The challenges faced by single mothers. This class is about an hour and 45 minutes. So, today were talking about the war on poverty, and the urban crisis in the late 1960s in the United States. And were looking at the ways in which the black Freedom Movement raised the issues of poverty, and of racial disadvantage. Really to a level of national attention, and National Action that we havent really seen at any time since. So i want to start just by well, first i should lead you through the outline quickly. Well talk about the ways in which americans at the time thought about black poverty. How did they interpret it. What causes did they think about. And then, what solutions, therefore, did they turn to. So well talk about designing a war on poverty. The choices that the federal government made when the Johnson Administration announced that it was going to wage a war on poverty. And then well talk a little bit about the socalled riots that occurred each summer in the late 1960s in africanamerican communities. In cities. And the ways in which discussions about those really reflected different attitudes about racial disadvantage. And then finally, well discuss imagining alternatives. So some of the ways in which activists offered their own ideas about what might help overcome racial disadvantage and poverty. And i have here a quote from a. Phillip randolph, freedom from oppression is and a necessary component to freedom from political oppression. Weve seen this throughout, right, that economic demands, demands for Economic Opportunity and Economic Security have been really important to the black freedom struggle, and so were going to see them kind of reappear here in significant form. So let me show you a couple of slides. These are statistics from the census. And here we have a comparison of white and black poverty in 1959 and 1968. Not a hard graph to interpret. What do you see . Cara . In 1968, poverty had declined a lot. But still black poverty is a lot higher than white poverty. And its still probably like that today. So there was change, but it wasnt theyre not equal. Yes. So we see progress for both groups over this time. But as you say, we continue to see a disparity. Any other comments on this graph . All right. I want to show you a little more detail here. And i want you to tell me what you see in this graph. Pedro . So, for you can tell with gender, theres a disparity where the poverty is, even among races. But with black females, theyre among the most highest. Well, actually yeah, among the most highest. They actually did decline slowly, but you can see even within race, theres also intersections within sex. So it sort of gives you a slight look at gender and how it intersects. The combined effects of race and gender on shaping Economic Opportunity and economic outcome, right . And i dont know if this is startling to you, but 1968, you can see still over 50 these are household headed by. So over 50 of households headed by africanamerican women were in poverty, or officially under the federal poverty line. Pauline . Why is it that black women are more in poverty than any other, like, race or gender . Thats a really great question. Lets talk about it. What do you think . Ashley . I think that its a combination of probably well, probably lack of being able to find employment, being both a person of color and also a woman. So as you can see, like the white female in 1968 is on par with the black male. Its like a double whammy of discrimination. Discrimination in the labor market. Lack of access to wellpaying jobs, both by sex and by race. And access to child care. A really good point. Womens role in raising children, and the time and resources that that takes. Other thoughts . Cara . Well, also the time period is the same time that a lot of our articles were talking about. So if it was like a single black woman, probably in poverty trying to raise a family, they were caught they werent allowed aid to help raise their families. Thats whats talked about in the articles that we read about, the struggle for them to receive government aid and the discrimination that they faced. Right, the social safety net access. Well talk a little bit more about that, review that in a few minutes. But remember, the social safety net was segmented. By race and by gender. I and by gender. I think to touch on what they both said, i think it was also like, it was cheaper for the access to child care, for women of color. It was like basically, youre not working youre working to pay for child care rather than just having money to, you know, cover your household. Most of it was going to child care. And not enough was going to the actual household. Writes come up or people who even had access to paid childcare. Black women were typically doing the paid child care for white women. We didnt have a proliferation of Child Care Centers at the time. A lot of this had to be informal through kinship. Difficult to arrange, absolutely. Any other thoughts on this intersection of race and gender in terms of creating poverty . Okay. So, i want you to keep these graphs in mind as we talk today. Lets turn to the ways in which americans in the 1960s framed the problem of black poverty. Americans were talking about poverty more broadly in the early 1960s. But because as weve seen, we have this Mass Movement among africanamericans, its making black poverty particularly visible. And we also see africanamericans in cities really challenging the economic manifestations of racism, right . So this is very much in the public eye. So lets look at daniel moynahan. So moynahan is a social scientist. He is a racial liberal. Think back to our discussion of racial liberalism. He is secretary of labor in the Johnson Administration. Hes a key policy maker among the federal officials who are determining what the federal governments response would be to poverty. And you read a short excerpt from a report he wrote called the negro family, a case for National Action. This was a report meant for internal eyes, to convince other policy makers and president johnson of the problem. And except that it was leaked. And it was made public. And so lets talk about what moynahan has to say about black poverty in 1965. Cara . Well, it talks about stuff weve learned