Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Read Online Free Page B

expensive for low-wage earners, especially for young men who must pay soaring urban insurance premiums.
     
    Paradoxically, the success of the Civil Rights movement in bringing the end of legal segregation contributed to the devastation of the inner cities. African Americans could for the first time demand housing outside the crowded ghetto. So, beginning in the late 1950s, more affluent African Americans joined the white exodus from the city to the suburbs. 6 Only those who could not afford to move out were left.
     
    The end result of all these changes is the black urban ghetto we know today. As early as the 1970s, what had been poor but vertically integrated neighborhoods had largely been transformed into poverty-stricken, resource-destitute areas where only poor people lived, lacking social networks, institutions of support, or jobs.
     
    In most cases, as more affluent African Americans departed, these ghettos became physical wastelands, too. Business followed the money, leaving behind only a few corner grocery stores, occasional check-cashing places, liquor stores, and lots of boarded up buildings. The “surround of force” that people experienced led to despair, inertia, and increasing anti-social behavior.
     
    The black ghetto had been plundered.
     

THE MYTH OF THE WAR ON POVERTY
     
    For the majority of Americans, poverty had been a phenomenon of the Great Depression that essentially disappeared from the political radar screen with the economic stimulus of World War II and the consumerism of the post-war years. The 1950s were a time, it seemed, of economic prosperity; a time to move to the suburbs, start a family, and concentrate on one’s own standard of living. Rock-and-roll music emerged, echoing the times: bold, impudent, full of hope and energy. The election of the young John F. Kennedy as president in 1960 symbolized the hopefulness with which the country looked toward the future.
     
    There were rumblings, of course. The 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott marked the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, which over the next fifteen years turned a spotlight on some of the poorest and most racist parts of the country. Northern whites began to develop a consciousness of segregation and also, to some degree, the poverty it engendered.
     
    In 1962, political activist Michael Harrington published The Other America , a book that pointed to “invisible” poverty in the United States, to an economic underworld comprising nearly one-fifth of the population. Harrington focused graphically on the poverty of white rural areas such as the Appalachian hills, but looked at other groups, too: the uninsured elderly, migrant farm workers—and residents of the black ghettos. The book was published at a propitious moment. It not only symbolized a renewed curiosity about and urge to solve America’s domestic problems, but also became itself part of the political process. The United States had won World War II, infused new life through the Marshall Plan into the devastated countries of Europe, and was both admired and feared throughout the world. Kennedy had announced that we would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Why, then, couldn’t we solve poverty and civil rights—both problems located, for most Americans, far away in the backward South, primitive Appalachia, or the ignored inner-city ghettos? We were, after all, a “can-do” country.
     
    In 1964, during his first months in office after the assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson felt the need for a grand theme to characterize his presidency, a program that would both offer him legitimacy in a position he had only inherited and garner the support of the liberals who had backed Kennedy and mistrusted this prototypical southern politician. Influenced by Harrington’s book, Johnson declared a “war on poverty” as part of an ambitious attempt to complete