What citizen participation was to the anti-poverty programs, community control was to Black Power activism. Its initial commitment to the recovery of direct democracy was followed by withdrawal from local political enfranchisement-a factor that triggered the piecemeal radicalization of urban Blacks. As soon as grassroots mobilization inspired the urban poor to affect change, the federal government retreated from its unprecedented support for participatory politics. Yet, recourse to participatory politics during the Johnson era, a fundamental tenet of the right to the city activism today, turned into a fleeting political concern with fleeting rewards to local communities. This ideological shift towards space-based politics and a recognition of the poor as collective political actors happened almost synchronously with Henri Lefebvre’s articulation of the right to the city idea in France. To achieve this the state would devolve some of its functions to the level of the local community, bypass the unresponsive and ossified state and municipal bureaucracies, and thus gradually dismantle the racial and power inequalities. Incremental urban regeneration was the War on Poverty’s professed goal. In that period, the federal government gave leeway to the local expression of collective grievances by encouraging the urban poor to become stakeholders in community-level politics. I am particularly interested in two 1960s federal War on Poverty programs and how they were related to black grassroots movements. It draws on the right to the city both as an ideal of urban governance and a critical perspective through which urban histories can be re-told and diverse social practices investigated. as one of the unacknowledged antecedents of today’s right to the city movements. 1This paper looks back to the 1960s Black Power Movement in the U.S.

Black power charles hamilton