More than 1.5 million North Carolinians today live in poverty. More than one in five are children. Behind these sobering statistics are the faces of our fellow citizens. This book tells their stories. Since 2012, Gene R. Nichol has traveled the length of North Carolina, conducting hundreds of interviews with poor people and those working to alleviate the worst of their circumstances. In an afterword to this new edition, Nichol draws on fresh data and interviews with those whose voices challenge all of us to see what is too often invisible, to look past partisan divides and preconceived notions, and to seek change. Only with a full commitment as a society, Nichol argues, will we succeed in truly ending poverty, which he calls our greatest challenge.
More than 1.5 million North Carolinians today live in poverty. More than one in five are children. Behind these sobering statistics are the faces of our fellow citizens. This book tells their stories. Since 2012, Gene R. Nichol has traveled the length of North Carolina, conducting hundreds of interviews with poor people and those working to alleviate the worst of their circumstances. In an afterword to this new edition, Nichol draws on fresh data and interviews with those whose voices challenge all of us to see what is too often invisible, to look past partisan divides and preconceived notions, and to seek change. Only with a full commitment as a society, Nichol argues, will we succeed in truly ending poverty, which he calls our greatest challenge.
Firebrand constitutional attorney and professor Gene Nichol describes how the Republican-majority NC legislature became a blueprint for dismantling democracy.
In Engines of Innovation, Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein make the case for the pivotal role of research universities as agents of societal change. They argue that universities must use their vast intellectual and financial resources to confront global challenges such as climate change, extreme poverty, childhood diseases, and an impending worldwide shortage of clean water. They provide not only an urgent call to action but also a practical guide for our nation's leading institutions to make the most of the opportunities available to be major players in solving the world's biggest problems. A preface and a new chapter by the authors address recent developments, including innovative licensing strategies, developments in online education, and the value of arts and sciences in an entrepreneurial society.
Rural poverty encompasses a distinctive deprivation in quality of life related to a lack of educational support and resources as well as unique issues related to geographical, cultural, community, and social isolation. While there have been many studies and accommodations made for the impoverished in urban environments, those impoverished in rural settings have been largely overlooked and passed over by current policy. The Handbook of Research on Leadership and Advocacy for Children and Families in Rural Poverty is an essential scholarly publication that creates awareness and promotes action for the advocacy of children and families in rural poverty and recommends interdisciplinary approaches to support the cognitive, social, and emotional needs of children and families in poverty. Featuring a wide range of topics such as mental health, foster care, and public policy, this book is ideal for academicians, counselors, social workers, mental health professionals, early childhood specialists, school psychologists, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and students.
In 1933 Congress granted American laborers the right of collective bargaining, but farmworkers got no New Deal. Cindy Hahamovitch's pathbreaking account of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic Coast shows how growers enlisted the aid of the state in an unprecedented effort to keep their fields well stocked with labor. This is the story of the farmworkers_Italian immigrants from northeastern tenements, African American laborers from the South, and imported workers from the Caribbean_who came to work in the fields of New Jersey, Georgia, and Florida in the decades after 1870. These farmworkers were not powerless, the author argues, for growers became increasingly open to negotiation as their crops ripened in the fields. But farmers fought back with padrone or labor contracting schemes and 'work-or-fight' forced-labor campaigns. Hahamovitch describes how growers' efforts became more effective as federal officials assumed the role of padroni, supplying farmers with foreign workers on demand. Today's migrants are as desperate as ever, the author concludes, not because poverty is an inevitable feature of modern agricultural work, but because the federal government has intervened on behalf of growers, preventing farmworkers from enjoying the fruits of their labor.
