ERAP: Summer 1964 - Summer 1965

And then, of course, there was the insurmountable problem that the economy wasn't collapsing the way SDS had predicted it would; no depression was throwing people out of work to join an angry army of the urban unemployed. "Just as we got to Chicago," Lee Webb remembers, "lines at the unemployment compensation center started to get shorter."* An economic boom period was beginning, to be accelerated by Vietnam expenditures, and Jobs Or Income Now was just not the issue around which people could be organized. All of the unemployment-directed JOIN projects (Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia) faltered, while the two projects (Newark and Cleveland) that tried to operate on any enunciated grievances of the community, from garbage collection to schools (that is, the multi-issue approach that Hayden and Wittman had put forth in "An Interracial Movement of the Poor?"), fared far better. For a while during the summer a running argument went on between the two approaches—Gitlin dubbed it the "GROIN-JOIN" debate, Garbage Removal Or Income Now vs. Jobs Or Income Now—but by the fall it was clear that JOIN would have to be altered, and all the projects that continued turned to the GROIN approach.

With problems, tensions, frustrations such as these, ERAP had to retrench. By the end of the 1964 summer Trenton, Louisville, and Hazard were dropped; Boston was given over to PREP; and Philadelphia and Chester were allowed to wither and drift into extinction by themselves. Baltimore and Chicago switched their emphasis to GROIN, and with Cleveland and Newark became the kernel of the ERAP operation as it headed into the new school year.

Despite setbacks, the ERAPers felt they had made considerable strides over the summer.

Much had been learned: how to approach a strange neighborhood, how to live on forty-two cents a day, how to run meetings so that ordinary people are not bewildered, how to get people in a community to think about the community for a change. Much had been accomplished: lines were opened to people in the bureaucracy (unemployment compensation offices, welfare bureaus, city housing officials) who had never listened much to the poor before, small battles were won against red tape, landlords, police. In Cleveland, ERAPers were able to organize a group of poor white women into a Citizens United For Adequate Welfare, which in turn got through a free lunch program for poor children in the city schools; in Newark, NCUP managed to generate enough pressure to get a play street established, improve garbage collection somewhat, and force housing improvements out of landlords; in Baltimore, small victories were won against the Department of Public Welfare; in Chicago, like victories against the unemployment offices. This was not, of course, what ERAP had set out so grandiosely to do, and as Rennie Davis confessed at the end of the summer, "No project succeeded in giving life to our slogan, 'an interracial movement of the poor,’ and certainly none ‘organized a community.' "® But what had been done was enough to convince a handful of people to stay on at each project after the summer and to press on during the winter. They had no illusions about the enormity of the job, and they knew they couldn't build a movement for social change in a few months.

In the summer of 1964, the Progressive Labor Party, then with perhaps six hundred members, was organizing in the slums of Harlem in New York City. It did not establish a permanent project; rather, it drew blacks into Marxist study groups and meetings to air their grievances against the city, and it led picket lines against "police brutality" and other local issues.

On July 18, 1964, Harlem blacks began an urban revolt over the fatal shooting of a fifteenyear-old black boy by a white policeman, which the PLP newspaper, Challenge, supported editorially: "There is no lawful government in this country today. Only a revolution will establish one. If that is 'civil rebellion’ let us make the most of it." Bill Epton, a PLP organizer, and black, is reported to have told a Harlem crowd: "We will not be fully free until we smash this state completely ... in that process, we're going to have to kill a lot of cops, a lot of these judges, and we'll have to go up against their army."

On August 5, Epton was indicted for "criminal anarchy" and for advocating "the overthrow of the government of the state of New York by force and violence." On December 20, 1965, after a year of legal maneuverings, Epton was found guilty, largely on the evidence of a police informer, of conspiring to overthrow the government and conspiring to riot, and sent to jail. Some thirty other members of PLP were subpoenaed by the New York Grand Jury, and more than ten of them, including a City College student, were convicted of contempt.

