January 8th is the anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of “unconditional war on poverty” declared his 1964 State of the Union address. It is also a day to remember Catholic social activist and writer Michael Harrington, author of the influential 1962 best seller “The Other America: Poverty in America.” The book, historian Maurice Isserman has written, “supplied the organizing concept, the target, the word, and thus was the idea for the War on Poverty born.”
Photo © Abraham Menashe