was premised on an expert-led, centralized 

local authority that could fairly and objectively understand community issues, make decisions 

about what was best for the community, and then leverage its power and influence to coordinate 

the work of other public and private agencies in furtherance of its program with a minimum of 

bureaucratic delays.146 By “maximum feasible participation,” the executive branch had a fantasy 

of “the local principal, the minister, the settlement house director, the head of the tenant’s union, 

the articulate welfare mother, the bright ex-convict who is a neighborhood leader”147 sitting with 

planners appointed by city leaders to offer support for their benevolent ideas. It was a vision of an 

orderly, controlled form of participation “conceived in a mood of political optimism which 

bordered on naivete.”148 

The top-down assumptions of the bill’s drafters were mirrored in the funding structure of CAP, 

which is based on the near-total discretion of the OEO director to “allocate and expend, or transfer 

 

140 Sanford Kravitz, The Community Action Program—Past Present, and Its Future?, in ON FIGHTING POVERTY: 

PERSPECTIVES FROM EXPERIENCE 52, 62 (James L. Sundquist ed., 1969). 
141 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 107. 
142 Kravitz, supra note 140, at 60. 
143 MOYNIHAN, supra note 139, at 21. 
144 Id. at 23. President Kennedy seemed inclined toward this model as well; he brought friends, consultants, 

experts, and colleagues, many from academia or other elite institutions to help develop this kind of “professional” 

reform. Even before he was elected, his advisors were called a new “brain trust” in a reference to Roosevelt’s New 

Deal-Era “brain trust.” See H.M., The Democratic Convention: Kennedy’s Brain Trust and His Plans for a “New” 

New Deal, SCIENCE, Jul. 22, 1960, at 209 (describing advisors Archibald Cox, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur 

Schlesinger, among other intellectuals and policy experts around Kennedy). 
145 Kravitz, supra note 140, at 60. 
146 Id. 
147 John G. Wofford, The Politics of Local Responsibility: Administration of the Community Action Program— 

1964-1966, in ON FIGHTING POVERTY: PERSPECTIVES FROM EXPERIENCE 70, 101 (James L. Sundquist ed., 1969). 
148 DONOVAN, supra note 125, at 113. 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1306 
 

 

to other Federal agencies for expenditure, funds made available under this Act as he deems 

necessary.”149 Even before the passage of the EOA, Johnson had named Shriver for the role,150 a 

position that seemed to have nearly complete discretion to make funding decisions based on “the 

incidence of poverty within the community…and the extent to which the applicant is in a position 

to utilize efficiently and expeditiously the assistance for which application is made.”151 

 

III. Two Ideas of Participatory Democracy Collide 

Applications for CAP funding began to come in to the OEO soon after the EOA was passed, 

largely from “the usual array of public officials and civic leaders,”152 who began discussing their 

proposals with OEO staff in the second half of 1964.153 OEO staff were directed to ask “whether 

representatives of the poor had participated in developing the proposed program to the ‘maximum 

extent’ feasible,” and the response from most local government insiders was that they did all they 

could, no matter how little that was; after all, part of the mandate was to have these programs use 

their funding “efficiently and expeditiously,”154 and, of course, “you can’t have unqualified people 

running good programs.”155 

At first, such answers were acceptable to the OEO.156 But after a few months, complaints about 

the process started to roll in.157 First they came from established national organizations like the 

NAACP and the Urban League, who wanted to be consulted.158 But soon demands to fulfill the 

“maximum feasible participation” mandate grew “angrier” and came from “entirely new 

groups.”159 This is where the influence of the participatory democracy that had been simmering in 

countless local groups influenced by SNCC, the sit-in movement, Highlander, and SDS collided 

with the expectations of the Johnson Administration experts, as suddenly, all around the country, 

“[B]lack communities organized and demanded authority over the program’s priorities and 

decision-making.”160 

The OEO felt that it could not simply ignore the “maximum feasible participation” mandate, 

and by Spring 1965, it began to suggest that community action programs “include approximately 

one-third representation of low-income groups, chosen wherever feasible in accordance with 

‘democratic techniques.’”161 For many communities distrustful of urban antipoverty programs 

after segregation, redlining, and Urban Renewal, communities that were promised they would have 

the “maximum feasible participation” in these new programs, this was not good enough. Elected 

officials and OEO leaders were flooded with complaints about CAP that spring and summer, about 

