Johnson defended the Great Society in a vocabulary of freedom derived from the New Deal, when his own political career began, and reinforced by the civil rights movement. Soon after assuming office in 1963, he resurrected the phrase “freedom from want,” all but forgotten during the 1950s. Echoing FDR, Johnson told the 1964 Democratic convention, “The man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want, that man is not fully free.” Recognizing that black poverty was fundamentally different from white, since its roots lay in “past injustice and present prejudice,” Johnson sought to redefine the relationship between freedom and equality. Economic liberty, he insisted, meant more than equal opportunity: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.... We seek... not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”
Johnson’s Great Society may not have achieved equality “as a fact,” but it represented a remarkable reaffirmation of the idea of social citizenship. It was the most expansive effort in the nation’s history to mobilize the powers of the national government to address the needs of the least-advantaged Americans, especially those, like blacks, largely excluded from the original New Deal entitlements such as Social Security.
Coupled with the decade’s high rate of economic growth, the War on Poverty succeeded in reducing the incidence of poverty from 22 percent to 13 percent of American families during the 1960s. It has fluctuated around the latter figure ever since. The sum spent, however, was too low to end poverty altogether or to transform conditions of life in poor urban neighborhoods. By the 1990s, thanks to the civil rights movement and the Great Society, the historic gap between whites and blacks in education, income, and access to skilled employment narrowed considerably. But with deindustrialization and urban decay affecting numerous families and most suburbs still being off-limits to non-whites, the median wealth of white households remained ten times greater than that of blacks, and nearly a quarter of all black children still lived in poverty.