The Enduring Power of ‘Poverty Pimps’

Ed Koch and the Young Lords may seem like strange bedfellows. But the three-term mayor and the Puerto Rican radical leftist group articulated similar critiques of the people who managed community development programs in New York’s poorest neighborhoods in the 1960s and ’70s. The so-called “poverty pimps,” they alleged, had taken control of valuable government resources, turning Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty — and the many programs it spawned — into a boondoggle. In so doing, they painted a partial and misleading picture, obscuring many of the War on Poverty’s accomplishments. And yet the stereotype of the “poverty pimps” has had real staying power. In the past half-century, the epithet has been thrown, from the left and from the right, at a hodgepodge of bureaucrats, civil rights activists, welfare workers and more.

The War on Poverty

To understand who the “poverty pimps” were — and how the term itself originated — we need to go back to the launch of the War on Poverty in 1964. In Johnson’s first State of the Union address, delivered only six weeks after the Kennedy assassination, the new president declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” The initiative, Johnson promised, would take a “cooperative approach” and mobilize resources at the federal, state and local levels. The enabling legislation, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, provided for Community Action Programs that would stimulate grassroots groups to “mobilize their resources to combat poverty” at the local level. These programs, funded by both the federal and city governments, were meant to be “developed, conducted, and administered with the maximum feasible participation” of local people and the poor themselves. The “maximum feasible participation” mandate marked an unprecedented devolution of power from the White House to community-based organizations. Thus the War on Poverty tapped into the participatory ethos that defined the Civil Rights Movement and the emerging New Left; it also echoed some of the new urbanism being formulated by the likes of Jane Jacobs.

From the start, controversy surrounded the Community Action Program, and historians continue to debate its meaning. To some on the left, it was a counterinsurgency program designed to buy off local elites and tamp down radical voices at a time of rising urban unrest. To others, it represented an earnest effort to build on the accomplishments of the civil rights struggle, translating calls for economic justice into concrete social welfare programs. The right, meanwhile, would dismiss the program as a waste of taxpayer resources that fostered corruption and dependency.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle. What’s clear is that the bulk of community-action monies were spent in low-income, majority-Black and brown communities at a time of widespread disinvestment, deindustrialization and rising crime. The War on Poverty would score some notable successes, as recent research has shown.

But the pace of change was slow. Big-city mayors like New York’s Robert F. Wagner Jr. scrambled to control the allocation of community-action funds in their cities, leading to delays. Once federal funds were disbursed, they were sent to hundreds of communities around the country, meaning that the amounts to be spent in any given locale were meager, relative to the need. As a result, fierce battles broke out within those communities about how the funds should be spent, and by whom.

‘The people never get any of the money’

Enter the “poverty pimps.” By the late 1960s, a rising cohort of Black and Latino leaders had begun to access political power and patronage channels, thanks, in part, to the new structures birthed by the Community Action Program. Meanwhile, anger was mounting among younger, more radical voices in the target communities.

The term “poverty pimp” was coined, it seems, by Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman, a 19-year-old from East Harlem and a leader of the Young Lords. The Lords borrowed the Black Panthers’ Marxist revolutionary philosophy and tailored it to the issues facing Puerto Ricans. The group’s 13-Point Program contained the first published mention of “poverty pimps.”

“One of the things we’ve been hitting on is the poverty pimps in the community,” Yoruba told The Movement, a newspaper published by SNCC, in November 1969. “See, if we take the position that the Barrio and the ghetto is a colony then these antipoverty agencies and poverty pimps are outposts.” According to Yoruba, all these organizations were set up for one purpose: “to keep the natives down. … The people never get any of the money.”

The living embodiment of the Lords’ analysis was Ramon Velez, the so-called “padrino” of the poverty programs in the South Bronx. Beginning in the 1960s, Velez used his Hunts Point Multi-Service Center, funded by the War on Poverty, as the base from which to build an empire of social-service providers, including health clinics, housing and drug counseling. Though he only briefly served in elected office, he accumulated immense political influence; his programs served thousands of Bronx residents even as he personally profited. Velez was, as the Lords’ newspaper Palante put it in 1970, the “number one Puerto Rican poverty pimp.”

