One of the most permanent aspects of our economic system is the existence of poverty. The poor have been with us since the founding of this country and expanded as the nation grew. It is the nemesis of a capitalist system and could ultimately be its Achilles Heel. 

Over the decades, many leaders, including presidents and civil rights leaders, have attempted to address poverty. But none of these programs have been successful. In 2021, 11.6%, or 37.9 million Americans, lived in poverty. Of that number, 19% were Black, and only Native Americans/Alaska Natives had a higher percentage at 24.3%. 

The first major attempt to curb poverty was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal which ran from 1933 to the outbreak of World War II. It was during the depression years, when America was on the verge of a possible revolution, led by those who were starving, that President Roosevelt stepped in and, with the assistance of a Democratic-controlled Congress, passed the unemployment compensation, welfare, social security, and minimum wage acts. However, his programs served more as a band-aid to a much larger PROBLEM. Even with these programs, the poor were still among us.

The next major attempt to address the problem of poverty was a combination of the work of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and civil rights leaders, specifically Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the famous 1963 March on Washington D.C.,  A. Phillip Randolph and Dr. King reached an agreement that the march would stress both the need to integrate, but also the importance of providing the poor and underclass job opportunities to climb out of poverty. It led to the 1964 passage of the Economic Opportunity Act. In his speech to the United States Congress, President Johnson told the Senators and members of the House of Representatives that “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty but to cure it and, above all, prevent it.” 

However, the escalation of the Vietnam War diverted President Johnson’s attention from the war on poverty to the war in a country thousands of miles from our shores. It led to a breakup of the unusual alliance between Dr. King and the President. As more money was poured into the war in Vietnam, it diminished the resources for the war against poverty. 

In his April 4, 1967, speech at Riverside Church in New York, King took aim at Johnson when he said, “There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as there was a real promise of hope for the poor…through the poverty programs. Then came the buildup in Vietnam…and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor.”

The following year, Dr. King went to work organizing what would become known as the “Poor People’s Campaign.” Before his assassination, he planned to erect a tent city on the National Mall to bring national attention to the plight of the poor and away from the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, he never had the opportunity to successfully carry out that mission for those millions of people suffering from poverty. Since 56 years ago, more emphasis has been placed on blaming the poor for their plight than solving it. Under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, who dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity, the blame for their plight was placed on the poor, especially Black Americans. Reagan coined the term “Welfare Queen” with the subtle implication that all Black women recipients were buying Cadillacs with welfare checks. It was especially an attack from the more conservative Republican Party, suggesting that welfare recipients were just too lazy to get a job and there were sufficient opportunities for them to work. The additional argument from conservatives, who oppose welfare and other programs designed to bring some financial relief to the poor, is that it creates a dependency on government assistance among the poor. For some reason, their attacks were never directed at the poor white population, probably because they needed their vote as part of their coalition to win office.

As the country moves into a new phase of divided government in Washington D. C. and a tendency to return as many federal programs as possible to the more conservative states, the plight of the poor will continue. Dr. King’s dream of a time when this country would achieve equality of the races may be true when it comes to eliminating segregated facilities, but it is still nothing more than a dream when it addresses the problem of poverty in America.