nstantly fed back to us by the media and the popular culture, is one of urban ghetto blacks. When former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, running as Republican Senatorial primary candidate in Louisiana in the 1990 election, denounced "welfare cheats," his audience did not need to have it spelled out that he meant black welfare cheats. Nor did Ronald Reagan have to spell this out in 1980, when he used similar rhetoric. Their white audience understood that "welfare" meant that their hard earned taxes were being given to lazy, troublesome black folks.
When "poverty" first emerged as a public question in modern America, in the Kennedy years of the early 1960s, the focus was not on the black poor. The first heavily publicized target of the War on Poverty was rural, predominantly white Appalachia (Katz, 1989: 82). However, it is not sheer coincidence that the war on poverty was launched at the same time as the civil rights revolution. Both were expressions along with the space program and even the war in Vietnam of the Kennedy era's self confidence that problems of all sorts could be solved if only they were attacked with vigor. Poor people could be provided with better housing, with schools, with job opportunities. Black people could be freed of the Jim Crow restrictions on where they could eat, work, live, or vote. Both, thus, could be brought into the prosperous American mainstream.
Then, beginning with Watts in 1964, America's inner city black ghettoes began to explode in violent upheavals. Unlike the race riots of earlier times, which were mainly riots of whites against blacks, the ghetto riots of the 1960s were black risings. These first explosions were chaotic. They had no definable leadership. When they were ended, the participants, save those arrested or killed by police, melted invisibly back into their communities.
They caught not only the white power structure, but also the black civil ...