Where the War on Poverty and Black Power Meet: A Right to the City Perspective on American Urban Politics in the 1960s

This paper looks at the U.S. American federal War on Poverty programs as a progressive attempt at rejuvenating local communities with citizen participation in the post-Civil Rights era. The anti-poverty measures set out to enhance the political empowerment of impoverished communities of color that by the late 1960s had become increasingly segregated and socially polarized. The federal programs did so by encouraging participatory democracy at the grassroots level and with recourse to the rights discourse. Both these aspects of the War on Poverty mobilized the targeted communities to fight for greater social justice and, eventually but unintentionally, to self-organize under the slogan of Black Power. As will be shown in this paper, both the federally-sponsored War on Poverty and Black Power activism, as dialectically related to each other, can be regarded as natural antecedents of the right to the city movements in the contemporary U.S.