ABSTRACT
H idden among the invisible poor of the 1950s and occasionally glimpsed during the 1960s by anthropologists studying street corner men, America’s underclass suddenly emerged in the consciousness of white America as a social problem in the 1980s. By the 1990s America’s black ghetto poor were assailed for the supposed inadequacy of their culture; stripped of any semblance of respectability; and “disentitled” to further public assistance by an increasingly hostile and conservative public sentiment. The president of the United States in 1995, facing an ultraconservative Congress, proffered the nation’s neediest a bare remnant of the already badly shredded “safety net.” Democrats voted with Republicans to dismantle what little was left of Lyndon Johnson’s once heralded “War on Poverty.”
