Fifty years after 'war on poverty': Who's poor now? (+video)

Fifty years after the advent of the “war on poverty,” the lives of low-income Americans have improved on many fronts even as the US faces persistent challenges, led by the prevalence of single-parent households. Here are four yardsticks to measure American poverty, then and now.

3. Poverty by race

The poverty rate for African-Americans has fallen since 1964, but African-Americans remain much more likely to be poor than whites.

Where the poverty rate was 12.7 percent for whites in 2012, it was more than twice that for blacks (27.1 percent) and Hispanics (25.6 percent).

In the war on poverty’s early years, though, a stunning 42 percent of African-Americans lived in poverty (as of 1966), while the figure for Hispanics was 22.8 percent (in 1972), by Census measures.

The economic gap is seen in educational opportunities as well as in income. “Among 25- to 34-year-olds in 2013, the share that completed a four-year college degree was 41 percent for whites as compared to 23 percent for African Americans,” Ms. Parrott says in her report.

3 of 4

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.