Introduction

This chapter focuses on the micropolitics of community development in the United States from 1968 to 1975; I have identified three discourses for analysis. The ‘Democracy discourse’ is constituted by the texts, language and practices of community organisers and activists of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organisation which formed part of the militant wing of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. For the Democracy discourse, community development is constructed as a process by which to identify and support indigenous leaders to work towards progressive social change. In contrast to this, the ‘Power discourse’ is constituted by the texts, language and practices of Black Power and Alinskyist community organisers. For the Power discourse, community development is constructed as the way in which revolutionary vanguard activists inculcate an ‘authentic’ and essentialised sense of identity among ‘the people’. Finally, in contrast to both the Democracy and Power discourses, the ‘Poverty discourse’ is constituted by the texts, language and practices of the bureaucrats administering the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty programmes. For the Poverty discourse, community development is constructed as a twopronged process of reform in terms of democratising state-run social welfare programmes and reforming the culture of poverty among ‘the poor’. I will begin this chapter with a short overview of the changing political and policy landscape that helped to form and structure the three discourses I have identified. I will then move on to discuss the structure and operation of each of the discourses and the contrasting identity constructions that each of the discourses constitute.

1968: the problematic transition from civil rights to economic rights

In order to understand the formation, structure and operationalisation of the community development discourses during this moment, I will discuss the growing uncertainty that was altering the politics of the Civil Rights Movement during the mid to late 1960s. It is important to trace how the deterioration of the Movement helped create spaces for different ways of understanding poverty and inequality and new opportunities for the practice of politics. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, the dominant form of African American resistance to social, political and economic inequality had been focused on attaining the formal political rights of citizenship: the right to vote, the right to protest, equal protection under law, the right to due process in the justice system, and so on (Hamilton 1974; Carson 1995: 9–19).