 

149 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-452, § 602(h) (1964). 
150 Yarmolinsky, supra note 129, at 47. 
151 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-452, § 205(c) (1964). 
152 Audrey G. McFarlane, When Inclusion Leads to Exclusion: The Uncharted Terrain of Community 

Participation in Economic Development, 66 BROOK. L. REV. 861, 872 (2001). 
153 Wofford, supra note 147, at 80. 
154 Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-452, § 205(c) (1964). 
155 FISHER, supra note 105, at 124 (quoting the Mayor of Nashville); Wofford, supra note 147, at 80. 
156 FISHER, supra note 105, at 124. 
157 MORONE, supra note 79, at 228. 
158 Id. 
159 Id. 
160 McFarlane, supra note 152, at 872. 
161 Paul E. Peterson & J. David Greenstone, Rapid Change and Citizen Participation: The Mobilization of Low- 

Income Communities through Community Action, in A DECADE OF FEDERAL ANTIPOVERTY PROGRAMS: 

ACHIEVEMENTS, FAILURES, AND LESSONS 241, 257 (Robert H. Haveman ed., 1977). 



1307 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

the “failure of the ‘mayor’s committee’ to consult the residents of the area.”162 The complaints 

were so vocal and widespread that the House Labor and Public Welfare Committee demanded that 

the OEO permit community participation in “all levels and stages of planning and administration” 

of CAP.163 The OEO responded by making awards to some community groups wholly unaffiliated 

with local or state government leaders.164 

The idea of having “low-income, socially deprived” people—people of color in most cases— 

leading their own government-funded programs was a new development and, to many, a shocking 

one.165 Hundreds of independent community action programs were created and debates raged over 

how they would be run, who would serve on their non-profit Boards of Directors, and over the 

very meaning of participation itself.166 The community action programs formed in this period 

varied significantly, but a significant portion of these new groups were made up of a mobilized 

base of people of color that had familiarity with forms of organizing grounded in participatory 

democracy. As the welfare rights movement leader Johnnie Tillmon said: “Community action 

programs and agencies began to form and we began to participate. I’m sure whoever wrote those 

words ‘maximum feasible participation of the poor,’ wished they had not done that!’”167 As 

Tillmon implies, participants in community action programs who came out of social movements 

knew they were taking a more engaged, activist, collectivist approach to participation than was 

likely intended by the Johnson Administration.168 This was an opportunity to be heard, but it was 

more than that: it was an opportunity to receive resources that would be controlled by grassroots, 

participatory community groups to support their own neighborhoods. 

Just as the OEO was succumbing to pressure to more meaningfully live up to its commitment 

to grassroots participation in CAP in summer 1965, uprisings—and panicked responses to them— 

were capturing the national attention.169 Urban mayors, mostly Democrats, argued that the OEO 

was “undermining the integrity of local government.”170 The Mayors of San Francisco and Los 

Angeles spoke out against the OEO.171 In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley assumed that he would 

have de facto control of the local Community Action Agency; he appointed political allies to its 
 

 

162 FISHER, supra note 105, at 124-25; Wofford, supra note 147, at 80. 
163 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 110. 
164 Id. at 109. 
165 Peterson & Greenstone, supra note 161, at 257-58. 
166 McFarlane, supra note 152, at 873. 
167 PREMILLA NADSEN, WELFARE WARRIORS: THE WELFARE RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES 34 

(2005) (quoting an interview of Johnnie Tillmon by Hobart A. Burch, from the papers of the National Welfare Rights 

Organization’s George Wiley). 
168 Id. at 247 n.150. 
169 Urban uprisings—“ghetto riots” in the popular language of the 1960s—can be dated to 1963 and 1964. In the 

Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, police attacked peaceful protesters, including children, with dogs, firehoses, 

and cattle prods, and local white residents shot at Black people and bombed residences and other parts of the Black 

community, killing four young girls in a Sunday School class in church. Some community members retaliated by 

attacking local white-owned businesses. NAT’L ADVISORY COMM’N ON CIV. DISORDERS, REPORT OF THE NATIONAL 

ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS 19 (1968). In July 1964, a 15-year-old Black student was killed by a 

police lieutenant, and Black communities in Brooklyn and Harlem battled police over six nights. Id. at 19-20. Other, 

smaller clashes arose in other cities, including Rochester, Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Chicago in 1964. Id. at 20. But 

the Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles in August 1965, in which the National Guard faced off against local residents, 

killing 34 people and arresting almost 4,000 more, was a shocking turn that captured the national attention and “evoked 

a new mood” across the country. Id. 
170 DONOVAN, supra note 125, at 54-56. 
171 FISHER, supra note 105, at 127. 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1308 
 

 

leadership, using CAP funds to extend his influence.172 The Woodlawn Organization, a South Side 

neighborhood coalition, complained that its groups were being shut out of CAP, and the OEO 

pressed Mayor Daley to reform.173 Daley responded by attacking the OEO at the annual meeting 

of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in 1965, accusing the OEO of engaging in “class struggle.”174 

Both the League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors began to advocate for limiting the 

participation of the poor in Community Action Agencies.175 

But groups coming out of, or influenced by, the participatory democratic frameworks of 

Highlander, SDS, and, above all, SNCC were trying to seize the opportunity for the movement.176 

SNCC developed a plan with CORE for a statewide Head Start program serving Black youth in 

Mississippi in 1965; it was funded by the OEO, then was protested by pro-segregation Mississippi 

Senators John Stennis and James Eastland, who complained that the OEO was being politicized 

and mismanaged.177 Seeking to mollify Southern leaders, the OEO clawed back that funding and 

awarded it to another organization to run an almost identical program, leading to further 

accusations of politicization.178 Community action programs in cities in the Northeast and on the 

West Coast became targets for various leftist and Black Power groups. In San Francisco, political 

contests between these groups and city officials “expanded the social revolution in San Francisco 

into a chain reaction of unrest.”179 In Oakland, Newark, New York, and Syracuse, movement 

groups sought federal funds for political organizing and movement building—to pay movement 

organizers, not fund social service programs.180 

MFY’s “neighborhood service center” model was originally funded by the Ford Foundation to 

provide community services and support in an accessible way, by putting one-stop service 

providers directly in commercial corridors in low-income neighborhoods.181 As this model spread 

to other cities and received CAP funding, staff in neighborhood service centers saw that many 

problems in low-income communities were rooted in exploitation and discrimination by local 

landlords, local merchants, local police, local welfare offices, and local elected officials—the 

centers of power in their neighborhoods.182 Caseworkers in neighborhood service centers, often 

college students or recent graduates who may have been involved in SDS or other student 

movement groups, started to reject social work approaches that saw the problems of the poor as 

rooted in individual pathologies and began to look for opportunities for group advocacy.183 Now 

with CAP funding, these federally-funded centers “began to organize the poor to picket public 

welfare departments and boycott school systems…[l]ocal officials were flabbergasted.”184 At 

MFY, federal CAP funding was used to support community-driven rent strikes, protests in the 

offices of elected officials, and legal actions against the welfare department and the police.185 Two 
 

172 Adler, supra note 116, at 556. 
173 Id. at 557. 
174 Id. 
175 FISHER, supra note 105, at 126-27. 
176 KRASOVIC, supra note 111, at 7 (arguing that “opening up the state to a broad [community 

participation]…especially in the years of the modern [B]lack freedom struggle…was an invitation to conflict”). 
177 Adler, supra note 116, at 553-55. 
178 Id. 
179 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 124. 
180 Id. at 124-25. 
181 Id. at 102-03. 
182 Id.; Rabin, supra note 130, at 1276. 
183 NADSEN, supra note 167, at 36. 
184 PIVEN & CLOWARD, supra note 120, at 266. 
185 Id. 