The epithet quickly caught on, though it would take on different meanings. Across the river in New Jersey, it was used during the Newark teachers’ strike of 1971. The episode pitted the city’s Black political establishment — including Amiri Baraka — against the teachers union, which was mostly white but led by a Black woman, Carole Graves, and backed by Newark’s Black Panther Party. Accused of being “insensitive to the needs of black ghetto children,” Graves and the union shot back that the city government was led by “unethical, irresponsible, and self-serving politicians and ‘poverty pimps’” According to the teachers, Baraka and company were using racial appeals and “reactionary nationalism” as a way of undermining a multiracial movement of the working class. In this context, “poverty pimping” was equated with union busting.

The following year, another critique of the “poverty pimps” emerged. In a 1972 book, “Welfare Mothers Speak Out,” members of the Milwaukee Welfare Rights Organization called out both “big-time poverty pimps” and “little ones.” In the latter category were social workers and welfare caseworkers who, it was alleged, were “more worried about professionalism, status, and money than about poor people.” As for the big-timers, they included large corporations that were gobbling up millions of taxpayer dollars through programs like the Job Corps. Meanwhile, bureaucrats were leaving the federal Office of Economic Opportunity for gigs with the very same management consultancies and think tanks that scored lucrative contracts with the office. (The Times labeled this the “poverty-industrial complex.”)

“We feel like we’re just urban prostitutes,” said Johnnie Tillman, the most prominent welfare-rights activist in the country at the time. “Anybody can draw up a proposal … and say they are going to do something for the poor, and make a lot of money off us.”

A turn to the right

It was Koch who made “poverty pimp” a household saying. (“Our mayor is a phrasemaker,” George Will would later quip, seemingly unaware of the phrase’s etymology.) On the campaign trail in 1977, Koch assailed the “poverty pimps” who, he said, were ripping off the City and worsening conditions in their own communities. New York’s Black leaders charged that Koch was using “racial codewords designed to polarize the city into ethnic camps,” as Major Owens, then a state senator who had previously helmed the City’s Community Development Agency, put it. The likes of Owens, Charles Rangel and Carl McCall eventually endorsed Koch for mayor, but only after he promised to stop saying the words “poverty pimp.”

A promise broken: Once in office, Koch resumed his attacks. “I want to keep providing the services, but we want to get rid of the poverty pimps,” he said in 1978. “You know what the poverty pimps are, don’t you? They’re the administrators of programs who skim money off the top. … Isn’t that disgusting?”

And yet the mayor would soon reconcile with some of his erstwhile targets. In 1981, Koch’s reelection campaign chose Ramon Velez to head a field operation in the South Bronx. (“I ascertained he was wrongly accused,” Koch would later say.) Velez continued to receive City contracts and emerged as a key surrogate for the mayor.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the “poverty pimp” archetype had symbolized a left-wing critique of Great Society liberalism. In the 1980s and ’90s, the weaponized term, reloaded, was mostly invoked by the right. Like Ronald Reagan’s favorite urban bogeyman, the “welfare queen,” the “poverty pimp” served to indict the welfare state itself. The term was also used to discredit an entire generation of civil rights leaders who stood accused of playing off past glories to extract promises and monies from “guilt-ridden whites.”

Black conservatives often led the charge. Thomas Sowell penned “The Poverty Pimp’s Poem.” In 1997, the Republican U.S. representative from Oklahoma, J.C. Watts, spoke of “race-hustling poverty pimps,” including Jesse Jackson and Marion Barry. Similarly, the economist Walter Williams commented that racism in America could have “earned a well-deserved death” but had been “resurrected by race hustlers, or poverty pimps as I call them, such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and many others in the civil rights movement who make a living on the grievances of Blacks.” Sharpton’s rebuttal, in the era of George W. Bush, flipped the insult on its head. “The same people, who yesterday were accusing us of being poverty pimps, are now all standing on line to get faith-based federal funding,” he noted.

One of the most broad-based critiques came in Theresa Funiciello’s 1993 book “Tyranny of Kindness.” Based on her experiences as a welfare mother, social services administrator and activist, Funiciello concluded that the entire welfare system was run by “institutionalized poverty pimps.” This indictment extended to private charities like the United Way, in addition to the welfare bureaucracy. Most recently, a 2024 lawsuit against the Red Cross, filed by Haitian Americans, alleged that the nonprofit had acted as a “poverty pimp” by diverting funds raised for victims of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. (The suit even quoted Sowell’s poem.)

Some 55 years after the Young Lords turned the phrase, “poverty pimp” retains its power as a metaphor for corruption, self-dealing and waste. That metaphor has helped to fuel a decades-long assault on the federal government itself. Ironically, many programs that were supposedly discredited by the “poverty pimps” did, in fact, help the poor.