Drawing on scores of interviews with black and white tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Robert Korstad brings to life the forgotten heroes of Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO. These workers confronted a system of racial capitalism that consigned African Americans to the basest jobs in the industry, perpetuated low wages for all southerners, and shored up white supremacy. Galvanized by the emergence of the CIO, African Americans took the lead in a campaign that saw a strong labor movement and the reenfranchisement of the southern poor as keys to reforming the South--and a reformed South as central to the survival and expansion of the New Deal. In the window of opportunity opened by World War II, they blurred the boundaries between home and work as they linked civil rights and labor rights in a bid for justice at work and in the public sphere. But civil rights unionism foundered in the maelstrom of the Cold War. Its defeat undermined later efforts by civil rights activists to raise issues of economic equality to the moral high ground occupied by the fight against legalized segregation and, Korstad contends, constrains the prospects for justice and democracy today.
Examining three interconnected case studies, Tamar Carroll powerfully demonstrates the ability of grassroots community activism to bridge racial and cultural differences and effect social change. Drawing on a rich array of oral histories, archival records, newspapers, films, and photographs from post–World War II New York City, Carroll shows how poor people transformed the antipoverty organization Mobilization for Youth and shaped the subsequent War on Poverty. Highlighting the little-known National Congress of Neighborhood Women, she reveals the significant participation of working-class white ethnic women and women of color in New York City's feminist activism. Finally, Carroll traces the partnership between the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Women's Health Action Mobilization (WHAM!), showing how gay men and feminists collaborated to create a supportive community for those affected by the AIDS epidemic, to improve health care, and to oppose homophobia and misogyny during the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Carroll contends that social policies that encourage the political mobilization of marginalized groups and foster coalitions across identity differences are the most effective means of solving social problems and realizing democracy.
Robert Schwartz examines the French government's attempts to suppress mendicity from the reign of Louis XIV to the Revolution. His study provides a rich account of the evolution of poverty, the varied and shifting attitudes toward the delinquent poor, and the government's efforts to control mendicity by strengthening the state's repressive machinery during the eighteenth century. As Schwartz demonstrates, popular conceptions of the mendicant poor in the ancient regime increasingly focused on the threat that they presented to the rest of society, thereby opening the way for the central state to augment its authority and enhance its credibility by acting as the agent protecting the majority of the populace from its threat to public security. Government efforts to control the activity of the "unworthy poor" -- those of sound mind and body who were seen to prefer idleness over productive work -- were most pronounced during two periods of repressive policing, one in the early eighteenth century and the other in the last two decades before the Revolution. From 1724 to 1733 beggars were interned in hopitaux, existing municipal institutions intended for the care of the "worthy poor," including orphans, the infirm, and the aged. But from 1768 until the outbreak of the Revolution, more stringent measures were taken. Sturdy beggars and vagrants were confined apart from the worthy poor on specially established, royal workhouses called depots de mendicite, and in the case of some repeat offenders, were sentenced to the galleys. This stepped-up level of policing arose not only from royal administrators' long-standing view of mendicity as criminal activity; it was also made possible because the propertied classes had likewise come to believe the mendicant poor were a danger rather than a nuisance. Economic and demographic conditions combined to swell the ranks of paupers and vagrants, especially in the 1760s and 1770s, and social tensions, along with calls for government action, multiplied in proportion to their numbers. As villagers came to call upon the improved royal police for help, a popular mental association of the state with public security began to take root. In arriving at these conclusions, Schwartz concentrates on law enforcement in a single area, Lower Normandy, but continually provides a perspective on local events by putting them in the context of national trends and realities. He tells the story of the poor in eighteenth-century France in sympathetic terms, giving a human face to poverty and to the men who policed its effects. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Presents a photographic study of twenty-first century poverty, one that transcends class and race, profession and talent. A visual survey, these portraits capture the individuals who gather on Sunday mornings at a nondenominational, multicultural church that has been meeting below an Interstate overpass for sixteen years. Those who attend Waco, Texas's Church Under the Bridge have experienced periods of homelessness or incarceration, addiction to drugs or alcohol, mental illness, or profound poverty and, almost always, deep periods of hopelessness. From publisher description.
