Beyond the Safety Net: A Brief Review Forty Years after the War on Poverty

This paper focuses on poverty in the last 40 years in the United States, focusing on policy and poverty in the African American community. Between 1968 and 2005, the black poverty rate fell from 35 percent to about 25 percent. However, in 2005, blacks were more than three times as likely as whites to be in “deep poverty,” meaning incomes below 50 percent of poverty. Additionally, Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to be poor (8.6 percent versus 3.5 percent).