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Watts Labor Community Action Committee

The Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) is a predominantly African-American antipoverty organization in Watts, California, officially founded in 1965. It’s a mission “is to improve the quality of life for the residents of Watts and neighboring communities.”

The WLCAC was led by labor unions and its elected representative, Ted Watkins, whom was part of the United Automobile Workers Union. WLCAC creation was influenced by the Watts Riots in 1965 and the need to address the high unemployment rates and low education levels present in Watts, California.

Organization
WLCAC was established largely because of the failure of the city and country of Los Angeles to establish a War on Poverty agency. Watts lacked an agency that addressed their concerns regarding the high unemployment rates, racism and inadequate living conditions. In the creation of the organization, the ideas of black nationalism motivated and influenced the community as they desired “for community control of economic resources, self-empowerment, and self-determination.”

The WLCAC’s headquarters is located on the seven-acre newly rebuilt shopping center at 109th and Central Avenue in Watts, California. Leaders and members are responsible for coordinating events and projects that improve the lives of poor people in their own communities.

Predecessor
In 1964, before the War on Poverty was implemented, local members of many unions, institutes and groups congregated to discuss the significant unemployment and low education levels in Watts.

Members of the United Auto Workers and other unions, researchers at the UCLA Institute for Industrial Relations, and a student group from Jordan High School in Watts congregated to discuss their concern regarding an Area Redevelopment Agency Report. Members of these groups started meeting informally to discuss solutions to the problems conflicting the Watts area.

War on Poverty
The War on Poverty, unofficially named for legislation, was proposed by Lyndon B. Johnson to address the national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. This led to the creation of the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty. OEO was created to fix the high unemployment rates rising in poverty areas. But from "1965 until 1970, OEO scrambled for an average of about $1.7 billion per year" which "the amounts never amounted to more than around 1.5 percent of the federal budget." The War on Poverty failed to provide the funds and services it promised which led to the creation of many local programs to aid their communities.

History
African American and Mexican Americans faced discrimination and a lack of support on the issue of poverty. Both groups battled “racially restrictive covenants, segregated schools, redlining practices, and a lack of access to jobs, transportation, and health care throughout their histories in Los Angeles.”

Both these groups were suppose to benefit from the EYOA that also included the EOE. However, disappointed with the antipoverty agency by LeRoy Collins and the city-controlled EYOA, African Americans sought alternative avenues for involvement in the War on Poverty.

Formation
The significant unemployment and low education levels of the Watts area highlighted the urgent need for an effective antipoverty organization in the Watts area. By 1965, the unemployment rate in the Watts area escalated to "10.7 percent, compared to only 4.2 percent for the city as a whole."

In the summer of 1965, local activists and labor union representatives officially founded WLCAC. UAW was instrumental in the creation of the WLCAC as UAW president Walter Reuther Walter Reuther and western regional director Paul Schrade “helped build a core of support for the new organization.” They saw the War on Poverty as an “opportunity in which long-standing policies and practices were open to question and change” and believed that the way to “create change…is by building community organizations.”

To further emphasize the crisis in Watts, the Watts Riots in August 1965 led the federal and local governments as well as private organizations to pay attention to the inadequate living conditions and lack of federal and local support in the Los Angeles area. Watts Rioters "were prompted as much by unemployment, bad housing, and lack of decent education" as they were by the mistreatment of the "white-dominated LAPD." This event wass the catalyst for the recognition and gain in support for the WLCAC. Shortly after this incident, WLCAC began a more assertive and persistent effort to urge the Office of Economic Opportunity and the local governments toward antipoverty and direct-action programs.

Ted Watkins, UAW member and civil rights activists, became the WLCAC administrator in 1966.

In the 1970s, Watkins formed a Community Development Corporation as a part of WLCAC. It was a quasi-private and quasi-public”  organization that focused on community control and economic development designed to address the problems of poverty. In specific, CDC was “a locally controlled, tax-exempt corporation that operates programs aimed at both immediate relief of severe social and economic disadvantage and at eventful regeneration of its community.” WLCAC opened a service station, poultry farm, grocery store, laundry, furniture and appliance shop, and food stamp centers. Watkins demonstrated Black power from an economic perspective--through community control of WLCAC and its programs.

Ted Watkins
Watkins was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1912. At the age of fourteen he moved to the Los Angeles area on his own where he eventually married and had children. After high school, Watkins landed a job on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company. He joined the local chapter of the UAW and in 1949 became the “international representative for UAW.” Aside from union activities, Watkins also involved himself “in various civil rights organizations, including the Watts chapter of the NAACP and the United Civil Rights Committee.” These programs protested against poor housing conditions and the lack of services in inner-city Los Angeles. Watkins active participation made him an adequate candidate to lead the WLCAC. When, in 1966, UAW sought a leader for the WLCAC, Watkins had the experience and organizational skills to lead the Watts community.

