Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Donald Mrozek / Scholars identify the early 1960s as the moment when Americans rediscovered poverty – as the time when Presidents, policymakers, and the public shifted their attention away from celebrating the affluence of the 1950s and toward directly helping poor people within the culture of poverty through major federal programs such as the Peace Corps and Job Corps. This dissertation argues that this moment should not be viewed as a rediscovery of poverty by Americans. Rather, it should be viewed as a paradigm shift that conceptually unified the understanding of both foreign and domestic privation within the concept of a culture of poverty. A culture of poverty equally hindered poor people all around the world, resulting in widespread illiteracy in India and juvenile delinquency in Indianapolis. Policymakers defined poverty less by employment rate or location (rural poverty in Ghana versus inner-city poverty in New York) and more by the cultural values of the poor people (apathy toward change, disdain for education, lack of planning for the future, and desire for immediate gratification). In a sense, the poor person who lived in the Philippines and the one who lived in Philadelphia became one. They suffered from the same cultural limitations and could be helped through the same remedy. There were not just similarities between programs to alleviate poverty in either the Third World or America; the two became one in the mid-1960s. Makers of policy in the War on Poverty understood all poverty around the world as identical and approached it with the same remedy. President John Kennedy inspired the paradigm shift. After reading about the culture of poverty in Dwight Macdonald’s review of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, Kennedy began to bring together experts within a new mentality to discuss a program to end poverty. The experts had been working for separate programs that focused on seemingly disparate issues—juvenile delinquency, poverty in New England, and Third World development—but they now realized that they were all working on the same problem, namely, the culture of poverty. The understanding that cultural values created poverty led them to unify their programs and approaches as they created the War on Poverty in 1964. The discovery was not the beginning of national attention on poverty but a culmination that brought together prominent people, ideas, and programs already in existence within a new paradigm.

Head Start began in 1965 as a part of the War on Poverty led by President Lyndon B. Johnson. After more than 50 years, it has remained as one of the most popular government social programs with support from across the political spectrum. However, there have been mixed results regarding the effectiveness of Head Start in participants' educational gains. Despite the mixed research, Head Start has continued to receive support by the public and both political parties throughout the decades. While there are disagreements on reforms to be made to Head Start, there has been increasing agreement around making providers more accountable for program quality through an evidence-based approach. The 2007 reauthorization of Head Start captures the spirit of Head Start as a “national laboratory” of what creates the best outcomes for children.

From the time of the "war on poverty" of 1964, to the era of "welfare reform" in 1990s, the federal welfare system underwent a change from a model that acted to protect citizens from the vagaries of the market economy to one that mandated their participation in the paid labor force. For a shift in policy of this magnitude to occur and be unquestioningly accepted by the public, a significant change also had to occur in how poverty and welfare issues were discussed and perceived over the intervening years. Using discourse analysis, this study examines how editorials in elite newspapers framed the issues of poverty and welfare in the months prior to the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act (1964) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996). It also addresses how newspaper editorials influenced public perception about the nature and causes of poverty and welfare reliance.

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Hard Luck Baby is a collection that elucidates the life of a southern, black mother as she grapples with her culture, family, love and the complex reality of black life in America. Hannah, is a woman who was born in the bubbling 40s, raised in the racial 60s and raptured in the drug-infested 80s. It is through these decades that the rough edges of America are exposed. She discusses her life experiences in a manner that allows readers to touch, as much as empathy will allow, the feelings that contour the deepest areas of her barrel. She shares her first example of love and its reverberations along with various accounts of growth. With minimal mention that demands acknowledgment, Hannah achieves an accurate description of American culture, as it relates to poor black people. She juxtaposes multiple societal and familial norms that contributed to her personal development. She is participating in a self-assigned purge of gripping hard-truths, but the crowning moment starts to take shape as she begins to understand herself and her children. Hard Luck Baby is the music of pained grandparents, parents, siblings, and children played over an American landscape. It is a platform for a woman who has been silenced to speak. Written in first person, many of the poems are stories that might have been told from other perspectives with venom, malice or sorrow, but the speaker takes ownership of her role in creating such emotions. As Hannah speaks, the audience may as well, be sitting crossed-legged on a front porch as she rocks in her chair recalling events from her life. She speaks about love, loss, rejection, disappointment, growth, friendship, fight, and forgiveness. At its close, Hard Luck Baby is an elderly woman giving stern-faced lessons to anyone who would dare to sit and listen.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Political Science, 2006. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-122).

