Storming Caesars Palace

Annelise Orleck is a professor at Dartmouth College where she focuses on history, American radicalism, race studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She is the author of several books, including: Rethinking American Women’s Activism; Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty; and Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working Class Politics in the U.S. She lives in Thetford Center, Vermont.

Introduction to the 2023 Edition
Introduction

CHAPTER 1
From the Cotton Fields to the Desert Sands:
Living and Leaving the Delta Life

CHAPTER 2
“The Mississippi of the West”:
Jim Crow in Sin City

CHAPTER 3
“Bad Luck and Lousy People”:
Black Single Mothers and the War on Poverty

CHAPTER 4
“If It Wasn’t for You, I’d Have Shoes for My Children”:
Welfare Rights Come to Las Vegas

CHAPTER 5
Storming Caesars Palace:
Poverty and Power in Las Vegas

CHAPTER 6
Dragging Nevada Kicking and Screaming into the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 7
“We Can Do It and Do It Better”:
Revitalizing a Community from the Bottom Up

CHAPTER 8
Can Welfare Mothers Do Community Economic Development?:
The Triumphs and Trials of Operation Life

CHAPTER 9
Maybe We Were Fighting History:
The Legacy of Operation Life

Epilogue—A New Era for Las Vegas
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index