Annelise Orleck. Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty.

Annelise Orleck. Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty. Boston: Beacon P, 2005, 368 pp. $20.00.

As former and current welfare recipient, single parent, college student and community activists, we are all too aware of the paradox through which recycled images of both the pathology and the victimization of profoundly poor women in the US permeate and shape our national consciousness. Reinforcing virulent racism, classism, sexism and homophobia, on the one hand, public images and rhetoric position us as victimizers, yoked to stories of "brood sows," "Welfare Queens," "unfit parents who view their children as nothing more than increases in welfare checks," "alligators," and "wolves who eat their young" (US Congressional record 1983, 1996 and 2002). On the other hand, allegedly more liberal assessments mark us as feckless victims; as static, ahistorical, passive, and hopeless casualties of poverty. For example, UC-Berkeley professor of Sociology Loic Waquant sympathetically laments "the despondency and rage ... the unstoppable downward spiral of deterioration of urban hellholes rife with deprivation, immorality and violence where only the outcasts of society would consider living" and from which-through noteworthy acts of heroism and exceptionalism--poor women and children can at best escape (1644).

Scholar and educator Joycelyn K. Moody recognizes that both frames do us harm. She notes:

   Enduring myths about welfare are rooted in racist ignorance and
   sustained by elitist ignorance of every sort: those myths injure
   and wound and scar. [Even] when feminists invoke cliches to hail
   the recognition of former welfare recipients as heroic "survivors,"
   they not only perpetuate racist and classist assumptions about
   poor women, they also finger the wound of victimization, oblivious
   to its raw-edged pain--or awestruck by it. (96)

In the evocative and powerfully written Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty, Annelise Orleck and the women whose stories she retells with precision and care, similarly refuse both positions. Storming Caesars Palace replaces these tropes with an exquisitely dense and multi-voiced history, the textual warp and weave of which is complex, multifaceted, and lovingly crafted. This communal biography moves fluidly among the political and the personal; structures of oppression and acts of resistance; public policies and the lives they impact; power, privilege, inequity, and justice. As such, it ruptures, by surpassing, traditional notions and narratives of poverty, welfare, and poor women. As Orleck reflects:

   The canvas of this story is broader than the Silver State and more
   complex than individual lives. Storming Caesars Palace is a
   chronicle of antipoverty policy in the US and poor people's
   political movements.... This book draws links between larger
   historical forces--economic shifts, national political debates,
   migration, urbanization--and the lived experience of poverty. (5-6)

As poor, single mothers coming to terms with the complexity and contradictions of our own experiences and recognizing the penalty we accrue as a result of widespread misrepresentation, what seems most crucial to us is that despite Orleck's complex, interdisciplinary, and myriad text, it is the "lived experiences of poverty and resistance" that remain central to the narrative of Storming Caesars Palace. This centrality we gratefully acknowledge as a testament to the respect and admiration that Orleck develops and maintains for the ethical and savvy welfare warriors she comes to know and reflect upon with such vigor, humor, and panache.

The development of this often neglected tale of poor women's resistance and empowerment has its immediate beginnings in the mid-century cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta, where as girls and young women the book's protagonists learned to work hard and to care and advocate for their families. Ruby Duncan began picking cotton and hoeing and planting corn full-time at age eight, to help feed her siblings. Rosie Seals and Alversa Beals tried to support their families by picking over 200 pounds of cotton each day as children, working from sun-rise to sun-set. Emma Stampley's childhood was filled with "unending work and life in the country that seemed to promise little" (29). These young girls also learned early lessons that allowed them to "navigate the dangerous and ever-shifting lines" of racism, sexism, and class oppression. Orleck points out that "elders in their communities modeled patterns of dignity and resistance that shaped these young girls' identities" (20).

Faced with continued poverty and financial insecurity, Delta migrants moved west in the 1950s and 1960s, along with thousands of other African Americans lured by the apocryphal promise of lucrative work in the "chrome and marble palaces" and defense plants of Jim Crow Nevada (53). But as Duncan, Seals, Beals, Stampley, and their neighbors soon realized, "Las Vegas was to be a white man's paradise" (50). The big hotels, where the bulk of the work force was made up of low-paid African American refugees from the cotton fields, as Essie Henderson quickly came to realize, were really just "shiny plantations" (58).

