Homeless Activism

In the post–Civil War United States, the shift to an industrial wage economy along with the easy transportation of the railroads helped contribute to a visible homeless population referred to as tramps and hobos, white men who traveled across the country seeking employment. While poor and often unemployed, this “army” was not the poorest of the poor at the time—as women and former slaves could not safely travel the rails—and rarely did these increasing numbers of wandering workers engage in coordinated activism. In 1894, however, 1,500 unemployed men calling themselves the Industrial Army struggled to make their way to Washington, D.C., to petition Congress for unemployment relief. Many were arrested or detained along the way, and those who did complete the journey found the legislature indifferent to their pleas.

In 1908, a group calling itself the Overalls Brigade, led by J. H. Walsh, traveled to Chicago to act as a hobo delegation to the convention of the Conference of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Unlike the “homeguard” delegates of the convention who advocated change toward socialism via the ballot box, the hobo delegation lobbied for direct action, strikes, and workplace protests, and in the end their view prevailed. By World War I, nearly every city's homeless “stem” or district hosted an IWW chapter or other formal organization with aims of social change.

According to Michael Stoops of the National Coalition for the Homeless, the roots of contemporary homeless activism can be found in the civil rights movement and anti–Vietnam War protests of the late [Page 697]1960s. In the early 1970s, many anti-war activists found their way to Catholic Worker houses, where they lived and worked alongside poor and homeless people. Contemporary community houses, such as the Catholic Worker Haley House in Boston or Atlanta's Open Door Community, are still sites for the gathering, support, and activism of and for homeless people in those cities.

The first coalitions for the homeless began forming in the late 1970s and the 1980s, the decade most known for the rise of homelessness on U.S. streets and in the U.S. consciousness. In 1985, for example, a New York Times poll found that only 36% of those surveyed had personally seen homeless people on the streets, while by 1991 that number had increased to 59%. Activist efforts at this time generally worked to put homelessness on the radar screen of legislators and citizens and to lobby for emergency services and resources. In 1978, the Community Center for Creative Nonviolence (CCNV) organized an occupation of the National Visitor's Center, the first in a decade of demands for more housing and resources for the poor. In 1980, Mitch Snyder, a charismatic advocate who joined CCNV in the early 1970s, along with Carol Fennelly, and Mary Ellen Hombs, coauthored a scathing report, Homelessness in America: A Forced March to Nowhere.

Throughout the 1980s, the CCNV and other groups sponsored memorial services, direct actions, street theater, and vigils to raise awareness of homelessness and to embarrass both civic and religious leaders. In 1983, around 150 people were arrested for occupying the nation's capitol; in 1984 more than 100 advocates and homeless people occupied the mayor's office in Columbus, Ohio. In 1984, Snyder went on a 51-day hunger strike and shamed the federal government into giving over a federal building for a shelter. In 1986, a march in Atlanta opposed a “derelict-free zone” that the city had imposed and a national march in 1988 drew thousands of homeless poor.

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