Race and Ethnicity

Product Description

The voices of famous and lesser known figures in America’s quest to reduce poverty are collected for the first time in this comprehensive historical anthology. The book traces the most important ideas and contributions of citizens, activists, labour leaders, scholars, politicians, and governmental agencies to ensure American citizens the basics of food, housing, employment, education, and health care.

The book follows the idea of poverty reduction from Thomas Paine’s agrarian justice to Josiah Quincy’s proposal for the construction of poorhouses; from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Sitting Bull’s demand for money and supplies; from Coxey’s army of the unemployed to Jane Addams’s Hull House; from the Civil Works Administration to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for an Economic Bill of Rights; and from William Julius Wilson’s universal programme of reform to George W. Bush’s armies of compassion.

About The Author

Scott Myers-Lipton, Associate Professor at San Jose State University, is the author of Social Solutions to Poverty: America's Struggle to Build a Just Society (Paradigm 2006), as well as numerous scholarly articles on civic engagement, education, and racism. For the past 20 years, Myers-Lipton has helped students examine solutions to poverty by taking them to live at homeless shelters, the Navajo and Lakota nations, Kingston, Jamaica and the Gulf Coast. He is also the cofounder of the Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign. He is the recipient of the Mover of Mountains Award from the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara County and the Manuel Vega Latino Empowerment Award. He lives with his wife, Diane, and his two children, in the Santa Cruz mountains, where they are the proprietors of the Sequoia Retreat Center, a meeting space dedicated to individual and social transformation.Catalog Author BioScott Myers-Lipton, Associate Professor at San Jose State University, is the author of Social Solutions to Poverty: America's Struggle to Build a Just Society (Paradigm 2006), as well as numerous scholarly articles on civic engagement, education, and racism.

Charles Lemert is Andrus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University, Connecticut. He is the author of Durkeim's Ghosts (2006).

Click to browse contents