By the time of the December National Council, the ERAPers knew that things were going badly, but also knew that they needed more time and they managed to convince the rest of the organization that everything was fine—certain setbacks here and there, but four projects at least were going ahead, with maybe fifty full-time people in them, and who knew how many more might start before next summer? Max and Williams tried to point out that it didn't look as if an awful lot of organizing was going on—not many of the community people seemed to be actually involved in the projects, doing the work along with the students—but those two had just come from a bad experience with the Political Education Project that fall, and no one paid much attention to them. In truth, ERAP had failed noticeably in this respect—by its own estimates, no more than thirty indigenous people in Newark had joined NCUP and participated regularly in its meetings, and Cleveland had twenty, Chicago maybe ten, and Baltimore only five—but the ERAPers tried to make as little of this as possible.

Still, the ERAPers couldn't fool themselves, and the ERAP meeting early in January 1965 after the National Council was over was an agonizing period of self-questioning stretched over eight days and nights. They all conceded that no interracial movement of the poor was going to emerge in any foreseeable future, it proving hard enough to arrange even a uniracial Tuesday night meeting, and as for the notion of radicalizing the poor and launching them on a "revolutionary trajectory," well, that was hardly spoken of at all. The failure of ends caused people to concentrate on the inadequacies of their means, and whole days of the ERAP conference were given over to worried questioning. Do we have to have leaders at all? Don't leaders, by definition, manipulate, and aren't we fundamentally against manipulating? But aren't we all manipulating, just by being in the projects? Suppose you convince a man to come to a meeting—isn't that manipulating him? Isn't ghetto organizing an expression of snobbery, of paternalism? Would we be in the ghetto at all if we didn't think we had some superior wisdom which we needed to give to these people? Isn't that simply trying to co-opt these people into our way of doing things, our kind of movement?

There was no escape from the net of these questions, and the more the ERAPers struggled the more they became entangled. The young organizers were trying to find some way to build up the movement that would not violate its principles at the same time, but nothing in their summer's experience had really proved successful in that. "The whole thing was very morose," Paul Booth recalls.’ Ultimately the organizers came to decide that they should just continue doing what they were doing for its own sake, unencumbered by theory or explanation or questioning: we can't second-guess the future, let us go on doing what we know we should do. This conclusion was, by no coincidence, the same kind of thing the SNCC organizers had also decided, and it was pressed upon the meeting by SNCC leader Ivanhoe Donaldson and a number of other SNCC people in attendance. One report afterward said:

SNCC organizers were present at the staff meeting and they managed to impress ERAP with the image of an organizer who never organized, who by his simple presence was the mystical medium for the spontaneous expression of the "people." The staff meeting ended in exhaustion, with a faith that the spirit would decide, that an invisible hand would enable all to be resolved if honesty prevailed.

Or, as they sang it around SNCC, "Do What the Spirit Say Do"—all very well for the psyche, but not much help in organizing.

ERAP as 1965 began was at a low point. The staff people were now continuing to live in the ghetto more because there was no place else in the society to go than because they thought they were doing anything significant in the way of changing it. "By the winter of 1965," says Richie Rothstein, a central figure in the Chicago project, "if you asked most ERAP organizers what they were attempting, they would simply have answered, 'to build a movement.’ " Nothing more precise.

The isolation of the projects grew as the ERAPers themselves grew inward. ERAP in fact soon came to regard itself as pretty much separate from SDS, the projects feeling their primary responsibility not to the campus constituency but to the individual communities.

This divarication was intensified by the decision of the January ERAP conference to abandon the national headquarters and to abolish leaders like Rennie Davis who were regarded as superfluous in a movement that sought none at all. Davis made one final trip as national director, enticed $5,000 out of the Rabinowitz Foundation in New York to keep the projects going through one more summer, and then dismantled the operation in Ann Arbor; he went to Chicago to live with the JOIN project, where he would continue to work for the next two years. In March ERAP was officially abandoned as a national organization, and henceforth individual projects went off without central direction or assistance of any kind: no two ERAP organizing staff's even sat down to compare notes from that time on. In theory this seemed sensible enough, since no two projects were alike and an isolated headquarters sending out newsletters or setting up conferences didn't do much to strengthen them. But later many came to feel that the national framework had at least prevented the projects from total isolation; as Rothstein put it:

.. in isolation, each project came to develop an exaggerated sense of its own importance. Not feeling itself to be part of an experimental tactically variegated movement, each project acted as though it bore the burden of history on its shoulders alone .... How could a project experiment with factory organizing, or even with leadership training in such a context? ... In the absence of a broader structure, with the burden of movement-building borne subjectively by each project, experiments could not be risked.

