A Black cabaret singer, actor, and celebrity, Kitt had been invited to a “Women Doers’ Luncheon” focused on crime, an issue of growing importance to the Johnson administration at the time. Mezzack writes that the speakers and guests included leaders of local anticrime groups, volunteers with community organizations like Head Start, judges, politicians’ wives, and teachers. After hearing from the speakers, Kitt spoke up, drawing on her authority as someone who had “lived in the gutters” and was involved with youth organizations in poor neighborhoods of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. She suggested that the luncheon’s speakers had missed a key point.