Everybody’s Problem: The War on Poverty in Eastern North Carolina

“Offers a new interpretation of the war on poverty by demonstrating the centrality of moderate local leadership (both white and black) in launching and operating antipoverty programs.”—Marisa Chappell, author ofThe War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America
 
“Hawkins has done a remarkable job of mining the sources and reconstructing the reality of what was going on in eastern North Carolina.”—Frank Stricker, author ofWhy America Lost the War on Poverty—And How to Win It
 
While many scholars have argued that confrontation and protest were the most effective ways for the poor to empower themselves during the social change of the 1960s, Karen Hawkins demonstrates that moderate, local leadership and biracial cooperation were sometimes just as forceful.Everybody’s Problemshows these values at play in the nation’s first rural Community Action Agency to receive federal funding as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Karen Hawkins describes the founding of Craven Operation Progress in North Carolina, discusses the philosophies and tactics of its directors, and outlines the tensions that arose between local leadership and federal control. Using previously untapped primary sources including oral interviews with antipoverty workers and local citizens, records from the U.S. Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, and documents from the North Carolina Fund, Hawkins adds to the story of the factors that helped lower poverty rates and advance economic development during the 1960s and beyond.
 
 
A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller