In 1971, thousands of poor black women shut down the Las Vegas Strip and occupied Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino in protest of welfare cuts in Nevada. They were joined by left celebrities like Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, partly to ensure that the mobsters who owned the casinos would not shoot into the crowds of protesters. These women subsequently founded Operation Life, considered one of the most successful programs of the War on Poverty era.

Historian Annelise Orleck’s book, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought their Own War on Poverty, documents this struggle for welfare rights. It has been published in a revised edition and is the basis of a new PBS documentary of the same name. She was recently interviewed by Sasha Lilley for Against the Grain, a California-based progressive radio show, about the punitive policies like “midnight raids” that spurred welfare recipients’ organizing, the connections between the local and national welfare rights movement, and, as one welfare rights recipient and organizer put it, “the idea that I was entitled to certain benefits for the work I did, raising my children.”