Using the experience he gained as a UAW representative, Watkins began to direct funding from local, state and federal agencies, as well as private organizations to numerous anti-poverty programs under WLCAC.

Two main objectives Watkins sought to accomplish was the establishment of a hospital and a financial institution.

In May 1967, Watkins persuaded members of the Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment, and Poverty to visit Los Angeles. The subcommittee included Robert Kennedy, Joe Clark, and George Murphy.

After the visit from the Senate Subcommitte, OEO granted WLCAC over $250,000, to be allocated towards consumer services and a credit union was formed to aid the community members of Watts. This was vital to the community as many residents often had “problems receiving approval because of their race or charged higher interest rates because of where they lived.”

WLCAC and Black Power
WLCAC promoted the ideology of Black Power. It valued the elements of “self-definition, community control, and cultural nationalism.” WLCAC focused its attention on including projects and promoting cultural heritage to the majority of the population at the time. During the 1960s and 1970s, a black population dominated the Watts area so ideally their focus was on black power.

WLCAC’s original creation of the Community Conservation Corps (CCC) incorporated programs to aid and support the youth of the Watts area. It included the Neighborhood Youth Corps and Manpower Development and Training Act (MDTA). This program directly reflected the black power movement. It not only provided jobs for the youth during the summer, but it also conducted educational classes on Black heritage and culture. It supported the Watts Summer Festival, an annual celebration of African American culture that began in 1966.

WLCAC Corps members marched through the streets of Watts chanting:

We're from Watts, you know,

Mighty, mighty Watts!

Get outta the way

Cause here we come.

Soul Brothers,

Soul Sisters,

Soul city,

Soul town,

Soul world,

Soul people,

Soul now!

The chant was an affirmation announcing personal and community empowerment by teenagers who relished black power.

Funding
From its establishment, WLCAC had an advisory board composed of major labor unions that provided financial assistance. In specific the labor unions consisted of the United Auto Workers (UAW), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Building Service Employees, the International Association of Machinists, the Teamsters, the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen, United Packinghouse Workers, and others. These unions alone “contributed a combined $100,000” the first two years of WLCAC existence.

Now, WLCAC received funds from various programs both federal and local agencies. In 1971, WLCAC utilized a $2 million loan from UAW-Chrysler to purchase property in order to expand on the initial “thirty homes built with funds from the state of California.” In addition, grants from the Ford Foundation served as a great contribution to the organization. The money from the Ford Foundation grant went “to pay administrators and project staff and also to establish a Minority Enterprise Small Business Investment Corporation.”

Current Activites
The shopping center includes WLCAC’s main headquarters, youth center, and the Ted Watkins Center for Communications, which includes a theater, galleries, exhibition spaces, and civil rights history museum.

In April of 2012, California State Parks announced the award to WLCAC of $4.9 Million in Proposition 84 grant funds for a new urban farm park and community center in Watts. The urban farm park will be named MudTown Farms in honor of the historic name for the area, MudTown. It will be a self-sustaining community center with education, job training, community gardening, farming, and entrepreneurship for stakeholders of all ages and backgrounds.

Today, WLCAC has over 350 employees on its payroll, with an annual operating budget of approximately $20 million. WLCAC's initial major achievement was the successful campaign for the construction of the Martin Luther King/Drew Hospital in the Watts/ Willowbrook area.

Integration: Blacks and Latinos
While African Americans founded their own community in the Watts area, Latinos also formed a group name The East Los Angeles Community Union (TELACU). In the 1960s and 1970s, the Watts area was a predominantly black resident so the WLCAC focus was on advocating for the black residents. However, over the years the Watts area has been infiltrated with a huge wave population of Latinos. Hence, WLCAC has shifted their focus of only black members to including Latinos as well. WLCAC has made attempts to integrate both cultures in events.

In compliance to the growing Latino population, WLCAC teamed up with Watts Century Latino Organization “to hold the annual Latino/African American Cinco de Mayo festivities.”

Criticism
In an attempt to promote black culture, WLCAC and other groups sponsored the Watts Summer Festival Parade in 1968. The parade focused on promoting “black pride and the focus on Afro American culture.” However, the Black Panther Party and the Black United Front opposed the festival’s focus. The Panthers perceived the parade as a “counter-revolutionary strategy to pacify blacks.” The parade served as a pedestal for various organizations to demonstrate the varieties of Black Nationalism that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s.