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Brent Staples grew up, the seventh of nine children, during the 1950s in the industrial town of Chester, Pennsylvania, poor but not on welfare— just as urban African Americans began to be identiWed with both poverty and handouts, not to mention violence. His parents had migrated to Chester from rural Virginia during World War II, lured by the economy. Sometimes Brent’s alcoholic father was in the home; often he was not. The family moved from one run-down residence to another, unable to pay rent for any length of time. “We went on and on like bedouins with couches, tables, and mattresses jumbled in the backs of pickup trucks.” Brent had a street life, but he never missed school, just as he Wlled a responsible place in his family. In the classroom, his mind was often elsewhere , but a few teachers inXuenced him. Several Quakers had established a community house in Chester, where Brent began hanging out. There he met black students from nearby Swarthmore College and soon visited the campus; it was safe when social events in Chester were dangerous. Thoughts of continuing in school and advice from a friend led him to apply to Pennsylvania Military College, a local institution with an outreach program for blacks. Although he could not afford tuition, he was nevertheless admitted, and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He was a lot more fortunate than his younger brother, a drug dealer murdered at the age of 22.1 There is a persistent myth in America that its citizens inhabit a classless society. Secondary school history books are mute on the subject of socioeconomic division; the word “class” goes unmentioned. It is almost never uttered by politicians, who sometimes take offense at the very use of the term, unless reference is being made to the middle class, which is assumed to include everyone. Class is deWned by personal income; the assumption is that anyone in our open society has access to a Xuid economy and, with a little effort, may join or remain a member of the middle class. This mythology could not be maintained during the Depression of the 1930s, but it was reasserted in the cause of unity during World War II and the cold war. 7. Inner-City and Rural Childhoods 07Chap7.qxd 4/25/02 3:16 PM Page 131 Prosperity is applauded because it is expected to affect all of us (“a rising tide lifts all boats”); its limits are frequently unnoticed. We proudly claim that after World War II the nation was rich. The gross national product, $212 billion in 1945, rose spectacularly to $503 billion in 1960 and kept moving up. A majority of Americans did, in fact, belong to the middle class: Their jobs were secure, they owned cars and homes and TVs, and they could send their children to college.2 And yet after World War II almost a quarter of the nation’s families lived below the poverty line ofWcially set by the federal government. A third of them were rural people—tenant farmers, sharecroppers, migrant farm workers. The remainder resided in the inner city, migrants from rural America, as well as from Puerto Rico and Mexico, who took the places left by those exiting to the suburbs. African American and female-headed households were conspicuously poor.3 Middle-class America was taken aback by the portrait of the povertystricken vividly drawn in 1962 by Michael Harrington in The Other America. Pointing to the invisibility of the poor, Harrington argued that they “are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.” (In truth, there were in 1962 a lot fewer poor people in the United States than there had been before World War II.)4 The most impoverished age group was the almost 10 percent of the population over 65, some 8 million (or roughly half) of whom lived on less than $1,000 a year (when the poverty line was $3,000 for a family of four), frequently without adequate food, housing, or medical care. But minorities had not participated in the prosperity of the postwar years, either. Millions of children, white as well as black, brown, and yellow, lived in poverty. In addition to the 24 percent of the child population living in “relative poverty” (less than 50 percent of median family income), 18 percent existed in “near-poor frugality” (between 50 and 75 percent of the median). They were...

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