SDS's antiwar march on Washington in the spring of 1965, though it drew its impetus from the campus, served to revivify ERAP for the summer. New people heard about the organization and wanted to do something with it over the summer; students who felt the war was the all-important issue thought that ERAP was a way to get ghetto people marching against it; and a number of previously quiescent students, now suddenly angry over Vietnam, wanted something to do other than the usual "summer job." New ERAPs were started all over: in Hoboken, in New Haven (where SDSer John Froines, later of the Chicago Eight, worked), New Brunswick, Oakland, San Francisco, Roxbury, Massachusetts, Champaign, Illinois, and even in Cairo, Illinois, a city which the ERAPers had previously dismissed. But now there was no central direction—each project was started on local impetus, organized where it wanted to, picked up the cause it found best. More existential now, in the SDS tradition, the organizers would simply go into a poor area and listen for a while, seek out the grievances and try to organize around them: no more prefabricated theories, or hunches masquerading as analyses.

Three times as many people worked in projects this summer as the summer before, more than four hundred in all. Their life styles were somewhat different from those of the previous summer. Communal living—men and women sharing the same apartment—was now accepted (the unusual success of black-white relations among the Cleveland organizers was laid specifically to that closeness), not least because it turned out to be cheaper all around. Marijuana was beginning to be smoked=—still with dire worries about its illegalitythough nothing stronger was used. Some slackening of the previous summer's monastic isolation occurred, with unspoken disapproval from the veterans: 1965 NCUP summer people would take off weekends and head for New York, parties, friends, sleep, relaxation, a different world, something that had not happened the summer before. But the essential asceticism remained the same; Andrew Kopkind, then writing for the New Republic, pictured NCUP that summer as "a wrenching experience":

Hardly anyone on the "outside" can image the completeness of [the students'] transformation, or the depth of their commitment. They are not down there for a visit in the slums. They are part of the slums, a kind of lay-brotherhood, or worker priests, except that they have no dogma to sell. They get no salary; they live on a subsistence allowance that the project as a whole uses for rent and food. Most of the time they are broke ... . Newark project workers have to call "friends in the suburbs" every so often for $5 or $10, so the necessities of life can continue ... . They eat a Spartan diet of one-and-a-half meals a day, consisting mainly of powdered milk and large quantities of peanut butter and jelly, which seems to be the SDS staple. Occasionally they cadge much more appetizing (and, presumably, more nourishing) meals from their poor local friends.”

But the 1965 ERAP people found the same problems their predecessors had—the thirteen projects at the start of the summer dwindled to nine, then seven, and by the late fall only five (Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland) were left. Some of the would-be organizers left in frustration, some had turned instead to Vietnam activities, and the majority soon decided to return to school: even that seemed better, and less frustrating, than trying to organize the ghettos. One project worker recalls:

The [SDS] kids who worked there ... they didn't get along at all well, and there were a lot of feuds. I got the impression that a lot of that was because they had been so completely unsuccessful ... . Personal feuds—somebody wouldn't wash the dishes. They never washed the dishes. A lot of them lived together in one apartment which was a bad deal—much too close, much too filthy .... They had gotten very discouraged and started being hesitant about going out and working. They would sleep late hours and waste a lot of time, and then they really felt bad because, "What the hell are we doing here?

The isolated, difficult world of the ERAP projects of this summer—and of later projects that would be started from time to time—is suggested by this account of organizing in a little Appalachian town in Pennsylvania called Bellefonte, where a group of Penn State SDSers set up a project in the summer of 1967:

The organizers were students ... well-versed in theory ... organizing around unemployment, welfare and corruption in the borough administration while learning how to modify the tactics developed by urban projects to fit the needs of semi-rural Appalachia. But though theory prepared them for the real problems, nothing in their middle-class lives and training had prepared them for the real people. As a result, they were never able to make their actions conform to their analysis ... .'°

The students decided to combine communal living quarters and an office in a three-story house. Their decision rested on the assumption that they would be working with adults .... But the first people to be attracted to the house were not adults but little kids "who came to be around us as friends in an atmosphere that was devoid of authoritarian restrictions." ... The organizers thought that the project's "open door policy" would reach out to the parents through their kids and establish a good relationship with the adult community.

