Transcript of full Hugh Wilson interview

BY OLIVIA WINSLOW | olivia.winslow@newsday.com

My name is Hugh A. Wilson. I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, West Indies. I am a retired professor of political science at Adelphi University. I'm 67 years of age.

Q: Tell us about what you did that led you to be called an activist.

Wilson: What I did to be called an activist started sometime, I guess, in the early '60s when I was at Howard University. I came in contact with Stokely Carmichael ... and a number of people involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. So my interest in civil rights started from that. And when I came to New York I became involved in welfare rights movements, teaching and welfare rights. And when I came to Nassau County I was a community organizer in Long Beach, then as the director of the welfare rights movement. This activism for me came out of, what you might call, a family tradition. Both my maternal and paternal grandfathers were activists in one form or another in Jamaica. My father was also a union organizer, a very militant union organizer. So there's a kind of family tradition.

Q: Tell us if you will, Dr. Wilson, the names of the groups that you were involved with here in Nassau and what years you were involved in those groups.

Wilson: I was involved with the Long Beach anti-poverty program between 1966 and '68. I was involved with the Welfare Council Coordinating Committee from '68 to 1971. I was affiliated in one form or another with the Congress of Racial Equality, not an official member, but a fellow traveler, you might say. I was involved with the NAACP as the youth adviser for a short period of time, so short that I can't remember exactly when it was.

Q: You have this family inspiration that inspired you to conduct this type of work. But tell us about the climate of Nassau County. I'm particularly intrigued with your welfare tenants rights' work. What were you trying to get accomplished?

Wilson: Well, what we were trying to accomplish with my activism in Nassau County involved trying to change the status of people who were poor. We didn't expect them to become middle class. What we expected was a better quality and standard of living. Wanted to use activism to force the system to understand that people needed a better standard of life. The problem arose, in that Nassau County, like most suburbs, are places where people go after they've made their upwardly mobile move. So there was very little, shall we say, understanding or sympathy for the poor. So what we had to do was not only to organize poor people, but also to try to change the minds of some of the people. I had family members who looked at me and wondered why was I organizing the welfare class, because they're all cheats, they are people who didn't work. So it was a matter of changing minds as well as changing people's beliefs that they themselves can effect changes in others; how do you empower people who are poor.

Q. You were trying to change the minds of the poor themselves?

Wilson: As well as the minds of the middle class. Trying to change the minds of the poor so that they would understand that as a group, an organized official group, they can in effect challenge the system. To also change the minds of the middle class and the opinion-makers so that there'd be less resistance to the poor. One of the things we did was organize a group called friends of the Welfare Tenants Coordinating Committee, which involved middle-class people in Long Island. We were also supported by the Catholic Church, by the Ethical Humanist Society and a number of other groups. So we were trying to create this climate of receptivity to creating some manners, some ladders of upward mobility on the part of the poor.

Q: And you found welfare policy at the time, either as perpetuated by state or federal government, as lax in what way?

Wilson: It was lax in that the assumption was that everybody on welfare were on welfare because they were shirking work, or they were on welfare because they were cheating to be on welfare. So we had to educate people that the vast majority of people on welfare were children. That only about 4 percent of the people on welfare were employable. That the cheating rate on welfare was about 3 to 4 percent. So what we were doing was in some way trying to get people to understand that people are poor not because they wanted to be, but essentially because circumstances created this kind of status, this kind of poverty.

Q: And the assistance offered by welfare was below what was needed? Was that one of your complaints as well?

Wilson: One of the things the welfare grant, the welfare assistance offered, was what you might call way below the poverty line itself. The assumption was one punishes the poor by giving them a certain amount which then would force them to go into the world of work. The idea was not to provide a living wage. The idea was to provide a wage to force people to take action, or create behaviors that would get them off of welfare, not realizing that the vast majority of people on welfare had no way to get off of welfare.

Q: Was there also housing discrimination that welfare clients faced here in Nassau County?

Wilson: Yeah, yeah. The housing discrimination that welfare clients faced was sort of class-based discrimination. The vast majority of people on welfare in Nassau County were white, the vast majority. So that discrimination was a bit different from what middle-class blacks faced. Middle-class blacks had the wherewithal to go into white communities and buy into white communities. They were just rejected from those white communities. What happened was the poor people were limited to those communities where you had multi-family housing or housing stock that was of very poor quality. So there was a difference between the discrimination against middle-class blacks and the discrimination of the poor in general.

Q: Were there any successes in the welfare tenants coordinating committee?

Wilson: I think there were a number of successes that we can at least take credit for. One was what you might call empowering people, people understanding that they do have it within themselves, if they organize, to move the system, maybe in small ways. The second success I would suggest is some of the programs we got the county itself to do. For example, we got the county to open up about 10 or 12 food stores, funded by the federal government, but run by welfare clients themselves. We got the Nassau County government to hire about 20 to 30 welfare clients to work as county aides in different departments. We worked with other groups to get a new careers training program set up inside Nassau County. This was helpful both under [County Executive Eugene] Nickerson, who, as a Democrat ,was particularly receptive to these kinds of things. And ultimately under [later the Republican County Executive] Ralph Caso, who although there was some initial resistance, was also open to some of these kinds of things. So the successes were not comprehensive. But the successes were incremental and enough, I think, to create a certain kind of feeling of value in what one was doing. What also occurred, of course, was we created a lot of leadership. A lot of members, people who were on welfare or in poverty ... that we found had leadership qualities that then went on to other kinds of projects, other kinds of programs, some to head up divisions within some of the anti-poverty programs. When I was working in Long Beach we had about four divisions, housing divisions, and all of us were like middle-class types. What we did, we had aides working with us, either poor or were on welfare, and what we did after a year was train them to take over from us. So we consciously walked away from those jobs and gave those jobs at the same salary we were paid to the poor and welfare clients that followed us. So the idea, really, was not to hold people's hands. The idea was to go and organize, empower people and then leave them, hopefully, to their own best devices.

Q: What would you say was your greatest accomplishment in doing this kind of work? Or proudest moment?

Wilson: My proudest moment, I guess, was the day we confronted Gov. [Nelson] Rockefeller when he was pushing through welfare cuts and was more concerned with problems on the Long Island Rail Road than the concerns of poverty. And what we did was to force him, he came to a town meeting at the old Garden City Hotel, and what we forced him to do was to address us. We blocked the hotel doors, where he couldn't leave. When we finally allowed him to leave [the hotel], we blocked his car. And it generated a substantial amount of interest. It was on the front page of Newsday. It was on the front page of the Long Island Press. What it did was it indicated to people, I think, that they could confront the most powerful politician in the state, at that particular point in time. Now, some people got arrested, and I had to ... get them out of jail on the same day so they wouldn't be prosecuted, formally. But it gave them a sense of, we're not just fighting a local battle. It's also a statewide battle, and that if you stick together you can confront the powers that be. The reason for that [confrontation with Rockefeller] was not only substantive, in terms of his policies, but also psychological, in terms of confronting this person ... with some impunity. What we wanted him to do was to understand that poor people were angry, that poor people were mobilized and that his policies had to be retooled in a way to satisfy the needs of those particular people.

Q: Did Gov. Rockefeller back down on his proposal to reduce welfare benefits?