1309 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

years after inspiring a major national program, the New York Daily News declared MFY to be 

“infested with Commies and Commie sympathizers.”186 A 1966 Comment in Yale Law Journal 

concluded that “maximum feasible participation” had come “to signify a militant slum 

organization, asserting its members’ interests against the mayor...By now, [EOA] section 202(a)(3) 

has been widely interpreted as a mandate for the OEO to finance these militant organizations.”187 

Even to the Johnson Administration’s political allies, it looked like an “ugly process,” in which 

encouraging participation had led CAP to become “a forum for dissent” against the power 

structures in low-income communities of color.188 

 

IV. The Johnson Administration Tries to Take Back Control Through a Series of 

Tools that Became the Blueprint for the Non-Profit Industrial Complex 

 

The response from both the OEO and Congress was to quickly try to take back control of the 

situation, using any tools they could. The OEO began to create exceptions to its own policies, both 

officially and unofficially. It backed away from its openness to community-driven initiatives.189 It 

made private arrangements with mayors to have any CAP grants being considered for their cities 

be cleared through their offices.190 It started to borrow from funds allocated to CAP to pay for 

more popular OEO programs like Head Start without Congressional authorization.191 It declared 

it would not fund partisan political activity or organizations that were “subversive” or “not of good 

character.”192 Shriver appeared before the House Education and Labor Subcommittee ready to 

accept tighter federal controls on CAP programs, like regular federal audits and evaluations, 

Congressional oversight of their hiring and pay policies, restrictions on political activities, and 

limits on administrative expenses.193 

The Johnson Administration also pushed new programs through Congress that were similar to 

CAP that ran parallel to it, but with significantly more control reserved for the federal government 

and private business interests. The 1966 Special Impact Program was an amendment to the EOA, 

written by Robert Kennedy after he visited Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and saw the community 

economic development efforts being coordinated there by a coalition of groups called the Central 

Brooklyn Coordinating Council.194 The Special Impact Program allocated funding specifically to 

support community development corporations, non-profit organizations that sought to aid urban 

redevelopment, including through small business support and other kinds of economic 

development.195 Instead of mandating the maximum feasible participation of the low-income 

communities being served, the Special Impact Program required the “maximum participation of 

businessmen by their inclusion on boards of directors, advisory councils, or other appropriate 

means.”196 
 

186 FISHER, supra note 105, at 126. 
187 Participation of the Poor: Section 202(a)(3) Organizations Under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, 75 

YALE L.J. 599, 610 (1966). 
188 DONOVAN, supra note 125, at 70-71. 
189 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 111. 
190 FISHER, supra note 105, at 127. 
191 DONOVAN, supra note 125, at 82. 
192 FISHER, supra note 105, at 127. 
193 DONOVAN, supra note 125, at 66. 
194 FRANKLIN A. THOMAS, AN UNPLANNED LIFE: A MEMOIR 33-41 (2022). 
195 NEAL R. PEIRCE & CAROL F. STEINBACH, CORRECTIVE CAPITALISM: THE RISE OF AMERICA’S COMMUNITY 

DEVELOPMENT CORPORATIONS 20 (1987). 
196 Financing and Operating Community Development Corporation Business Activity, 83 HARV. L. REV. 1592, 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1310 
 

 

The Model Cities program was created by the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan 

Development Act of 1966, and it became the first program of a new federal agency, the Department 

of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”).197 It aimed to fund community development using 

a totally opposite set of beliefs from those at the heart of CAP: Model Cities provided funding to 

strengthen local government agencies serving low-income neighborhoods in the belief that their 

main problem was not any bureaucratic dysfunction, but simply a lack of adequate funding.198 The 

“maximum feasible participation” requirement in CAP was scaled back to “widespread citizen 

participation”199 in Model Cities, and this was interpreted to be a substantial change; HUD only 

reserved a limited, advisory role for local residents in Model Cities programs and, in most cities, 

proposals were created Mayoral staff.200 

In the 1966 mid-term election, 45 Congressmembers who supported the OEO were defeated, 

and 45 Republicans who opposed increases in antipoverty spending were elected; this new 

Congress would take further action to rein in CAP as well.201 Democratic Congressmember Edith 

Green of Oregon offered an amendment to a 1967 appropriations bill that required all community 

action programs: (1) be officially designated by state or local government and (2) have Boards of 

Directors comprised of no more than 51 people, made up of 1/3 public officials, 1/3 representatives 

of business, labor, civic, and charitable groups, and 1/3 democratically selected representatives of 

the target areas.202 In effect, the “Green Amendment” changed the mandate from “maximum 

feasible participation” to one in which representatives of low-income communities would be 

limited to 1/3 of the votes within a body that made decisions by majority rule.203 The Green 

