Looks Like I Got Mad

Annie Smart has struggled against the injustices of the welfare system for more than four decades. Her family first received assistance during the Truman administration, and she helped organize a national movement for welfare rights after the failure of the War on Poverty during the Johnson administration.

As vice president of the National Welfare Rights Union, Smart continues to mobilize the poor to fight for better benefits and jobs. She also serves as co-chair of the National Anti-Hunger Coalition and works as a paralegal in an advocacy program she helped organize for welfare recipients.

When she’s not buttonholing Louisiana lawmakers, challenging welfare bureaucrats, or marching in the streets, Smart enjoys dancing the jitterbug for her 13 children, putting up a big pot of gumbo or red beans, and sitting on her front porch in Baton Rouge reminiscing.

 

My grandmother owned her own home. In those days the older people were able to get property for about $50. She made a house large enough for all of her family. She could not read or write, but she could count. She used to grow her own sugar cane and sell it to LSU. She’d pick strawberries and raise chickens, and that kept her in business.

When I was about 10, I was her business person, because I could read and count. If I didn’t do it right, that woman would beat you half to death — or you’d think you was dead! I’m glad, because if it hadn’t been for her, I probably wouldn’t have been the same mother that I became when I had the responsibility.

When my grandmother died she willed me part of the property, so I’m living today on the same spot I grew up on. It’s a big house, with a nice side yard where children come and play and tear up my flowers. They have a good time — but then I have to put it back together.

I’m the mother of 13 children. I have two sets of triplets, a set of twins, five singles, a host of grandchildren, and 10 or 12 great-grandchildren. We have a good family, we get along fine.

On holidays I do the cooking. I don’t do as much cooking as I used to ’cause I’m getting older — I’ll be 67 this next birthday. I guess I’m getting tired. But I can’t let go of the organizations I work with — they just won’t let me. For the last 10 years I’ve been trying to come and sit in this chair that my daughter bought me, one of these comfort chairs where you lay back, put your feet up and sleep in. But my daughter said she bought it too early — I’m still traveling.

 

What caused me to get into helping out other people was the knowledge that I had about how to receive public benefits. It was not easy when we started out in 1968. It was ’long about that time that things got real tight. It was just like it is now — you couldn’t find employment.

My husband had been working at Louisiana State University, but he left to work on a construction job. You know how men are. I tried to tell him that even though he wasn’t making as much money at LSU, he was gaining benefits. But men do not like for women to tell them anything. He left LSU to work on this construction job, and they upped and moved after two or three years. Naturally, they wasn’t taking a man with a family. That brought problems for us.

When I first needed welfare, I knew nothing about it. I really didn’t know where to go. At that time the president was the one before Eisenhower. I wrote to this president to ask him how would a family get aid in this state. He wrote me a letter back and told me where to go. So I took his letter and went on down to the state department, and they told me that if my legal spouse was in the household, that I couldn’t get any help. My husband had to leave out of the house.

It made me feel terrible. I was working for a lady about three days a week, but I couldn’t afford to do the whole week because I had small kids. I had to wash and keep the kids clean and send them off to school. A lot of them was small.

My children didn’t feel bad about it, because I never let them down in keeping up the house, feeding them, doing things for them, and keeping their health. It doesn’t hurt children when you’re on welfare if you continue to be a parent. What hurts the child is if you get despondent and take it out on the child. We talked about things and discussed things. If the light people came and turned the lights off, we had a party by kerosene lamp.

Seven ladies and myself was at the welfare department and found out that we all had the same issue: We really didn’t want to be on welfare, but we had no choice. If your man wasn’t working, you had to think about the children first.

We used to have partnership on the street. If I went to work today, my neighbor would watch my kids and hers, and then if she went to work tomorrow, I’d watch her kids. We had a good thing going without having to pay somebody to watch our kids.

But then in the ’50s and ’60s, the state decided that we needed day care. That meant that mothers had to stay home with their kids or put them in the nursery. If you put them in the nursery, you had to pay those fees — we didn’t know welfare was supposed to pay those fees.

 

We seven mothers got together and we started discussing how bad we was doing. We were very angry. We got together. New Orleans already had a welfare rights group. So they came in for a meeting and we set up one of our own. We decided that welfare would be our issue. We’d go around and try to get more groups among the parishes. We started to get contacts who were able to do something.

I learned to do appeals hearings, but I wasn’t making any money for it. We had to go in training like we were going to school. We had to learn how to read the manual. It was so complicated. The little attorneys we had were fresh out of school — they didn’t know anything about the manual. So we had to go to the welfare department and ask for things that they didn’t want to tell us.

When I went around the state and did appeals, I would talk about welfare rights. Our early conversations was about them destroying the household. Once you lose the man of the house, the family won’t survive unless the mother is able to keep it together. If the woman is not strong enough, it destroys the family.

We started fighting them on that, and they fought us back. In the ’70s some states adopted the unemployed parent program which allowed fathers to stay in the house, but our state would not do it. Today they finally are — but for many families, it’s too late. There’s no fathers in those houses any more.

Before we had the National Welfare Rights Union, we had the National Coordinating Council. We had someone represented from every state. It was a good feeling to have all those women together — you didn’t feel so isolated and alone, like you had degraded yourself.

You had white and black women fighting the same issues. Today you still have white representatives and senators who don’t believe that welfare consists of anything but blacks. It’s real strange. There’s just as many white women across the country that are suffering the same thing we are suffering. Some of them are having a worse time than we are, because they don’t want to rock the boat.

