Combating Need: Urban Conflict and the Transformation of the War on Poverty and the African American Freedom Struggle in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

This article examines the struggle for control over Rocky Mount's Community Action Program (CAP)—Nash-Edgecombe Economic Development (NEED)—as a turning point in a longstanding urban conflict. For decades, white businessmen and government officials had repeatedly blocked African Americans from using federal policy innovations to promote racial equality and black economic advancement. Implementation of the city's War on Poverty initially followed these well-established patterns. But by the summer of 1967, working-class African American neighborhood organizations, supported by federal and state agencies, loosened the white political establishment's grip on NEED, secured improvements in rental housing regulation, and increased their role within the city's evolving black freedom movement. In exploring these transformations, this essay argues that the CAP should be reevaluated from the perspective of how it altered the course of local economic and political struggles, and how local contests over implementation of the CAP reshaped the War on Poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]