It would not be “a short or easy struggle,” Johnson went on. “No single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”
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More accurately, the richest nation on earth can afford not to fight such a war—for it never has, not even in the 60s. Declaring the war helped Johnson deliver crucial social programs—Head Start, Medicaid, Medicare, the Food Stamp Act, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But initiatives targeting the problems of urban ghettos had barely begun before they lost their funding. “Right now, we don’t even have a skirmish on poverty,” King said in 1968.
- David Shankbone
- An Occupy Wall Street protester in New York’s Zucotti Park in September 2011
Those neighborhoods, and their residents, haven’t benefited from another several decades of government neglect. In one of our stories this week, I documented the lack of progress in Chicago, where poor, segregated neighborhoods and schools are widespread, as they were in the 1960s.
Enrichment efforts also have raised hopes. In the most renowned such initiative, the Promise Academy, families in 100 blocks of Harlem participate in programs that begin when parents are expecting and extend through their children’s college years. Scores on achievement tests have been encouraging.
But where’s the political impetus for an unrelenting effort? “The true answer is I don’t know where the commitment would come from, given that we’ve never sustained a commitment to urban neighborhoods,” Sharkey told me yesterday in an e-mail.
I am convinced that nothing will be done until enough people of good will get together . . . and bring these issues out in the open enough so that the Congressmen, who are in no mood at the present time to do anything about this problem, will be forced to do something about it.