about in other alesses, about how black m are oppressed through history. They do not have traditional roles like they did, strong father figures, so it talks about how that creates an unstable environment. I do not know how i personally felt about this article. I thought it was a little messed up and a little sexist. Only one. Not the thank you, other comments . What sort of language does moynahan use to describe the problem . Deterioration of the family. Deterioration of the family, yep. Other phrases . A quote that kind of stuck out. As jobs became more and more difficult to find, the stability of the family became more and more difficult to maintain. Yeah. And stability of family, right . A good phrase there. As jobs for who became more and more difficult to find . Africanamericans. Which africanamericans . Males. Males, right. The stability of the family. A Stable Family here is a male breadwinner family, right . And so this causes a number of problems. If black men cant find jobs, what are the problems that this causes, according to moynahan . Scott . The female has to become the moneymaker. Yes. It says a fundamental fact of Negro American life is often reversed roles of husband and wife. Yes. So if the woman is doing the earning, somehow the family the roles are reversed and the family is an unStable Family. And it leads to did anybody get the language of a matriarchal family structure, right . So thats deemed here a damaged family. Right . So if the fathers around, hes psychologically damaged, because he cant fulfill the role that men are supposed to fulfill in society as being the family breadwinner. So hes psychologically damaged. The availability of welfare benefits, which well talk a lot about later, also creates a problem, and contributes to the matriarchal family structure, according to moynahan. How does that happen . We have this program aid to dependent children. Ashley . I know it came up in the reading last week about how sometimes, like fathers would, like, step out of the picture so that the family could qualify for that aid. And then so then that would leave it to be a female head of household. Thats right. So its both that the man is psychologically damaged because he cant be a family breadwinner, so the mother becomes the breadwinner, and the man might actually leave, he might desert his family so that his children can be fed. Right . Through access to welfare benefits. Keep that in mind, because that becomes a key argument against social welfare measures, right . That its causing now its welfare, right . Hes saying its job discrimination, but its a short trip to saying the availability of welfare for mothers is creating damaged families, right . Okay. So moynahan says that initially, the problem is black mens inability to be breadwinners. But that this problem could become selfperpetuating. Right . And thats an important part of his analysis, too. So moynahan here is really well, i have one more question based on moynahan. We watched a raisin in the sun. Caras jumping ahead. I made some notes abouts raisin in the sun when i was readsing the article, how the grandma was this really strong, like, woman in the family who controls everything. You could see the son who was the dad trying to break out of that control, and find his own power in life. And be like the man of the family. I was thinking about that when i was reading it. Yeah. Other comments on that, the film . Pedro . I think something that she mentioned was like, what would your father do . The connections back to his father, so the expectations of actually heading their household household, because it seemed like she was the head of the household but she wanted him to take ownership of the household and sort of be head of the household like his father was. It seemed like he was lost. And he didnt know what to do. The expectations, and him either fulfilling the expectations or just leaving the picture. Especially with the one where, i was a little confused, i dont know if he was supposed to tell his wife to not have an abortion . Right. His mother was saying, tell her, right . And he didnt. And he yeah, hes clearly struggling. Hes just in pain this whole time. Yeah, pauline . I feel like the son had an issue well, like the son and the mother had issues. Because they saw it differently. The man that she expected him to be is not the man he wanted to be. It was just the man she expects him to be. It was like she wanted him to mirror the like his father. But at the same hand, he wasnt his father. And like that idea of, like, them coming, like migrating, is completely different from the lifestyle that they were actually living. Right. Its an interesting generational discussion, too, right . Because the mother and father had migrated from the south to chicago. And so their expectations were shaped by that migration. And then their son was born in chicago, in the getto, right . And so his expectations are different than theirs. And he feels yeah, he feels this tension about the role that his father played. A few of you were able to see the whole film. Does he how does it end . Does he become the man that his mother wants him to be . Latrice . I think he stands up for him. He almost sees what his mother is saying. Like i want you to be your father. I think she meant that morally, like he would have stood up for us, not let the white people push us around. I think he got that gist at the end where he acted on impulse and called that back over to sell the house. And then the more he was out there, he thought about, no, my sons right in front of me. I cant let him see me bow down to them. Because i dont want him to be that way. I think he starts to understands why his mother wanted him to be up to those expectations, because he has a little boy looking up to him. Him standing up for himself at the end, i think that made his mom proud. And that is why she kind of conceited at the end, what do you have to say . Hes the head of the family, its him now. It showed that he did end up being like his father like she wanted him to, but then again, he took his own stance. The way that he sort of came into his manhood, he was chasing this dream of a liquor store and business ownership, right . But the way he comes into his manhood is by