Naida García-Crespo on Casey D. Nichols’ *Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America*

Casey D. Nichols’ Poverty Rebels: Black and Brown Protest in Post-Civil Rights America examines the implementation of anti-poverty policies and programs during the mid and late 1960s in Los Angeles as a case study of how American binary conceptions of race affected activism in the years following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Nichols argues that ingrained social prejudices about how black and brown people related to state structures and the ways they performed activism created a misconception of racial competition, which is not necessarily supported by the facts.

By analyzing how different War on Poverty/Great Society programs were discussed, planned, and implemented in Los Angeles, Nichols seeks to explain how local activism shaped race relations and the development and implementation of local and federal policies. Specifically, Nichols looks at the Economics Opportunities Act, the Mexican-American Cabinet Committee on Mexican American Affairs, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and its Model Cities program, as key historical events that helped to structure black-brown relations in the United States along a sense of class solidarity. Nichols also argues that uprisings like the Watts Rebellion or the Chicano Moratorium Riot caused public attention to be directed at particular racial/ethnic communities and promoted or challenged conceptions of African-Americans as violent/active and Mexican-Americans as peaceful/passive.

Nichols’ most interesting contribution comes in Chapter Four when she discusses President Johnson’s courting of African-American and Mexican-American communities in detail, and how his history as a teacher in Texas shaped his understanding of these communities and their needs. Also particularly insightful, this chapter analyzes how black and brown elites helped to shape policy, and both promote the creation of coalitions and challenge government programs that they saw as benefiting one community over the other.

Overall, Poverty Rebels explains how racial and ethnic coalitions are both time and space-specific but also how public policy and the media’s portrayals of race relations can help shape our understanding of what it means to be black or brown in America. Although the book is a great contribution to our understanding of how local activism helped to structure and define War on Poverty/Great Society programs, its focus on Los Angeles leads Nichols to equate the Mexican-American experience with that of other Latinx groups. Though Nichols briefly mentions other brown communities like Puerto Ricans, she does not dedicate any time to explaining the important cultural and political differences that exist among Latinx communities and how these differences complicate black-brown relations in the United States. Still, Poverty Rebels opens up a critical space for discussing how social class can serve as an important shared identity that can help bridge race/ethnic differences.