By Anne Price, President

Organizers and volunteers from the National Welfare Rights Organization, marching to end hunger in 1968. Source: Anna Julia Cooper Center, Wake Forest University

It’s been 40 years since we witnessed a Women’s Convention challenging our nation to take up equal rights of women in education, work, and in their personal lives, but this past weekend nearly 5,000 people, mostly women, gathered in Detroit as part of the inaugural Women’s Convention with the theme of Reclaiming Our Time.

Inspired by Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ highly esteemed mantra “reclaiming my time,” convention speakers echoed the need to restore human dignity across a wide range of social, political and economic issues.

The Women’s Convention lifted up the role that social movements led by women of color have played in shaping current proposals and actions to address discrimination, alienation, and exclusion. At the same time, the gathering recognized that the Women’s Movement has never amply included, let alone prioritized, Black women’s oppression and experiences in the struggle for gender justice.

We are in an important moment for women to exercise their moral agency to reclaim dignity and humanity in our economy and draw upon the legacy of historical movements. One of the most compelling ideas for reimagining our nation’s economic policies through this vision is Universal Basic Income (UBI), a progressive policy proposal that is gaining traction in the national conversation.

The basic tenet behind UBI is to give every American a stipend so that all children and families have the funds to meet their most essential needs — with their dignity and self-efficacy intact. The most common UBI proposal is to give people unconditional cash grants of about $12,000 per adult annually, with variances for true costs of living. This amount would help families create an income floor to meet basic needs like shelter, food, and transportation.

While UBI has gained mainstream attention as a possible solution to automation and job loss, when it comes to the full promise — and historical roots — of UBI, we have some reclaiming to do.

We must acknowledge that the legacy of a basic income is inextricably linked to racial justice advocacy of women, particularly Black women. Looking at historical precedents, much attention is focused on the Black Panther Party’s 1966 10-point platform, which called for every person being offered employment or a guaranteed income, and Martin Luther King’s own proposal for a guaranteed income, as outlined in his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

Much less attention has been paid to the role the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which numbered over 100,000 at the organization’s peak, played in advancing a guaranteed income.

The NWRO focused primarily on racial, gender, and economic justice. Many NWRO members were Black women who came north from the sharecropping South and faced widespread employment discrimination. They clearly understood that their status as public assistance recipients was tied to being seen as laborers, rather than hard-working mothers, who were nonetheless deemed unworthy and undeserving of any assistance. They challenged the stigma of welfare and insisted that a decent standard of living was a right — one that should not be tied to wage work — while also emphasizing the work and value of caregiving.

Considered in this historical light, it’s abundantly clear that a basic income program has much greater potential than is captured in the mainstream conversations about UBI — it holds the promise of addressing, head on, some of our most deeply entrenched racial and economic inequities.

We should be building on the work of the NWRO to tackle longstanding dominant narratives about deservedness, dignity, and personhood that remain genderized and racialized through anti-poverty policies and practices.

We need to honor this legacy by reframing the UBI conversation in terms of fundamental human worth and dignity.

We need to take a broader view of UBI as a mechanism for lifting up communities that are being shut out of the economy, like the formerly incarcerated and people with criminal records, who are disproportionately people of color.

We need to see that UBI would provide all families with greater opportunity to hold on to and build up their wealth and resources for long-term, cross-generational benefit.

And we need to be crystal clear that UBI is much more than another transactional economic policy. It represents a truly transformative opportunity for communities and families to escape paternalistic safety net programs, built on racist ideology and stereotypes, to become more self-determining and free to make their own choices.

While UBI would not completely eliminate racial injustice, it would enable people, no matter their race, gender, or zip code, to take greater control of their lives and destiny. This is an essential tenet for true liberation and one that puts us — finally, resolutely, and with the strength of all those who came before us — on a pathway to racial and economic justice.