Instead, the older brothers and older friends of the original kids started coming in through the open door. These older kids were veterans of the reformatory ....

As the organizers became more interested in these kids, the open door began to make trouble. First the neighbors began to talk. They were hostile to the house for harboring the town's troublemakers. And they began to gossip about the hours that the women associated with the project were keeping at the house. The students were shocked to find the low-income people they had come to work with identifying so fully with "bourgeois" values. But they realized that they had to make a decision: either maintain their original vision of organizing adults and abandon the kids who were coming to the house; or work with the kids and alienate the welfare recipients. They decided to stick with the kids.

The open door now created a new set of difficulties. The organizers had never made their purpose in Bellefonte clear to the kids. As a result, the kids saw the house simply as a place that was always available for a party—and they parried continually .... The situation became a nightmarish cycle. The organizers would return from the twelve-hour shifts they worked to an ongoing beer party. The combination of work and party exhausted them so that they couldn't think straight, let alone talk the problem through. And silence gave consent to yet another round of parties. Toward the end it was impossible even to sleep at night ....

To complete the project's rout, personal hang-ups were woven into political problems. In common with most new leftists, the organizers were committed to developing close personal relationships as a basis for effective work. They held frequent "soul sessions," where they talked frankly and personally about the problems the project faced. Unfortunately, friction which had existed before the students moved to Bellefonte was aggravated by the tension and closeness of the project. Because these old quarrels harmed the project the group tried to resolve them at their meetings. Instead, the people involved began to use the soul sessions as a cover for personal attacks. The bad feeling generated would have been enough in itself to cripple the project.

In August the Bellefonte project disbanded.

By the end of the summer of 1965, ERAP had proven itself to be a failure. Like the Narodniki before them, ERAPers found "the people" harder to organize than they had imagined and, like them, they tended to feel that some kind of increased militance and direct confrontation would be necessary to effect real change. Of the five projects left at the end of 1965, Oakland soon disappeared, and Cleveland and Baltimore quietly withered in the following year. Chicago and Newark lasted into 1967, but their permutations took them almost totally away from SDS and into the engulfing life of the community, and only a few of the original student organizers stuck it out. Hayden, Wittman, Steve Block, and two vital women, Corinna Fales and Carol Glassman, held on in Newark; Davis, Rothstein, Gitlin, Mike James, Casey Hayden, and one or two others in Chicago. With the exception of a few local attempts like a Minneapolis Community Union Project in 1966 and the Bellefonte project in 1967—and even these were abandoned after the summer of 1967—ERAP ceased to have any major effect on SDS after 1965.

The reasons for ERAP's failure were roughly three.

First, ERAP was never able to shake off the middle-class beliefs and expectations it started with. The ERAPers' postscarcity consciousness ran smack up against the scarcity reality, and the collision was painful. The students expected the poor to be natively intelligent, informed, angry at the circumstances of their lives, prepared to unite against a common enemy—"they sometimes expect the poor to act out the moral values of the middle-class radical who has come to the slum," as Michael Harrington tellingly wrote—and instead they found the poor (for reasons not of their own making, of course) ignorant, passive, atomized and fragmented, and with a whole set of quite different values. Moreover, the students expected the idea of community organizations to be a great deal more powerful and attractive than it was; Nick Egleson, working in the Hoboken project in the summer of 1965, put it this way:

We have [gained] a greater respect for people's perception of their own surroundings. If they don't think an organization will get them anywhere, it is not always because, as we thought in the past, they have no experience with community organization, but sometimes it is because they have had just that experience and sometimes it is because they perceive the smallness of the organization compared to the enormity of the problem much better than we, the hopeful organizers, can allow ourselves to do.??