Amendment was followed by much closer regulation of the whole CAP program. In 1966, all CAP 

funds except Head Start were discretionary, and community action programs could use them in 

any approved program.204 By 1968, 60% of all CAP funds were directed to specific “national 

emphasis” programs—principally Upward Bound,205 Manpower Development and Training,206 

and Legal Services207—with most of the rest of CAP funds going to administrative salaries and 
 

1595-1600 (1970) (citing 42 U.S.C. § 2765(a)(2), (3)). 
197 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, Pub. L. 89-754 (1966). HUD was created 

by two 1965 laws, the Housing and Urban Development Act and the Department of Housing and Urban Development 

Act. HUD had consolidated under its authority the Federal Housing Administration, the Urban Renewal 

Administration, and the Community Facilities Administration, along with an increase in funding for its programs. 

Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-117, 79 Stat. 451 (1965); Department of Housing and Urban 

Development Act, Pub. L. 89-174, 79 Stat. 667 (1965). 
198 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 118. 
199 Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, Pub. L. 89-754, tit. I, § 101, 80 Stat. 1255 

(1966). 
200 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 122; McFarlane, supra note 152, at 875-76. 
201 ZAREFSKY, supra note 96, at 79. 
202 FISHER, supra note 105, at 127. 
203 Id. at 127-28. 
204 Id. at 128. 
205 Upward Bound is a college and career readiness program that was originally part of the Higher Education Act 

of 1965, Pub.L. 89-329, Title IV, § 302C, codified as amended at 20 U.S.C. § 1070a-13 (2008). 
206 The Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962 was a job training initiative for unemployed workers 

passed during the Kennedy Administration that has subsequently been repealed. 42 U.S.C. §§ 2571-2574, repealed, 

Pub. L. 93-203, Title VII § 714, formerly title VI, § 614, Dec. 28, 1973, 87 Stat. 883; renumbered title VII, § 714, 

Pub. L. 93-567, title I, § 101, Dec. 31, 1974, 88 Stat. 1845. 
207 The idea of providing federal funding for civil legal services was popular with the Ford Foundation and some 

of the reformers that were in and around the Kennedy and Johnston Administrations; the program was not included in 

the original text of the EOA, but Edgar and Jean Cahn’s 1964 The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective described 

the idea of neighborhood law offices for poor people and convinced Shriver to include legal services as an activity 



1311 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

overhead, not community-designed or community-directed programs.208 

Community action programs originally funded in late 1964 and 1965 to promote community 

participation and decrease bureaucracy were quickly burdened by a whole set of new requirements. 

Neighborhood service centers created to make accessing information about available social 

services programs as easy as a trip to the local commercial corridor found themselves 

“increasingly…worrying about caseloads, restricting eligibility, specializing in particular kinds of 

counseling, and so forth.”209 With the increased emphasis on the Special Impact Program and 

Model Cities, the OEO split off possible opportunities for community organizing within CAP from 

service provision and the community development of Model Cities and the Special Impact 

Program, programs that were “no longer seen as vehicles for community control but instead…for 

‘community-based’ activities like housing or ‘development.”210 Community development groups 

may have “had their roots” in “radicals storming city hall…civil rights marches, anti-Vietnam 

protests…and distrust of anyone in a business suit,” but by the 1970s and 1980s, at least for many 

community development groups, that radical past became “as much history for them as for the rest 

of American society.”211 What remained of CAP became seen by many low-income community 

residents as “part of the problem, another service agency.”212 The grantmaking functions of the 

OEO survived for a while, but became closely regulated and watched rather than community- 

designed and participatory, just another program to regulate the lives of low-income communities 

of color.213 

As the Johnson Administration and, later, Congress backed away from the “maximum feasible 

participation” commitment, they deployed quite varied tactics to regulate the programs they were 

funding. These tactics became the essential technologies of the non-profit industrial complex. They 

stripped groups of funding.214 They required Boards and organizational leaders be comprised of 

people palatable to elected officials.215 They blocked groups they deemed to be too partisan, too 
 

that could be funded under the act. Alan W. Houseman, Civil Legal Assistance for Low-Income Persons: Looking 

Back and Looking Forward, 29 FORDHAM URB. L.J. 1213, 1213 (2002); Alan W. Houseman, To Establish Justice for 

All: The Past and Future of Civil Legal Aid in the United States, 23 GEO. J. ON POVERTY L. & POL’Y 325, 329-30 

(2016). See Edgar S. Cahn & Jean C. Cahn, The War on Poverty: A Civilian Perspective, 73 YALE L.J. 1317 (1964). 

