History and Origin

The War on Poverty

After President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Johnson took up his charge to address the problem of American poverty, and in his first State of the Union address on June 8, 1964, Johnson called for an unconditional war to defeat poverty. He expanded and revised the proposals given by Kennedy and developed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The act included a variety of initiatives:

1. Head Start
2. Job Corps
3. Work-Study program for university students
4. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America): a domestic version of the Peace Corps
5. Neighborhood Youth Corps
6. Basic education and adult job training
7. CAPs (Community Action Programs): CAPs turned out to be the most controversial part of the package, as it proposed the “maximum feasible participation” by poor people themselves to determine what would help them the most. CAPs were a radical departure from how the government had run most social reform programs in the past.

The Economic Opportunity Act was innovative legislation, but it received only about $1 billion to divide among the various programs and remained critically underfunded. By 1966, Congress appropriated $4 billion for the programs.

Check out this video of Sargent Shriver and Pastor Billy Graham visiting a North Carolina Community Action Agency in 1965.

Skip ahead about 9 minutes for a riveting discussion on what it really means to help the poor!