1970 map of poverty and race.
As can be seen from the map, high levels of poverty stricken areas are found in certain areas of the country that have high densities of certain races. Specifically, the south and the southwest. These maps show us that the American Indian and Innuit cultures as well as the African American races suffer from poverty on a grander scale than the Caucasian race.
The American Indian populations have been segregated to reservations and have very few economic opportunities on these reservations. The south was a bit more complicated to explain.
The industrialization of southern agriculture led to a loss of jobs throughout the farming communities. This in turn led to mass migrations of African Americans to the north. This migration coincided with industrialization of these northern cities and in effect, but, due to segregation, created large ghettos. While members of other races could get out of their ghettos, larger numbers of residents remained in black ghettoes due to segregation. Even when a person was able to work up to a comfortable level of affluence, they were still segregated to the ghetto due to their race. The south, however, never developed the industrial centers of the north and both White and Black races that depended on agriculture as a livelihood remained impoverished for many decades.
During the depression social security and mandatory unemployment insurance, which were part of the New Deal by Franklin D. Roosevelt, were specifically left out for domestic and agricultural workers. The majority of these two trades were occupied by the black race in the south. This increased the poverty of the south even further, which can be seen by our maps. Poverty is highly concentrated in the southern states and still is.
During the 1960’s farms became even more mechanized. One of the main reasons for this was the Vietnam War. In 1970, nearly 25% of the U.S. population was living in rural areas. It has been estimated that 2.25 million men left these communities to join the military. This depletion of the farm workforce forced farmers to use even more mechanization to supplement the loss of manual labor (Ganzel).
In the mid 1960’s a war was declared on poverty and certain reforms were implemented by Lyndon B. Johnson; the food stamp act of 1964, The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the 1965 Social Security Act that created Medicare and Medicaid. All of these reforms helped to bring poverty down to the relatively low level that we see in our maps of this time period http://www.ushistory.org/us/56e.asp.
To put the maps seen in the 1970’s into context, at the end of the 1950’s, poverty had reached a level of close to forty million Americans living below the poverty level. By 1968, however, this number had fallen to the level of 26 million due to these reforms.
Works Cited
Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Ushistory.org. n.p. n.d. web. December 8, 2015 http://www.ushistory.org/us/56e.asp
Ganzel, Bill. Livinghistory.org. The Vietnam War. The Ganzel Group. 2007. Web. December 8, 2015. http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe50s/life_08.html