Introduction: Historical Overview of Race and Poverty from Reconstruction to 1969

Abstract

This introductory chapter focuses on the period of 1865 and 1970 to examine the historical factors that explain race and poverty amongst African Americans. These factors include economic stagnation and retrogression, educational failure, employment discrimination, labor market discrimination, union barriers to employment, housing segregation, and black poverty. It also discusses anti-poverty policy and addresses the pecuniary costs of segregation and discrimination and human costs of the antiblack violence and white antipathy between 1866 and 1943.