Professors Jeffrey L. Littlejohn and Wesley G. Phelps discuss topics in World and U.S. History with the faculty members and graduate students at Sam Houston State University. Each episode of Living History features concise interviews with authors on current publications. Join us.
In this episode...
A People's War On Poverty:
Urban Politics and Grassroots Activists in Houston
From the publisher:
In A People’s War on Poverty, Wesley G. Phelps investigates the on-the-ground implementation of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty during the 1960s and 1970s. He argues that the fluid interaction between federal policies, urban politics, and grassroots activists created a significant site of conflict over the meaning of American democracy and the rights of citizenship that historians have largely overlooked. In Houston in particular, the War on Poverty spawned fierce political battles that revealed fundamental disagreements over what democracy meant, how far it should extend, and who should benefit from it. Many of the program’s implementers took seriously the federal mandate to empower the poor as they pushed for a more participatory form of democracy that would include more citizens in the political, cultural, and economic life of the city.
http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/peoples_war_on_poverty/