Fifty years since Johnson’s declaration of the “War on Poverty” - World Socialist Web Site
▻http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/01/08/pers-j08.html
In his first State of the Union Address, delivered to Congress on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson called for ending poverty, joblessness, and hunger in the US. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” Johnson said in the speech, delivered not quite seven weeks after the assassination of his predecessor, John Kennedy.
Within two years, Congress put in place a series of laws and programs that together became known as “The Great Society.” These included: the Social Security Act of 1965 creating Medicare and Medicaid, which respectively provided health insurance to the elderly and introduced federal health care coverage for the disabled and poor; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the first significant legislation addressing institutional racism since the era of Reconstruction nearly a century earlier; and a number of job training, urban development, educational, and nutritional government agencies and initiatives, including the pre-kindergarten educational program Head Start and the Food Stamp program.