Civil legal services was added to amendments to the EOA in 1966 and 1967, and today exists as the Legal Services 

Corporation Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2996 - §§ 2996l (1977). 
208 FISHER, supra note 105, at 128. 
209 HALPERN, supra note 110, at 113. 
210 JAMES DEFILIPPIS, UNMAKING GOLIATH: COMMUNITY CONTROL IN THE FACE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL 47 (2004). 
211 PEIRCE & STEINBACH , supra note 195, at 8. Peirce and Steinbach represent the views of a certain segment of 

CED practitioners, but, as I have argued elsewhere, “to frame all of CED as a tool of the Ford Foundation and 

governmental agencies comes too close to stripping low-income communities of color of their agency.” Michael 

Haber, Transactional Clinical Support for Mutual Aid Groups: Toward a Theory of Transactional Movement 

Lawyering, 68 WASH. U. J. L. & POL’Y 215, 241 (2022) A more complete view of contemporary CED practices could 

be defined as “the set of practices that emerged from the tension between the interests of the powerful governmental 

and private funders that sought to simultaneously fund and control CED programs, on the one hand, and the interests 

of community activists and community organizations seeking to leverage those funds…while bending as little as 

possible…on the other.” Id. 
212 JAMES LEIBY, THE HISTORY OF SOCIAL WELFARE AND SOCIAL WORK IN THE UNITED STATES 338 (1978). 
213 The OEO survived in this weakened state until 1981, when its grantmaking functions were transferred to the 

Office of Community Services within HUD. 42 U.S.C. § 9805-9807 (1981). 
214 See supra note 178 and accompanying text. For a similar argument from the non-profit industrial complex 

literature, see Smith, supra note 7, at 1-2 (describing the sudden revocation of a grant due to a funder’s opposition to 

a statement on their website). 
215 See supra note 192 and accompanying text. For a similar argument from the non-profit industrial complex 

literature, see ANA CLARISSA ROJAS DURAZO, “We Were Never Meant to Survive”: Fighting Violence Against Women 



2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1312 
 

 

political, or otherwise “subversive.”216 They closely tracked numerical outcomes and eligibility 

criteria and demanded significant organizational time be spent on such policing of eligibility.217 

They narrowed what could qualify for funding.218 And they split politicized community organizing 

from “community based” service provision, and reserved almost all funding for the latter.219 

Over time, many who had hoped to plant real democratic seeds in their communities ended up 

taking official positions as “model-cities directors, or community-action executives—that is, they 

became government employees or contractors, subject to the constraints of federal funding and 

federal guidelines.”220 Some participatory groups that once wanted to collectively determine where 

funds would go in their communities developed into hierarchical groups “vying for position and 

patronage within the urban political system.”221 Some of those groups’ leaders would even go on 

to seek elected office, completing the process of converting participatory democratic group leaders 

into elected officials, “absorbing and directing many of the agitational elements in the [B]lack 

population.”222 

When social movement groups talk about the non-profit industrial complex, these are the kinds 

of tactics that they mean. Together, they manipulate social movement groups, funneling their 

energies into service provision and paperwork, encouraging their leaders into non-profit sector and 

government careers, pushing them to be more receptive to partnerships with businesses and to 

become more businesslike themselves.223 Participatory democratic groups that engage with the 

non-profit industrial complex encounter a dizzying set of false hopes, setbacks, changing 

requirements, funds clawed back and visions compromised, little of it transparent, little even done 

legislatively. In CAP, an innovative, participatory antipoverty program was created by the 

executive branch almost by accident, as it rushed to build something without an appreciation for 

 

and the Fourth World War, in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL 

COMPLEX 113, 117-19 (INCITE! WOMEN OF COLOR AGAINST VIOLENCE ed., 2d ed. 2017) (describing how funding 

for community groups led to women’s anti-violence groups becoming more hierarchical, hierarchies that usually 

recreate “social axes of inequality such as class, race, nationality, sexuality, and ability.”) 
216 See supra note 192 and accompanying text. For a similar argument from the non-profit industrial complex 

literature, see Alisa Bierria, Pursuing a Radical Antiviolence Agenda Inside/Outside a Non-Profit Structure, in THE 

REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 151, 156 (INCITE! Women 

of Color Against Violence ed., 2d ed. 2017) (describing an effort to strip a group’s funding because an elected official 

took issue with the use of the phrase “rape culture” in their materials). 
217 See supra note 209 and accompanying text. For a similar argument from the non-profit industrial complex 

literature, see JENNIFER R. WOLCH, THE SHADOW STATE, GOVERNMENT AND VOLUNTARY SECTOR IN TRANSITION 15 

(1990) (describing the increasing reliance on “stringent, rigid, and quantitatively oriented approaches” to funding, 

which undermines the autonomy of non-profit groups). 
218 See supra notes 204-208 and accompanying text. For a similar argument from the non-profit industrial 

complex literature, see Nicole Burrowes et al., On Our Own Terms: Ten Years of Radical Community Building with 

Sista II Sista, in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 227, 229 

(INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence ed., 2d ed. 2017) (describing how ideas that were once seen as new and 

innovative became, in an increasingly conservative political climate, “threatening and ‘unfundable’”). 
219 See supra note 210 and accompanying text. For a similar argument from the non-profit industrial complex 

literature, see Paul Kivel, Social Service or Social Change, in THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE FUNDED: BEYOND THE 

NON-PROFIT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX 129, 136-37 (INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence ed., 2d ed. 2017) 

(arguing that government and foundations help maintain the social order by supporting service provision that is 

“severely underfunded and overregulated” but always just service provision that never quite turns to address “the 

structural issues as required to actually eliminate the injustice or inequality.”) 
220 PIVEN & CLOWARD, supra note 120, at 274-75. 
221 Id. at 275. 
222 Id. at 275-76. 
223 See supra note 4 and accompanying text. 



1313 COLUM. J. RACE & L. [Vol. 15:1285 
 

 

 

the radical potential of participatory democracy. To diffuse that energy, the Johnson 

Administration quickly had to scale back and chip away and what it had just offered, using a series 

of techniques that became the blueprint for the non-profit industrial complex, techniques that 

remain widely used by government and private funders of community organizations to this day. 

 

Conclusion 

Scholarly analyses of the non-profit industrial complex largely focus on how these mechanisms 

have often constrained and tamed social movements by pushing them into acceptable, depoliticized 

forms of action. The history of how a number of the techniques of the non-profit industrial complex 

were developed by the executive branch when it sought to constrain participatory democratic 

grassroots groups involved in CAP reveals both the social function of the non-profit industrial 

complex and the potential threat to entrenched power that grassroots participatory democracy 

continues to possess. But in this historical moment, as the U.S. moves increasingly toward 

oligarchy and autocracy,224 the stakes of the non-profit industrial complex are increasingly stark. 

The Johnson administration developed these tools to try to control the radical, 

Deweyan participatory democratic impulses of grassroots 1960s movements that had somewhat 

accidentally been allowed to take a meaningful role within CAP and, through it, the War on 

Poverty, and to restore control back to the executive branch. In so doing, it created a blueprint for 

how elite institutions could exert control over the grassroots, preserving and even expanding their 

own power in the process. In the ensuing decades, this relationship increasingly became the norm. 

Tragically, however, this strategy ignored the deep interconnection between local, participatory 

democratic institutions and democratic states, one that has been discussed by social scientists and 

political theorists in all sorts of contexts.225 

As democratic institutions from apolitical community groups to labor unions to movement 

groups have been turned into hierarchical, professionally-managed, expert-led non-profits and 

 

224 See, e.g., President Joe Biden, Remarks by President Biden in a Farewell Address to the Nation (Jan. 15, 2025), 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a- 

farewell-address-to-the-nation/ (warning of a “an oligarchy…of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally 

threatens our entire democracy”); Steven Levitsky & Lucan A. Way, The Path to American Authoritarianism, 

FOREIGN AFF. (Feb. 11, 2025), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump; 

Lawrence Norden & Daniel I. Weiner, The Rise of America’s Broligarchy and What to do About It, TIME (Feb. 12, 