Then, too, the organizers brought a good deal of middle-class guilt with them into the ghetto, not simply from having privileged positions, or money, or an education, but from running away from their own real and palpable grievances, which at this point in time seemed illegitimate to acknowledge openly (it would take a few years before students could admit that they too felt trod upon by the society, in ways maybe not as obvious but just as pervasive as those used on the poor). "ERAP," Todd Gitlin has written, "was built on guilt .. . Guilt and its counterpart, shame, are healthy and necessary antidotes to privilege, but the antidote taken in large doses becomes poisonous."

Second, ERAP never resolved the contradictions between wanting fundamentally to change the nature of the state and building its projects around all the shoddy instruments of that state. Whether JOIN or GROIN, the projects sought to improve the governmental services of their neighborhoods, break the red tape at the unemployment center, force the traffic department to put up a light, see to it that welfare checks arrived when they should—and then the organizers would go home at night and talk about "transforming the system," "building alternative institutions," and "revolutionary potential." ERAP, for all the talk, did not build para/le/ structures out of its projects, it built parasite structures, which had to live off the crumbs of the Establishment and soon determined their failure or success according to how many crumbs they got. The projects were caught in the very machinery America and the New Era had warned them about: "a politics of adjustment" whose "principle function is a mediating, rationalizing and managerial one" so as "to manipulate and control conflict" and "prevent popular upsurge." In spite of themselves, ERAPers were manipulated and handled by the state they had set out to change.

Third, ERAP was never able to escape the fact that the poor are not "the agents of change" in American society, whether there be massive unemployment or not. The poor, as the ERAPers found out to their sorrow, want leaders, they do not want to lead; the poor are myth-ridden, enervated, cynical, and historically the least likely to rebel; the poor are powerless, without even that small threat of being able to withdraw their bodies that workingmen and labor unions have, and at best they can only embarrass or discomfort, not threaten, the powers that be. After more than a year in the Newark ghetto Tom Hayden came to acknowledge this:

Poor people know they are victimized from every direction. The facts of life always break through to expose the distance between American ideals and personal realities. This kind of knowledge, however, is kept undeveloped and unused because of another knowledge imposed on the poor, a keen sense of dependence on the oppressor. This is the source of that universal fear which leads poor people to act and even to think subserviently. Seeing themselves to blame for their situation, they rule out the possibility that they might be qualified to govern themselves and their own organizations. Besides fear, it is their sense of inadequacy and embarrassment which destroys the possibility of revolt.

ERAP, then, suffered from the incurable disease of having the wrong kinds of organizers with the wrong choice of methods operating in the wrong place at the wrong time. Marya Levenson, a Brandeis graduate who joined ERAP in Boston, said it all: "People ask why SDS's Economic Research and Action Projects (ERAP) disappeared. It's because we didn't know what the hell we were trying to do and that always caught up with us."!*

But was it only a failure? In one sense, yes: no beginnings were made toward the creation of an indigenous left of students and the poor, no army of ghettoites ever rose to challenge the state, or align blacks and whites together to demand their rightful share, nor were there even potent organizations of the poor pressing reforms upon the cities. But it had its other effects.

Of absolutely prime importance is the effect of the ERAP experience on those youths who passed through it. "Radicalization" is an often misused word, but it describes perfectly the experience of so many of the ERAP organizers. Testing some of the reformist hypotheses of the The Port Huron Statement and America and the New Era in concrete and specific ways, they found those assumptions in error; working with the instruments of the state, they found those instruments insufficient, or, worse, corrupt and evil; trying in the only way they could see to make the American dream a reality for the lowliest citizens, to keep the promises about equal opportunity and economic betterment they had heard so often from the nation's leaders, they found that goal impossible and the leaders indifferent. They tried the system, and found it wanting. Richie Rothstein has said:

Those of us involved in ERAP ... are now enemies of welfare state capitalism, with little faith or desire that the liberal-labor forces within this system be strengthened vis-a-vis their corporatist and reactionary allies. We view those forces—and the social "reforms" they espouse—as being incompatible with a non-interventionist world policy and as no more than a manipulative fraud perpetrated upon the dignity and humanity of the American people.

We owe these conclusions in large measure to four years of ERAP experience.

Many who went through that experience sought more than community unions next time out—they were ready not to challenge the institutions of the system but to resist them.

