Addressing Inner City Issues

Cover of an ERAP

pamphlet circa 1964.

SDS and the War on Poverty

The Port Huron Statement touched on multiple fronts, including the urban crisis and the problem of poverty.  The SDS manifesto criticized “a national celebration of economic prosperity while poverty and deprivation remain an unbreakable way of life for millions in the ‘affluent society.’” Automation replaced workers with machines and facilitated the increase in unemployment. For SDS, achieving American democracy and expanding the civil rights movement to the North required a battle against poverty. The Port Huron statement blended separate issues into one common fight: “The fight against poverty, against slums, against the stalemated Congress, against McCarthyism, are all fights against the discrimination that is nearly endemic to all areas of American life.”  In these ways, the Port Huron Statement anticipated SDS’s formation of the Economic Research and Action Program, otherwise known as ERAP.  In his memoir, Tom Hayden wrote that ERAP “was a product of intense thinking about the intertwined issues of race and poverty and how to bring them to center stage in a nation consumed by the Cold War.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson delivering
the “War on Poverty” commencement
address at University of Michigan on
May 22, 1964.

SDS launched the ERAP initiative in the fall of 1963, four months before President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national “War on Poverty” in his State of the Union address. In May 1964, Johnson introduced his vision of a liberal “Great Society” in a commencement address at the University of Michigan. The president proclaimed that “the Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.”    

Anti-poverty activism built on the civil rights movement in the South, where Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was working with local black communities to address racial and socioeconomic discrimination.  SDS lacked this direct connection to communities outside the university and decided to apply these tactics to the urban North as well.  While SDS members worked on ERAP projects on the ground, the escalation of the war in Vietnam undermined Johnson’s commitment to the Great Society.  Todd Gitlin, the SDS president in 1963-1964, wrote that “his [Johnson’s] war also passed a death sentence on his Great Society. . . . Cold War liberalism was forced to choose between the two terms of its definition, and chose war.”   

Intellectual Origins

The leaders of SDS set forth the philosophy behind the ERAP mission in the 1963 document “America and the New Era.” This document argued that American intellectuals should focus on forming solutions to problems “with regards to poverty, unemployment, social services, public planning, education, cultural life, and housing.” It highlighted how the Civil Rights Movement did not adequately address the links between poverty and racial discrimination. SDS planned to confront the issue head-on with a comprehensive program working with the poor to combat the oppression of poverty. Several years before the anti-war movement, ERAP represented participatory democracy in action.

History and Legacy of ERAP

The Economic Research and Action Program began in September 1963. The United Automobile Workers initially funded ERAP through a grant. Recent UM graduates Tom Hayden and Sharon Jeffrey served on the executive committee, along with incoming SDS president Paul Potter.  Through ERAP, the New Left sought not only to assist in local communities but to lend the poor a voice and create a biracial movement of the poor.  The cities ERAP focused on included Chicago, Chester, Cleveland (where Potter and Jeffrey worked), Baltimore, Louisville, Newark (where Hayden and Carl Wittman worked), Philadelphia, and Trenton. Hayden, in a 2015 interview added that the “staff leadership were all our age and they had left campuses, they had been expelled from school, they were students and they were knocking on doors doing organizing.”

Sharon Jeffrey devoted the most attention of all SDS members to ERAP and one of the most active female members of SDS. She soon became the first full-time staff member of ERAP in Cleveland. (miller 185) Her Socialist politics, developed from her parents, left her unsatisfied with student organizations such as the Young Democrats until she met Al Haber, the first SDS president, when the organization remained under the LID umbrella. Al Haber represented what Jeffrey expected from a university: students guided by their human values working towards social reform. Sharon Jeffrey added that SDS “set an enormous amount of movement and change into action.”

Towards the end of the program in 1965, ERAP activists faced a moral dilemma: had the SDS members been imposing their New-Left values on the poor? Along with this, ERAP failed to confront the complexities of each community, and organizers became disillusioned by the tension between their lofty spirits and the harsh realities.  ERAP’s positive legacies include the fact that many of the New Left organizers stayed committed to anti-poverty activism, even while the Vietnam War escalated.  As an illustration of participatory democracy in action, ERAP represented “someplace to go when you left campus,” as Tom Hayden recalled in a 2015 interview.