My first demonstration was supposed to be in Mississippi. It was my first meeting as chair of the welfare rights group, and we had our conference in Mississippi. Everything was terrible then. They didn’t allow you in certain places. We got this hotel, the Sun and Sands, across from the Capitol. When I got there the director says to me, “Smart, before we leave, we have to go down to the welfare department and demonstrate for these people how to deal with welfare.” I said “OK.”

Then I thought about where I was and I said, “Oh my God, I can’t do this — I’m in Mississippi! They might hang me 20 times!” I was backing up like a crawfish. I did everything I was supposed to do, but I was determined not to put my foot on the soil of Mississippi to demonstrate. People scared you to death about Mississippi.

The demonstration was supposed to be at nine in the morning. I found Charlie Granger, director of the Anti-Poverty Program of Baton Rouge, and said, “Charlie, you better pack your suitcase.” We was out of there before seven.

I came on home. Then George, the director of the NCC, called me up. He said, “Now, Louisiana,” — they used to call you by your state name — “you left and did not tell us a thing.” I said, “I didn’t intend to, George. I was getting out of town before the water rise.”

 

Then I went to a meeting in New York. It was my first plane ride, I like to had a fit. The social workers were having a conference in the hotel across the street from us, and we decided to demonstrate against them.

I dressed up as a social worker. You know how all those women come with all their furs, all their fine shoes, painted faces, fingernails all painted — cool, calm, and collected. So a bunch of us put on our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, came in, and they thought we were social workers.

I pretended I was. I told them I was from Louisiana. The lady next to me was from Kansas. She said, “You know, that welfare rights organization is right across the street. I hope they don’t give us any trouble.” I said, “I hope not, too.” Then Johnny and all them leaped up on the podium, and I stood up and throwed my hand up — that mean everybody in our group stand, and we had them surrounded. We took over the podium.

I didn’t know it, but I was supposed to be the speaker. I had never rapped to that many people in my life. I think that I was sweating bullets. Somehow, my mouth flew open and I rapped for a while. Looks like I got mad.

I talked about social workers as though they had stole something. I told them about all of our issues — how they destroyed families by putting husbands out of the house, how devastating that was to the children who did not understand the mother and father breaking up. I said, “That don’t happen to you and your family. Do you think it’s fair to us and our family?”

I said, “My husband is out of the house. If I wasn’t a strong mother and understood that I had to keep the family together, our family would be destroyed.”

One social worker who said she’d been working at it for 60 years got up and said, “This is the best education that I’ve ever had. They’re right: We have not treated them like humans. And I’m ashamed of myself.” That lady cried me a river.

The next day they actually invited us to the meeting and fed us and gave us $3,000 for bringing out our executive board.

 

Since we started our welfare rights organization, our goal was to fight for jobs. But we still have not reached the goal of getting up and out of poverty. We came to the conclusion that America cannot exist without poverty. The only way that they can keep on going is for us to be poor. There are thousands of people administering welfare — all 50 states is in the business of welfare. They’re not ever going to give us clear-cut jobs with annual incomes for nothing in the world, because they need to keep themselves in jobs.

I was on the advisory board of CETA, the first employment and training program. It turned out to be good. It got a lot of women off welfare into employment. People were buying cars and houses. Some women worked for five years through CETA. We thought CETA was going to be here forever, and then they cut it off.

So that was the issue from the ’60s on — we was never able to get above the poverty guidelines.

Every year we used to lobby and try to get people jobs so they could feel like they were part of society. We were on the Hill. There was 15 of us, blacks and whites. This senator said to one of the white women, “I can understand them being on welfare, but I can’t understand you being on welfare.”

She said, “Smart, don’t say a word. I’m going to say enough for you and me.” And she did. She told him, “It’s no different if you have children, whether you’re black or white. You put us there.” He was so stunned, he couldn’t even get out of his chair.

In the past, we never had a race issue. Back then, everybody was in the same boat — we never thought about black or white. We did whatever had to be done, disseminated information. Some of those women, when I see them now, you’d think that we had been to school and living together for years, because that’s the kind of relationship we had.

We have more race issues now than we did then. I think what happened was that the senators and representatives in the South seen the tie between whites and blacks, so they told whites that they didn’t need us. It was hard for us in the South to get many whites to join with us. We have white clients at Legal Services who don’t join our client council, because they figure they don’t need it. Once in a while you gain one or two, but you have mostly blacks. When you’re in a racist state, you have problems.

Our work in the South is harder than the work we have in any other area, for both white and black. What distinguishes the struggle in the South is that a lot of women seem to be afraid. A lot of them live in small towns where the welfare office will intimidate them, threaten them. So they are not as energetic about going out there changing anything — unless you show them how it could be done.

 

The workfare program in this state, JOBS, is not going to work. The poor already work every day, and they cannot put food on the table for their children. What kind of job you going to give me? You work, but it doesn’t elevate you above poverty.

Look at the War on Poverty — it was a war on us. I didn’t get a job and I was full grown. You got retired teachers, retired people out of the army who got those jobs. But we didn’t get any. We were still on welfare. We would get these little programs, and we would participate in the program, but they kept us poor. You never got a job. The training they gave you was only six to eight weeks.

And even if you give people a year of training, where’s the job market? Do you know that the job program in our state created 206 jobs? You had to have a college degree to get a slot.

A lot of people is really embarrassed by welfare. But I tell them all the time: If this is the only thing the system has prepared for you, you take it and survive. If I didn’t have any children, I could make it. I could go out and get me a hamburger, and I’ve fed my whole family. But when you’ve got children, you have to think about everything that child needs to survive. If it’s welfare, you have to take it.

Just always be looking for something better.