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