Michael Harrington states in this book that the “old” poverty was the condition of life of an entire society, or at least of those without special skills or luck of birth into a wealthy family. When the entire economy advanced, many of these people gained higher standards of living. Unlike the poor today, the majority poor of a generation ago were an immediate concern of political leaders. The old slums of the immigrants had the votes; they provided the basis for labor organizations. New technology required employees to have higher skills and more education. Many of these people did not have the skills for these jobs so they were forced to work well under minimum wage jobs just to eat. They spoke of in the book that employees were provided food to eat when they were at work. Employees later found out that they were taking out money out of their pay every week for the cost of food. Because they were barely making $1 and hour they decided that it wasn’t that crucial for them to eat at work but the companies made them pay them if they didn’t. This brings me to the point in lecture when we talked about the government putting taxes on voting. Back when this book was written, black people with “exceptional” jobs made on average $40 a week whereas the whites made that in a day. The blacks weren’t given vacations or medical benefits as the whites were. They barely made enough money to support their families so voting was pretty much out of the question. That required them to spend money they didn’t have. This ensured that the democratic party continued to control the south, leaving them in poverty.
Whites made it hard for blacks to go to school by segregating them from everyone and even in McLauren’s case, made him sit outside of the classroom. This was constitutional at the time because of the pleasy v. ferguson case which ruled that schools could be segregated as long as students were treated equally. After making students feel unequal, it caused students to have...