37 Years Ago in Time

Hurricane Katrina has offered Americans a clear glimpse of the POVERTY that persists in the U.S.

The nation of the poor is often invisible to the rest of America. Unlike the destitute of other times and places, its inhabitants are not usually distinguishable by any of the traditional telltales of want ... Foreign observers of U.S. urban riots are frequently stunned at the vigor of the American poor. How, they wonder, can a looter claim to be hungry and oppressed, yet walk off with a color-television set as easily as if he were hefting a loaf of bread? ... While no region has a monopoly on poverty, the South comes the closest. Virtually half of America's poor live in the 16 Southern and border states, an area that holds less than a third of the total U.S. population. Moreover, the South is the spawning ground for much of the poverty that scars the rest of the land: since 1940, some 4,000,000 Negroes and uncounted poor whites have left the South for what they hoped would be a more rewarding life in the cities of the North and West. Few have found it. --TIME, May 17, 1968

Read the entire article at time.com/years