Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Read Online Free PDF Page A

the social revolution of the New Deal. Under the rubric of The Great Society, he launched a series of programs that significantly increased public spending on poverty, expanding services for and raising benefits available to the poor, especially to the elderly poor.
     
    Johnson intended to focus the War on Poverty on white rural poverty, but as the Civil Rights movement gathered steam and the nation became increasingly aware of inner-city poverty, the spotlight shifted to the ghetto. Unfortunately, his War on Poverty was soon cut off at the knees by several converging factors, the most important of which was the war in Vietnam. As the war heated up in the mid-1960s, Johnson’s energies focused increasingly on Vietnam, while political disagreements about the conduct of the war divided the liberal coalition that supported the reforms of his domestic agenda. Most decisive, money funneled to Vietnam could not be used to fight American poverty. Few of Johnson’s poverty programs were ever fully implemented, and funding, never abundant, was curtailed or eliminated for almost all of them.
     
    As our involvement in Vietnam withdrew resources from the war on poverty, the struggle for civil rights moved into northern cities and splintered. To white supporters of integration, the most threatening of the pieces was the Black Power movement. Previously strong supporters of civil rights in the South, northern liberal whites now felt themselves attacked by their former allies. The undertones of violence in Black Power were intimidating. Civil rights, a distant issue that to northern whites had seemed so easy to deal with, had suddenly shown up right in their backyard, morally ambiguous, and amenable to no simple solutions. Whereas 68 percent of northern whites supported Johnson’s initiatives in 1964, just two years later 52 percent thought the government was pushing integration too fast. 7 Although the War on Poverty was distinct from the Civil Rights movement, the two began to merge in public perception. As support drained for the latter, it was withdrawn from the former as well.
     
    It was precisely then that the ghettos erupted in violence. The concentration of poverty and the isolation of the poor within American cities now created overwhelming pressures and frustrations amid all the promises of help and hope. Beginning in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1965, one city after another boiled over. Television pictures of National Guardsmen occupying the smoldering ruins of the inner city would by 1968 become a dominant image of the black ghetto. Suddenly, poverty was not white, rural, and hardworking—“the great-, great-, grandchildren of Daniel Boone” 8 —but black, urban, and violent. Media images of the dangerous ghetto were now everywhere.
     
    In 1964, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a young advisor to President Johnson, wrote what was supposed to be a confidential memo to the president. Although the report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action , stressed male unemployment as the primary cause of black poverty, Moynihan also described what he called a “tangle of pathology” that had undermined the black family, another way of describing what Harrington (and others) had more positively, if blandly, called a “culture of poverty.” While both Harrington and Moynihan wrote hoping to spur the country to action, in fact, the public began to interpret that “tangle of pathology” as an intractable and intrinsic feature of black urban life. Although Moynihan believed that more and better jobs for black men were a crucial part of the solution to poverty in the inner cities, he left that recommendation out of the final report, reinforcing a sense of the intractability of poverty. There were, it seemed, no solutions.
     
    The Moynihan Report was leaked to the public just prior to the violence in Watts and then sensationalized in the press. It caused a firestorm among liberals and black activists, who