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Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty has long been portrayed as the most potent symbol of all that is wrong with big government. Conservatives deride the War on Poverty for corruption and the creation of \"poverty pimps,\" and even liberals carefully distance themselves from it. Examining the long War on Poverty from the 1960s onward, this book makes a controversial argument that the programs were in many ways a success, reducing poverty rates and weaving a social safety net that has proven as enduring as programs that came out of the New Deal. The War on Poverty also transformed American politics from the grass roots up, mobilizing poor people across the nation. Blacks in crumbling cities, rural whites in Appalachia, Cherokees in Oklahoma, Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, migrant Mexican farmworkers, and Chinese immigrants from New York to California built social programs based on Johnson's vision of a greater, more just society. Contributors to this volume chronicle these vibrant and largely unknown histories while not shying away from the flaws and failings of the movement-including inadequate funding, co-optation by local political elites, and blindness to the reality that mothers and their children made up most of the poor. In the twenty-first century, when one in seven Americans receives food stamps and community health centers are the largest primary care system in the nation, the War on Poverty is as relevant as ever. This book helps us to understand the turbulent era out of which it emerged and why it remains so controversial to this day.

Led by the Office of Economic Opportunity, Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty reflected the president’s belief that, just as the civil rights movement and federal law tore down legalized segregation, progressive government and grassroots activism could eradicate poverty in the United States. Yet few have attempted to evaluate the relationship between the OEO and the freedom struggles of the 1960s. Focusing on the unique situation presented by Texas, Freedom Is Not Enough examines how the War on Poverty manifested itself in a state marked by racial division and diversity—and by endemic poverty. Though the War on Poverty did not eradicate destitution in the United States, the history of the effort provides a unique window to examine the politics of race and social justice in the 1960s. William S. Clayson traces the rise and fall of postwar liberalism in the Lone Star State against a backdrop of dissent among Chicano militants and black nationalists who rejected Johnson's brand of liberalism. The conservative backlash that followed is another result of the dramatic political shifts revealed in the history of the OEO, completing this study of a unique facet in Texas’s historical identity.

Cover -- Contents -- Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up -- Part I. Battles over Community Action -- \"This Government Is with Us\": Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty -- \"To Challenge the Status Quo by Any Means\": Community Action and Representational Politics in 1960s Baltimore -- Ideological Diversity and the Implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston -- Defining the Space of Participation in a Northern City: Tejanos and the War on Poverty in Milwaukee -- Part II. Poor Mothers and the War on Poverty -- Saving Babies in Memphis: The Politics of Race, Health, and Hunger during the War on Poverty -- \"Someday . . . the Colored and White Will Stand Together\": The War on Poverty, Black Power Politics, and Southern Women's Interracial Alliances -- \"Parent Power\": Evelina López Antonetty, the United Bronx Parents, and the War on Poverty -- Gender, Civil Rights Activism, and the War on Poverty in Los Angeles -- Part III. The War on Poverty, the Civil Rights Movement, and Southern Politics -- Poverty Wars in the Louisiana Delta: White Resistance, Black Power, and the Poorest Place in America -- Plantation Politics: The Tufts-Delta Health Center and Intraracial Class Conflict in Mississippi, 1965-1972 -- Fighting for the Child Development Group of Mississippi: Poor People, Local Politics, and the Complicated Legacy of Head Start -- Going Back to Selma: Organizing for Change in Dallas County after the March to Montgomery -- The War on Poverty and the Chicano Movement in Texas: Confronting \"Tio Tomás\" and the \"Gringo Pseudoliberals\" -- Part IV. What Do They Really Mean by Community Development? -- Looking Back to the City in the Hills: The Council of the Southern Mountains and a Longer View of the War on Poverty in the Appalachian South, 1913-1970.

