Fred R. Harris, Lynn A. Curtis, ed. Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race, and Poverty in the
United States. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. x + 188 pp. $24.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-7425-0904-7.
Reviewed by Amanda I. Seligman (Associate Professor of History and Urban Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
Published on H-Urban (August, 2001)
Two Societies, More Separate, More Unequal
Two Societies, More Separate, More Unequal
of the Kerner Commission report. The editors of Locked
in the Poorhouse, a member of the Kerner Commission
In March 1968, the National Advisory Commission
and the president of the Eisenhower Foundation, gathon Civil Disorders, known more popularly as the Kerner ered a panel of social scientists and legal experts to comCommission, issued its report on the riots that had swept ment on the state of American cities thirty years after
many of the nation’s cities during the summer of 1967. the Kerner Commission’s recommendations. Locked in
Most famously, the report concluded that the United the Poorhouse describes the results of the federal governStates “is moving toward two societies, one black, one
ment’s failure to offer significant intervention on behalf
white-separate and unequal.”[1] Although the report reof the nation’s urban poor.
ceived enormous public attention, its observations and
recommendations went largely unheeded by national
In the three decades since the Kerner Commission
policy-makers. Official disregard of the Kerner Commis- reported, the conditions that underlay the outbreaks
sion’s recommendations began almost immediately, with of 1960s rioting have gotten far worse. The essays in
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s successful efforts at dodg- this slim and readable volume document the increasing
ing formally receiving it. Even though the report released poverty (especially among children of color), chronic unby the Kerner Commission was in some ways milder than employment, and incarceration rates that have come to
the earlier “Harvest of American Racism” draft prepared characterize urban areas. The book’s final chapters also
by commission staff, Johnson declined to send Commis- recommend policy initiatives that have the potential to
sioners a set of thank-you notes prepared for his signa- change these conditions. The authors of the essays are
ture, noting that he would “be a hypocrite” if he did.[2] careful to note that poverty in the United States is neither
an exclusively black nor urban phenomenon (p. 50); they
To serious observers of the American urban scene,
are also cognizant of the fact that during the last three
then, it will come as little surprise that a study comdecades, a substantial number of African Americans have
memorating the thirtieth anniversary of the report’s re- consolidated their position in the ranks of the nation’s
lease laments the road not taken. The Milton S. Eisen- middle and upper classes. The contributors are, however,
hower Foundation published Locked in the Poorhouse and deeply alarmed by the consequences of the increasing
its companion volume, The Millennium Breach in 1998 in isolation of the urban poor in racially and economically
order to instruct American policy-makers on the continhomogeneous neighborhoods. For example, the essay
uing need for, and possible approaches to, the large-scale
on “The New Urban Poverty,” by William Julius Wilson,
urban interventions of the sort called for in chapter 17 James M. Quane, and Bruce H. Rankin, summarizes the
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devastating effects of concentrated poverty in Chicago
neighborhoods: poor people who live in high poverty
neighborhoods experience lower rates of informal social
control, neighborhood cohesion, institutional effectiveness, and peer group orientation, and higher rates of social isolation and crime than their counterparts in lowand medium-poverty neighborhoods do.
are responsible for much of what works,” (p. 133), language that recalls–without exactly reproducing–the War
on Poverty’s call for the “maximum feasible participation” of residents of poor neighborhoods. In addition to
these large-scale policy recommendations, several other
suggestions are embedded in this book. William L. Taylor’s essay on “Racism and the Poor” argues that integration and affirmative action, “the mainstays of what little antipoverty policy the nation has had over the past
three decades,” are policies that have succeeded in creating “conditions in which many minority citizens have
been able to lift themselves out of poverty” (p. 119). Lynn
Curtis’s conclusion also calls on liberals to develop the
kinds of media savvy that “naysaying think tanks” make
one of their primary occupations in order to counteract
the feeling of the “average, middle-class, suburban American…that nothing works” (p. 145).
Concentrated poverty has become such a persistent
urban phenomenon, in fact, that two of the essays suggest that we should understand it as matter of public
health rather than as a purely economic or social characteristic. The essay by Gary Sandefur, Molly Martin, and
Thomas Wells argues that the “analogy” (p. 34) of public
health helps to explain the persistence of poverty in a society with chronic urban unemployment. An assumption
that poverty is a public health issue, then, might lead to
policies that effectively help people cope with the structure of the national economy. Elliott Currie’s essay on
“Race, Violence, and Justice since Kerner,” on the other
hand, treats public health in quite literal terms, arguing
that urban violence, HIV/AIDS, and drug use amount to
a “permanent emergency” (p. 95) in American cities. In
short, these essays collectively argue that the urban poor
at the end of the twentieth century have become Locked
in the Poorhouse in a way that their counterparts in 1968
were not. The conclusion to Paul Jargowsky’s essay–the
observation that “we are no longer moving toward two
societies, one white and one black…we are moving in the
direction of the kind of society that builds walls topped
by broken glass, a society with permanent, deep, and
bitter class divisions,” (p. 93)–encapsulates the analytic
thrust of the entire book.
Locked in the Poorhouse is a clear and concise summary of the present state of American urban poverty.
The major omission in its analysis is an explanation for
the shifting sands of federal urban and poverty policy in
the three decades since the release of the Kerner Commission report. Two of the essays, for example, mention the abolition of the nation’s major welfare program,
Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and its
replacement by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the culmination of President William J. Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it.” An essay that placed the demise of AFDC and the ascent of
TANF in the context of how Americans in the late twentieth century regarded the role of government would have
been an excellent complement to the essays that were included. Nonetheless, Locked in the Poorhouse does lay out
a roadmap for the historians who take up the challenge of
describing what happened in American cities at the end
of the twentieth century and suggest what policy-makers
can still do to change that course.
Lest their grim conclusions lead to continued inaction
in federal urban policy, the editors include a program for
changing these conditions. The final chapter of the book,
a summary of The Millennium Breach, lays out a “Policy
for the New Millennium,” a series of seven recommendations for federal action costing an estimated $56 billion annually. Some of these proposals echo the Kerner
Commission’s call for creation of new public and private
sector jobs, while others, based on the Eisenhower Foundation’s experience of policies that “work,” are of more
recent genesis. The chapter also recommends that the
policies “should be implemented as much as is feasible
by the indigenous inner-city nonprofit organizations that
Notes:
[1]. Report of the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders, The New York Times Edition (New York:
E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1968), p.1.
[2]. Bill Barnhart and Gene Schlickman, Kerner: The
Conflict of Intangible Rights (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 206 and 216.
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Citation: Amanda I. Seligman. Review of Harris, Fred R.; Curtis, Lynn A., ed., Locked in the Poorhouse: Cities, Race,
and Poverty in the United States. H-Urban, H-Net Reviews. August, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5416
Copyright © 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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