The Desire Housing Project opened in 1956 as a segregated public housing development in New Orleans‟ Upper Ninth Ward. The Desire neighborhood, one of the few neighborhoods in the city where black homeownership had been encouraged, was transformed by the project. Hundreds of former Desire residents were displaced by the mammoth project, which became home to more than 13,000 residents by 1958. Built on what had once been a landfill, the Desire Housing Project came to epitomize the worst in public housing, before it was torn down by 2001. Although the project was isolated from the rest of the city and lacked basic services, residents worked to create a viable community, in spite of the pitfalls of segregation. Within the context of the civil rights movement, Desire residents fought to bring in basic services, pushing local government to more fully develop their neighborhood.

Envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, the Poor People's Campaign (PPC) represented a bold attempt to revitalize the black freedom struggle as a movement explicitly based on class, not race. Incorporating African Americans, ethnic Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, American Indians, and poor whites, the PPC sought a broad coalition to travel to Washington, D.C., and pressure the government to fulfill the promise of the War on Poverty. Because of King's death and the campaign's subsequent premature end amid rain-driven, ankle-deep mud and just a few, isolated policy achievements, observers then and scholars since have dismissed the campaign as not only a colossal failure, but also the death knell of the modern freedom struggle. Using a wide range of sources - from little-used archives and Federal Bureau of Investigation files to periodicals and oral histories - this project recovers the broader significance of the campaign. Rejecting the paradigm of success and failure and placing the PPC in the broader context of the era's other social movements, my analysis opens the door to the larger complexity of this pivotal moment of the 1960s. By highlighting the often daunting obstacles to building an alliance of the poor, particularly among blacks and ethnic Mexicans, this study prompts new questions. How do poor people emancipate themselves? And why do we as scholars routinely expect poor people to have solidarity across racial and ethnic lines? In fact, the campaign did spark a tentative but serious conversation on how to organize effectively across these barriers. But the PPC also assisted other burgeoning social movements, such as the Chicano movement, find their own voices on the national scene, build activist networks, and deepen the sophistication of their own power analyses, especially after returning home. Not only does this project challenge the continued dominance of a black-white racial framework in historical scholarship, it also undermines the civil rights master narrative by exploring activism after 1968. In addition, it recognizes the often-competing, ethnic-driven social constructions of poverty, and situates this discussion at the intersection of the local and the national. / Dissertation

This dissertation explores the University of Kentucky’s efforts to develop and implement an “action program” in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s. By the late 1950s, Kentucky’s political, business, and academic leaders had identified eastern Kentucky as the state’s problem area, and they sought strategies to bring the region into the economic and cultural mainstream. This generation of post-war leaders had an uncompromising faith in the power of knowledge, technology, and planning, and University leaders saw their action program as a university-wide effort to address what most would argue was Kentucky’s ugliest problem. This study begins with an examination of the rushed and disorganized Kellogg Foundation-funded Eastern Kentucky Resource Development Project (EKRDP) in 1960. With the national “rediscovery” of Appalachia in the early 1960s and the passage of the Equal Opportunity Act (EOA) and the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA) in 1964 and 1965, University leaders reframed their thinking about how to engage eastern Kentucky in the midst of a War on Poverty. Institutional support for the EKRDP dwindled, and administrators tried to shift the responsibility of the eastern Kentucky program to the newly developed Center for Developmental Change (CDC). However, the leadership of the CDC lacked stability, the faculty who had been the driving force behind the Center did not want to be tied down to Appalachian projects, and the changing expectations for faculty ushered in by the “Oswald Revolution” did not reward interdisciplinary work.