There was a positive side to that experience, however, that also rubbed off, and that was the chance to try participatory democracy within the project itself. It was imperfect, of course—personal antagonisms surfaced, the more articulate dominated, males tended to outweigh females—but still the ERAP people did try to run their projects by putting their deepest beliefs into practice. Leaders were played down, and found to be often dispensable; meetings could be run without Robert's Rules of Order and elaborate procedures, and decisions were arrived at, often, through consensus; grand ideologies could be dispensed with, without everyone floundering, and daily work proved often enough to be its own reason for being. Rothstein again:

In many cases the students who did short term tours of duty on ERAP staffs returned to their campuses to lead university reform and Vietnam protest movements. They were, as a result of their contact with ERAP, reinforced in their radical impulses. The democratic, "participatory" tone of all ERAP projects has, in this respect, contributed to the emergence of a new popular movement.

Perhaps no more than a thousand people ever went through this ERAP experience, but a great many of them ended up with the conviction first expressed on an NCUP button and then adopted as the motto for all of SDS: "Let the People Decide." They saw a little part of the future, and it worked—and they did not want to settle for less, in their next meeting, their next Movement job, their university, their country.

ERAP had its effects, too, on the organization whence it sprang. In general they were salutary, for during a most critical period before an active student movement was born, it gave SDS a sense of purpose and a reputation for doing something other than talking and mimeographing. Indeed, many came to see ERAP as the best expression of SDS, an example of the seriousness with which the young took their ideas, even as a potential key to real social change; Kopkind wrote, "There is no other movement, no other source of action in the US that is so doggedly exploring methods of social change, and putting them into practice."*° It is not an accident that Frank Mankiewicz and then Sargent Shriver himself, when they were at the Office of Economic Opportunity in charge of the "domestic Peace Corps," saw ideas and tactics worthy of emulation in ERAP—Mankiewicz even paid to have Hayden visit Washington to explain NCUP to his staff and several ERAPers served as well-paid consultants to VISTA in 1966 and 1967—for this was the opinion of many who came in contact with the projects. Whether or not this was all exaggerated (as it was), it did much to give the organization a sense of legitimization and purpose within, and an image of dynamism and seriousness without.

With the collapse of ERAP, generally acknowledged by the end of 1965, other less happy consequences for the organization came to be seen. Some bitter individuals soured by ERAP were simply lost to SDS altogether or participated in activities just enough to depress everyone within earshot. A number came to feel that it was too early to do anything in this society and turned instead to the development of theory, often ending in fetid Marxist bogs totally removed from the rest of the organization. More important, the absence of the ERAPers from SDS affairs in the period from 1964 to 1965 came to be felt: they were, after all, some of the best talents, the brightest minds, the most committed souls in the organization, and there they were, off in almost utter isolation, rarely participating in ongoing SDS business. As a result, younger people coming into SDS had fewer mentors, and with an increasing number of these people in 1965 the whole problem of "internal education"—passing on the original radical perceptions of the organization and infusing others with its open style and political-personal unity—became acute. From the summer of 1965 on, these early characteristics of SDS would begin to fade.

The most difficult effect of ERAP to judge is the one it set out to accomplish: changing the lives of people in the cities where it operated.

The experience of JOIN in Chicago is perhaps most instructive. By the end of the summer of 1965, when most of the students had returned to school, a half-dozen of the older organizers who remained decided, after prodding by the radicals, that greater reliance had to be placed on the local people rather than the student influx. An Organizing Committee of the staff members and the most active community members of JOIN was established, to give the latter a greater voice. Early in 1966 JOIN was formally incorporated, with a Board of Directors made up of Harriet Stulman and Richie Rothstein from the staff and Mary Hockenberry, John Howard, and Dovie Thurman from the local community: in fact as well as in legality, more of the thrust of JOIN now came from the locals. In September, JOIN was formally separated from SDS entirely, and in the next year split off into several separate groups, all organized by local people, for welfare action, publishing a newspaper, youth work, and ultimately organizing in other communities. By the end of 1967 the ERAP organizers were more or less pushed out of the project, having succeeded to some extent in making themselves superfluous, which after all was the idea from the start: organizing was now in the hands of the organized.’”