This commentary introduces a special section of AJPH on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the US government’s largest antihunger program and third-largest antipoverty program. SNAP demonstrably lifts adults, children, and families out of poverty, thereby constituting a vital component of this nation’s public health safety net. Despite its well-documented benefits, SNAP is under political and budgetary siege, mainly from congressional representatives and lobbying groups opposed to a federal role in welfare. In part, SNAP is protected from total annihilation by its unusual authorizing legislation—the Farm Bill. This commentary provides a brief overview of the political history of SNAP and its Farm Bill location as background to the deeper analyses provided in this series of articles.

Welfare policy in the American states has been shaped profoundly by race, ethnicity, and representation. Does gender matter as well? Focusing on state welfare reform in the mid-1990s, we test hypotheses derived from two alternative approaches to incorporating gender into the study of representation and welfare policymaking. An additive approach, which assumes gender and race/ethnicity are distinct and independent, suggests that female state legislators—regardless of race/ethnicity—will mitigate the more restrictive and punitive aspects of welfare reform, much like their African American and Latino counterparts do. In contrast, an intersectional approach, which highlights the overlapping and interdependent nature of gender and race/ethnicity, suggests that legislative women of color will have the strongest countervailing effect on state welfare reform—stronger than that of other women or men of color. Our empirical analyses suggest an intersectional approach yields a more accurate understanding of gender, race/ethnicity, and welfare politics in the states.

Beyond Rustchronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of metropolitan Pittsburgh, an industrial region that once formed the heart of the world's steel production and is now touted as a model for reviving other hard-hit cities of the Rust Belt. Writing in clear and engaging prose, historian and area native Allen Dieterich-Ward provides a new model for a truly metropolitan history that integrates the urban core with its regional hinterland of satellite cities, white-collar suburbs, mill towns, and rural mining areas. Pittsburgh reached its industrial heyday between 1880 and 1920, as vertically integrated industrial corporations forged a regional community in the mountainous Upper Ohio River Valley. Over subsequent decades, metropolitan population growth slowed as mining and manufacturing employment declined. Faced with economic and environmental disaster in the 1930s, Pittsburgh's business elite and political leaders developed an ambitious program of pollution control and infrastructure development. The public-private partnership behind the \"Pittsburgh Renaissance,\" as advocates called it, pursued nothing less than the selective erasure of the existing social and physical environment in favor of a modernist, functionally divided landscape: a goal that was widely copied by other aging cities and one that has important ramifications for the broader national story. Ultimately, the Renaissance vision of downtown skyscrapers, sleek suburban research campuses, and bucolic regional parks resulted in an uneven transformation that tore the urban fabric while leaving deindustrializing river valleys and impoverished coal towns isolated from areas of postwar growth. Beyond Rustis among the first books of its kind to continue past the collapse of American manufacturing in the 1980s by exploring the diverse ways residents of an iconic industrial region sought places for themselves within a new economic order.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States and Japan went through massive welfare expansions that sparked debates about citizenship. At the heart of these disputes stood African Americans and Koreans.Reinventing Citizenshipoffers a comparative study of African American welfare activism in Los Angeles and Koreans' campaigns for welfare rights in Kawasaki. In working-class and poor neighborhoods in both locations, African Americans and Koreans sought not only to be recognized as citizens but also to become legitimate constituting members of communities. Local activists in Los Angeles and Kawasaki ardently challenged the welfare institutions. By creating opposition movements and voicing alternative visions of citizenship, African American leaders, Tsuchiya argues, turned Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty into a battle for equality. Koreans countered the city's and the nation's exclusionary policies and asserted their welfare rights. Tsuchiya's work exemplifies transnational antiracist networking, showing how black religious leaders traveled to Japan to meet Christian Korean activists and to provide counsel for their own struggles. Reinventing Citizenshipreveals how race and citizenship transform as they cross countries and continents. By documenting the interconnected histories of African Americans and Koreans in Japan, Tsuchiya enables us to rethink present ideas of community and belonging.

In January of 1964, President Lyndon B.Johnson declared a \"War on Poverty.\" Over the next several years, the United States launched several programs aimed at drastically reducing the level of poverty throughout the nation.Now fifty years later, we have a number of lessons related to what has and has not worked in the fight against poverty.