Storming Caesars Palace How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty

by Orleck, Annelise

• ISBN13: 9780807007976
• ISBN10: 0807007978
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780807007969
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-04-25
• Publisher: Beacon Press
• More Book Details
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Summary

The inspiration for the PBS documentary premiering March 2023

The story of the revolutionary Black women welfare organizers of Las Vegas who spearheaded an evergreen, radical revisioning of American economic justice

This timely reissue tells the little-known story of a pioneering group of Black mothers who built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs.

In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck brings into focus the hidden figures of a trailblazing movement who proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty, providing job training, libraries, medical access, daycare centers and housing to the poor in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s. Orleck introduces Ruby Duncan, a sharecropper turned White House advisor who led the charge on the long war on poverty waged against the poor Black mothers of Las Vegas. According to Ruby, “Poor women must dream their highest dreams and never stop,” and she, with the help of Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, did exactly that.

A vivid retelling of an overlooked American history, Orleck follows the Black women who went on to lead a revolutionary movement against welfare injustice. These women eventually founded Operation Life, one of the first women-led community organizations in the nation and one of the country’s most successful antipoverty programs. They went on to gain national traction and garnered the respect of key political figures such as Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.

With a new prologue and epilogue that explore the race and labor movements paramount to the political climate of 2021, Orleck masterfully blends together history, social analysis, and personal storytelling in a story that is as enraging as it is empowering.

Author Biography

Annelise Orleck is a professor at Dartmouth College where she focuses on history, American radicalism, race studies and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. She is the author of several books, including: Rethinking American Women’s Activism; Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty; and Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the U.S.. She lives in Thetford Center, Vermont

Table of Contents

Introduction to the 2023 Edition
Introduction

CHAPTER 1
From the Cotton Fields to the Desert Sands:
Living and Leaving the Delta Life

CHAPTER 2
“The Mississippi of the West”:
Jim Crow in Sin City

CHAPTER 3
“Bad Luck and Lousy People”:
Black Single Mothers and the War on Poverty

CHAPTER 4
“If It Wasn’t for You, I’d Have Shoes for My Children”:
Welfare Rights Come to Las Vegas

CHAPTER 5
Storming Caesars Palace:
Poverty and Power in Las Vegas

CHAPTER 6
Dragging Nevada Kicking and Screaming into the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 7
“We Can Do It and Do It Better”:
Revitalizing a Community from the Bottom Up

CHAPTER 8
Can Welfare Mothers Do Community Economic Development?:
The Triumphs and Trials of Operation Life

CHAPTER 9
Maybe We Were Fighting History:
The Legacy of Operation Life

Epilogue—A New Era for Las Vegas
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index