The spirit that lay behind this process is reflected in a statement one of the poor white community people made to Todd Gitlin and Nanci Hollander (for a time, married to Gitlin), whose book, Uptown, describes the people of the project:

See, like it used to be you'd walk from Clifton to Wilson and somebody said,

"Oh, there's one a those JOIN Communist people." It's not like that any more.

People know JOIN's there. And if they have any problem they try to get in touch with JOIN. I'm known as JOIN in the neighborhood. It's nice to walk down the street and know that I'm known as JOIN and people are not callin you Communist.

I feel more dedicated than when I started cause things are startin to happen and I was partly responsible for buildin’ things that happened ... . It all causes things to happen, it causes people to get together. People know it's urban renewal tearin' down the neighborhood and they know they're gonna be kicked out and that's a good feelin' when they start organizin' to do somethin about it. You get a great feelin' when you see a group a people standin' around demanding stuff that is rightfully theirs. I mean it's theirs and they never had it before and they want it now. It makes me feel good that after a year and a half the neighborhood has changed like that. And it seems to be throbbin' with excitement of people wantin’ to do stuff, about the stuff we've been talkin about for a year and a half, and the things they've been listenin' to and checkin' up on. They wanna do it now, a lotta people around there.

So I can't drop out now, cause for one I don't want to. Things are in such a state where you have to fight 'em through and maybe eventually come up with an organization of people who control the community.

This is the kind of achievement impossible to measure, but clearly the ERAP experience has entered into this man's life, into the lives of others in his neighborhood. Directly traceable to this are the development in the sixties of a kind of poor-white "nationalism" in the JOIN area that in turn leads to the establishment by young whites of the Young Patriot Party (which became part of the "Rainbow Coalition" with the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Organization) and the creation of Rising Up Angry, a group of young whites out of a "greaser" background (motorcycles, leather jackets, gangs) who adopted a revolutionary ideology I in the late sixties. What the ultimate effect of this "nationalism" ! will be on the city's power structure is impossible to say, but it , can't hurt.

Newark, similarly, touched the future. The project there also : lasted well beyond the formal collapse of ERAP and until local people started acting on their own. At the end of the summer of : 1965, the project staff dwindled to a half-dozen, still with Hayden ; and Wittman as the guiding forces, but it was estimated then that ' as many as 150 local people participated in its various programs and meetings. Over the next year, the tools which the NCUPers had developed—rent strikes, picketing of slumlords' homes, block meetingsbegan to spread to other parts of the city, not with any extraordinary success, to be sure, but perhaps with enough mixture of anticipation and frustration to have ultimately led to the anger that exploded in the urban revolt in the summer of 1967. That summer proved to be the death of NCUP, for it was the fourth summer of black rebellion and it (along with the whole growth of black power) finally convinced the young whites that they were unwanted and unneeded in the black ghettos. A few of the white ERAPers stayed on in Newark, however, getting jobs in the city and occasionally surfacing to organize, as for example during the two-week student strike at the Essex County Community College early in 1970.

And a number of blacks who had been mobilized and radicalized by NCUP went on to help in the mayoralty campaign of Kenneth Gibson, who finally ousted the corrupt white regime in the summer of 1970 and became the city's first black mayor.

The effects of ERAP, then, are diffuse, and they lead out in rays almost impossible to track down. But for hundreds of heretofore untested young collegians, for hundreds of heretofore ignored blacks and white poor, ERAP had a clear impact—caused them, as the Chicago slum people put it, to become "turned around." Like malaria, or a war, it was something that no one who went through would ever forget. Whether it made anything significantly better, whether it seriously improved the lot of any individual, whether things would have been different without it, that is impossible to say. At the least, the ERAPers can say, in the words of the Bertolt Brecht poem pinned on the wall of the NCUP office:

In my time streets led to the quicksand.

Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.

There was little I could do. But without me

The rulers would have been more secure. This was my hope.

So the time passed away

Which on earth was given me.

For we knew only too well:

Even the hatred of squalor

Makes the brow grow stem.

Even anger against injustice

Makes the voice grow harsh. Alas, we

Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness

Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when at last it comes to pass

That man can help his fellow man,

Do not judge us

Too harshly.