In this dispatch, Gene Drew reported on the long-running battle to bring people from the flatlands (if not The Flatlands) into the planning of local War on Poverty efforts.

The Oakland Economic Development Council (OEDC), created to coordinate the disbursement of federal and state anti-poverty funds, had not been created with popular participation in mind. Years of surveys and fact-finding committees had convinced Oakland’s leaders that serious changes were needed to combat the city’s poverty problem, but a political culture of cozy power brokerage precluded any sizable role for grassroots community representation.

The Council’s leadership in its early years had tended to draw a few of its members from the city’s middle-class black leadership, but the majority were putatively progressive-minded figures from the city’s white political and business establishment, civic boosters and wheeler-dealers. Good will abounded, but action was lacking.

Donald McCullum, an NAACP leader and OEDC member, spearheaded a grassroots effort to address this failing in the spring of 1966, proposing that 51% of Council members would be required to reside within its “target areas.” Since OEDC members tended to live in the tonier enclaves of the surrounding hills, outside the target neighborhoods in the flatlands, geographical representation acted as a proxy for participation of the program’s intended beneficiaries.

Drew, who had come to prominence as a high-ranking member of Oakland’s CORE chapter and a key organizer with the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, had been elected an at-large member of OEDC the previous fall. Now, he worked with McCullum and other allies to bring the voices of the poor to the halls of power. Their proposal favored the establishment of a police review board, and sided with rank-and-file legal aid workers in their dispute with management.

After months of struggle, covered blow-by-blow in the pages of The Flatlands, the 51% representation proposal was eventually enacted by the OEDC, setting the stage for the coming fight over the Model Cities program.