challenging racism. Right . Challenging discrimination, and saying, no, were not going to take it. Were going to move into that suburb. So similar themes here from lorraine hansberry, where shes an africanamerican activist. Shes on the left. Moynahans a racial liberal. And here what we see is what the historian Darrell Michael scott has called the politics of pathology. I want you to think about that for a minute. What was the argument that swayed earl warren and the Supreme Court in the brown versus board of education case . Cara . Wasnt it the dolls . The dolls . Which proved what . Which proved that black children preferred the white dolls over the ones that looked more like them. So it showed some kind of deepseeded, like selfhating kind of thing and moved the court. That is interesting. Because thats not i dont know what else to say. I think maybe whats going on there is, is there a problem with this kind of an argument. Well definitely get there, right . But you see the politics, the pathology playing out in brown versus board of education. Whats wrong with racism and discrimination and segregation is it has a damaging psychological effect on africanamericans. I remember what i was going to say. It doesnt show the like what caused the racism, and the bigger problem of like institutions that are keeping it in place. Its just showing racism is bad, they dont like themselves, we need to fix this, schools should be integrated. But it doesnt open the blight on the real issues, that needed massive government change and stuff like that. For some racial liberals, the hope was that by emphasizing this damage that racism and segregation did to africanamericans, that would mobilize government action. So in other words, theyre using this politics of pathology to try to get liberal measures in place, right . To try to push for equal opportunity, to try to push for jobs programs, et cetera. As we see, its a problematic kind of an argument. So moynahans drawing on this framework then, as i said. Remember that the postwar period is also a period where psychology is really popular. People think in psychological terms, and so it makes sense that this kind of argument is being made. We see this across the spectrum. Charles silverman, crisis in black and white, hes a journalist, the disorganization of the family is reflected in the disorganization of negro life as well. Absence of the inner strength and selfdiscipline necessary, if one is to be the master rather than the servant of his environment, in a competitive society. So the damage imagery, very, very often relies on a certain gender and family structure, right . The damage to the family, the damage to the man that creates damage to the family. So you see racial liberals, social scientists, black and white, writing about this, making these arguments about family structure, and about pathology. Many of them, again, were hoping that this would convince the government to institute fixes to economic discrimination, that would enable africanamericans to reestablish a patriarchal family structure, which would then have their children not become criminals, right, and damaged and perpetuate this cycle. So racial liberals then are using damage imagery to promote Government Intervention to address africanamerican economic disadvantage. One other framework for thinking about black poverty in the 1960s, and its related to this politics of pathology, is the idea of culture of poverty. This idea of a culture of poverty comes most explicitly from anthropologist oscar lewis. And lewis wrote a book, initially he was writing about a mexican family in a small village in mexico. And what he argued in this book is that the poverty that this family had lived in for generations had created a pathological culture. Or a culture of poverty. So that these poor people had different values, a different way of living than nonpoor people did. He had a list of 50 different characteristics. They were things like tendency toward violence and inability to defer gratification and all of these sort of negative values that got passed on generation to generation, right . So again, even if you argue as lewis did that the origination of the problem was being kept out of opportunity, hes arguing again that this culture becomes self perpetuating. So what causes children to be poor, its the culture of their families and communities that causes them to be poor. He wrote then a book about a port ee family in sancan juan in new york about a culture of pourty. This was challenged by a lot of social scientists who did a lot of research to see if there was really a culture of poverty. Even though it was challenged quite robustly, the idea was really widespread. It became important to the ways in which federal policy makers designed programs to overcome poverty. So its cultural characteristics rather than what karra is pointing to what hamilton would call institutional racisms, the structures weve discussed creating these economic problems. Amidst the debate in the 1950s and 60s when americans thought about poverty and thought about a lower class, they increasingly envisioned africanamericans. Nathan glazer put it this way in 1963, he said terms such as cultural deprived and disadvantaged, quote, are only euphemisms for the negro child. President kennedy was thinking about federal antiPoverty Programs, he was thinking of whites in appalachia. This certainly became part of the approach. If you were a federal antipoverty planner, an aide to president johnson and he comes to you and says, what should we do to fix poverty in general and particular . Y in what would you advise . Having representatives from the actual poor populations say what they need for their specific communities rather than massive government things that dont exactly know the specific problems for certain areas so having the voice of the poor. Thats is what was talked about in one of the articles actually the bigger articles how the big programs by johnson didnt the voices of the actual people who the programs are going to affect werent even heard at all so i think that would be a really good strategy to go about fixing these issues. See what they actually need themselves. Ok. Let them design their own approaches. With help. With the aid li