Working seasonally as maids and service workers, and living in the dilapidated and unsafe shacks and tents of Las Vegas's segregated Westside, these women struggled to survive on unlivable wages punctuated by bouts of unemployment. During these times, the women and their families were subjected to increasingly punitive and racist welfare policies, meant to control and punish rather than assist the poor (87). During the early 1970s as corrupt Nevada politicians and legislators worked to secure and increase their own profits and to establish Nevada as "a leader in the war on welfare," and as the nation embraced an ideology that blamed poor black mothers for most of the nation's postwar social and economic woes, these women mustered the strength, determination, and acumen to fight back.

Inspiring and organizing thousands of other Las Vegas welfare recipient mothers, Ruby Duncan--"a cotton picker turned hotel maid and mother of seven"--forged the lessons she learned in the rural south as a child, her experiences organizing for fair, anti-racist labor practices in the city, her commitment to poor women and children, and an uncanny political and media savvy, to literally shut down "The Strip" in an unprecedented act of civil disobedience. In the spring of 1971 she and her welfare warrior colleagues, supported by civil and legal rights advocates, members of the clergy, and even celebrities, staged a series of media protests beginning in Caesars Palace, then the most lavish casino hotel in town. The result was a protest that riveted the nation and pressured legislators in Nevada to overturn welfare policies that had been designed to make the state the most punitive in the nation.

Closing down the strip and forcing the hand of corrupt, myopic, and self-serving politicians and welfare administrators was only the beginning for this remarkable group of women. They began to study and use the law for social change, formed and secured federal funds for a highly successful anti-poverty organization called Operation Life, and created innovative and responsive medical, housing, childcare, job training, and business enterprises in west Las Vegas that enhanced the lives of hundreds of thousands of Nevada's poor. As Orleck reminds us, as a result of the work of these capable women, "Black and White Nevada welfare mothers worked together to eliminate state regulations they saw as cruel and capricious" (116), "challenged point for point the logic of Nevada's punitive welfare policies" (108), and improved the health, safety, and well-being of the citizens most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of mean-spirited and shortsighted public policy in the state. Over a 20-year period the welfare mothers who designed, funded, and ran Operation Life, assumed responsibility for

   Millions employed, fed, educated, and given medical treatment,
   neighborhoods at least partially rebuilt, and the political
   enfranchisement of poor people who became active in political
   parties and demanded a voice on welfare hearing boards, school
   boards, city councils, and county commissions. Federal poverty
   programs were not simply top-down manipulations but also
   invitations for the poor to become engaged at all levels of
   American politics. Their involvement generated turbulence and
   conflict in many cities, but it was a healthy, vigorously
   democratic process. (307)

Today, as the gap between the rich and the poor grows ever wider, the rhetoric and policy generated by our leaders and law makers reflect both an apathy about the poor and a newly found, overt--almost a proud--disdain and disregard for our lives and our futures. Senator Rick Santorum's sense that "making poor people struggle a little bit is not necessarily the worst thing" (305), is indicative of a growing national ethos that holds unbridled profit, financial gain, and conspicuous consumption sacrosanct while choosing to punish and discipline those who are somehow deemed failures of capitalism. Orleck's work in Storming Caesars Palace offers us an alternative model for understanding, and for fighting, in a way that affirms and supports poor families instead of demeaning and humiliating them. Ultimately, she succeeds in doing so by acknowledging and listening to "the real experts on poverty: poor mothers" (6).

As welfare warriors of the next generation, we are indebted to the women of west Las Vegas and Operation Life, and to Annelise Orleck for her meticulous sharing of their powerful stories. Storming Caesars Palace reminds us of the power and potential we hold but are constantly pressured to relinquish. By continuing to study critical race theory, law, language, representation, history, philosophy, psychology, and public policy as welfare recipient college students; by caring for and teaching our own children with love and dignity; and by working in our communities to effect social justice, we hope to respond to Orleck's implicit challenge to honor our foremothers by carrying on with strength, focus, and determination. We will do so, as Moody suggests, neither by positioning ourselves as fortunate, educated welfare recipients who are "exceptions," nor as "casualties of the latest 'war on the poor,'" but as "sufferers of it"--and, like the women of Storming Caesars Palace--"as proudly valiant soldiers against it" (96).

Works Cited

Moody, Joycelyn "To Be Young, Pregnant, and Black: My Life as a Welfare Coed." Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America. Eds. Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L. Dahlberg. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003.

US Congressional Record. 1983, 1996, 2002. <http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecordbound/index.html> 1 Nov. 2003.

Wacquant, Loic. "Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium." Urban Studies 36, 10 (1999): 163947.

Vivyan Adair with Paulette Brown, Jamie L. Clark, and Rosie Cotrich Perez

The ACCESS Project at Hamilton College