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

"I love this book because it talks about a fabulous advocate named Ruby Duncan and the people that she was working to organize. Annelise Orleck interviewed a lot of the women who were part of the Welfare Rights Movement in Las Vegas, Nevada in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What makes the book so exciting is that she gets into their stories about coming up from the South and coming to Las Vegas to try to get better jobs. They explained how their kids were so poor and hungry that they became absolutely desperate and angry at the same time. Many of them had applied for public assistance or welfare. That was barely keeping them alive, and they were struggling. It starts out with the public assistance administrators cutting people off the rolls without any warning. All of a sudden, people were cut off of welfare and their families became hungrier and hungrier. The women got so angry, they organized themselves. They did a lot of protests, they wrote letters and they advocated for themselves. That, for me, is a really important experience of understanding hunger in America. People are not just victims of hunger. They can take action. I was very inspired by these stories. They demonstrate that hunger never happens in a vacuum. When hunger is happening to people, there are many other things going on around it. The book teaches us that the systems that are in place can be really helpful or they can be very harmful, and they can be weaponized. So the casino owners were collaborating with the welfare administrators to keep welfare benefits very low so that people would be willing to work for low wages. It shows us that big businesses in the United States do everything they possibly can to keep wages low. There was the idea that if welfare benefits were too high, people were not going to go work for wages that were less. The women found out about that, and they went and protested against the wages at the casinos. That’s really exciting, because those are some very powerful institutions. So this book was really important to me for understanding that women can take action. When they get together, they can have a lot of power. It also shows us how integral all of these different systems are in terms of generating hunger or treating hunger. The other thing I like about Ruby Duncan and her work is that she was able to start a clinic for families and give out WIC benefits. The WIC Program is a really important program. It stands for Women, Infants and Children, and it’s only in the United States. It’s a special nutrition program for pregnant and lactating mothers and young children under the age of five. It helps children to develop better and prevents preterm births. So Ruby Duncan brought that to her clinic in Southern Nevada. I like it that women were taking control of the situation in their own communities. It’s an important piece of history that a lot of people don’t remember or don’t know about. It inspired me to develop a program called Witnesses to Hunger, where I worked with low-income women. I gave each of them a camera to talk about their experiences, and then we created exhibits so that they can use their photographs to educate the public, the press and policymakers and have an influence on the public policies that are having an impact on them. It was quite successful. We had several women testify before Congress and we think that the members of Witnesses to Hunger were instrumental in increasing the SNAP benefits (SNAP is food stamps, it’s a program where people can get money to buy groceries in the United States). So, for me, this book is really important. Annelise Orleck is a fantastic historian, because she includes oral history. She talks directly to people. She understands social movements. She also lives the social movements in her own life. Last spring in the United States, there were a lot of students on campuses around the country protesting against genocide in Gaza. She was near her students when the police were attacking them, even though the students were being very peaceful and were not breaking the law. She got in between them and said, ‘These are my students. They’re not doing anything wrong. Please don’t harm them.’ And the police threw her to the ground. That’s actually on video. What’s so shocking is that you have this very esteemed historian and professor who’s just talking about peace and understanding and trying to protect people’s lives, and she gets brutalized. Unfortunately, I think that’s a mirror into who we are in the United States. It’s deeply concerning. But I just love Annelise Orleck, I look up to her, and I’m grateful for that book. There’s a movie that people can look at on PBS that is also called Storming Caesar’s Palace . It interviews Ruby Duncan, 30 or 40 years later."