2025), https://time.com/7221154/rise-of-americas-broligarchy/; David Smith, “In a Real Sense, US Democracy Has 

Died”: How Trump is Emulating Hungary’s Orbán, Guardian (Feb. 7, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/us- 

news/2025/feb/07/trump-viktor-orban-electoral-autocracy. 
225 For example, Robert Putnam argues that the decline of fraternal membership organizations—as seemingly 

insignificant as the decline of recreational bowling leagues—has harmed U.S. democracy: “It is commonly assumed 

that cynicism toward government has caused our disengagement from politics, but the converse is just as likely: that 

we are disaffected because as we and our neighbors have dropped out, the real performance of government has 

suffered.” ROBERT D. PUTNAM, BOWLING ALONE: THE COLLAPSE AND REVIVAL OF AMERICAN COMMUNITY 347 

(2000). Emile Durkheim asserts that individual participation in “secondary groups” is essential to national coherence, 

arguing that “a nation can be maintained only if, between the state and the individual, there is a intercalated a whole 

series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag 

them, in this way, into the general torrent of social life.” EMILE DURKHEIM, THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN SOCIETY 28 

(1964). Similarly, John Stuart Mill argues that local, accessible forms of participatory democracy are a necessary 

precondition for the liberal state, writing that “as we do not learn to read or write, to ride or swim, by merely being 

told how to do it, but by doing it, so it is only by practicing popular government on a limited scale, that the people will 

ever learn how to exercise it on a larger.” JOHN STUART MILL, Tocqueville on Democracy in America, Vol. 1, in 

ESSAYS ON POLITICS AND CULTURE 173, 186 (Gertrude Himmelfarb ed., 1962). 

http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/path-american-authoritarianism-trump%3B
http://www.theguardian.com/us-


2025] WHEN THE EXECUTIVE 1314 
 

 

been drained of the power that comes from democratic participation, today, some of the very 

institutional actors that helped lay the groundwork for the non-profit industrial complex—private 

foundations,229 elite universities,230 and policy experts231—are themselves under attack. 

Unfortunately, like Pastor Niemöller, they may be realizing too late that their own past actions 

have helped to create a world in which there are very few popular, participatory organizations left 

to speak out for them.232 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

229 See, e.g., Drew Lindsey, Trump’s DEI Order Takes Aim and the Biggest Foundations. Here are the 346 that 

Could Face a Probe, CHRON. OF PHILANTHROPY (Feb. 27, 2025), https://www.philanthropy.com/article/these-346- 

foundations-are-candidates-for-a-trump-dei-investigation (noting the impact on the Ford Foundation and other major 

foundations). 
230 Notably, the second Trump Administration has singled out Columbia University, once the home of John 

Dewey, Richard Cloward, and Lloyd Ohlin, where Muste traveled to hear Dewey speak and where the ideas for MFY 

were theorized, for attack. See, e.g., Sharon Otterman, Trump Escalates Attack on Columbia by Threatening Its 

Accreditation, N.Y. TIMES (Jun. 4, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/nyregion/columbia-trump- 

accreditation-civil-rights.html. 
231 See, e.g., Jody Freeman & Sharon Jacobs, Structural Deregulation, 135 HARV. L. REV. 585, 615-20 

(describing efforts by the first Trump Administration to weaken agency expertise is an example of what the authors call 

“structural deregulation”). 
232 Pastor Martin Niemöller was a prominent German pastor with long-held anti-Semitic and anti-Communist 

views who became a vocal supporter of the Nazi party. After he gave a statement that was viewed as insufficiently 

supportive of the German government, he was deemed to have committed “underhand attacks against the State” and 

“abuse of the pulpit,” detained for seven months and, after being sentenced to, in effect, time served, he was taken 

from the court to the “protective custody” of the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. 

WILLIAM L. SHIRER, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY 208-212, 239 (1960). 

His post-war confessional, reflecting his own later-acknowledged complicity, became widely known as FIRST THEY 

CAME: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for 

the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I 

did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.” 

Martin Niemöller: “First They Came for…”, UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MUSEUM, HOLOCAUST ENCYCLOPEDIA, 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists. 

http://www.philanthropy.com/article/these-346-
http://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/nyregion/columbia-trump-