WLCAC was initiated largely due to the absence of essential infrastructure in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles such as: Intra-community transportation, housing, senior programs, employment training, job placement, homeless services, health services, and businesses. Watts lacked an advocate to advance concerns regarding the high unemployment rates, poverty, and inadequate living conditions. The WLCAC's headquarters is located at 109th and Central Avenue in Watts, California.
War on Poverty The
War on Poverty, proposed by
Lyndon B. Johnson to address the national poverty rate of about nineteen percent, led to the creation of the Economic Opportunity Act, which then 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 to areas such as Watts, which led to the creation of many local programs to aid their communities.
Formation The significant challenges in unemployment, housing, transportation and low education levels of the Watts area highlighted the urgent need for an effective community 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, under the leadership of Ted Watkins, local activists and labor union representatives officially founded WLCAC. UAW was instrumental in the creation of the WLCAC as UAW president
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. It is alleged that those who participated in the Watts Rebellion "were prompted as much by unemployment, bad housing, and lack of decent education" as they were by the mistreatment of the "white-dominated LAPD."
Ted Watkins Watkins was born in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1923. At the age of fifteen he moved to the Los Angeles area in flight from a lynch mob that targeted him for allegedly disobeying a white resident. After high school, Watkins landed a job on the
assembly line at the Ford Motor Company. There 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. Two main objectives Watkins sought to accomplish was the establishment of a hospital and a financial institution. The necessity for a hospital near the Watts area prompted Watkins to work with County Supervisor
Kenneth Hahn to build community support for the construction of a local hospital. As a result, the
Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in
Willowbrook, California was built in 1972. ==Funding==