With roots in slavery and segregation, especially southern sharecropping, black poverty persisted over time. In 1939, amid the Great Depression, 65 and 93 percent of white and black Americans, respectively, lacked income and resources for minimal subsistence. Despite the World War II recovery and broad postwar prosperity, 39.5 million or 22 percent of the people were poor by the late 1950s. The poorest included the elderly, conspicuously women; whites in rural Appalachia; and blacks in the South and inner cities.

Black poverty was disproportionate. Mainly because of federal reforms, it decreased from 55.1 to 30.3 percent between 1959 and 1974, a year when 9 percent of whites were destitute. The black poor faced destitution and racial discrimination; millions of those who worked earned low wages and lived in ghettoes. Between 1980 and the mid-1990s about 12 percent of whites, compared to 30 percent of blacks and Hispanics and 27 percent of Native Americans, were poor. The urban black underclass had higher rates of drug addiction, crime, out of wedlock births, and welfare dependency, which mirrored structural disparities rooted in deindustrialization, blacks’ much larger loss of factory work, and a larger proportion of female-headed black households. Unemployment was 22% for black men ages 20–24 in 1980 alone, easily reducing the pool of marriageable men and potential husband–wife families while increasing women and children's dependent status. Poverty was 11.7% nationally in 2002 and blacks had its highest rate at 22.7%. In 2008 some 39.8 million, 13.2% of the population, were impoverished, namely 8.6% of whites, 11.8% of Asians, 23.8% of Hispanics, 24.2% of Native Americans, and 24.7% of blacks.

Antipoverty programs helped maintain the public safety net. These had been expanded and initiated via the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964 and Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO)-led War on Poverty. Fighting “the causes, not just the consequences of poverty,” OEO provided aid, education, and training. It furnished cash payments through Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, and housing subsidies. It instituted Head Start, Job Corps, College Work Study, and local community action programs, the last pledging to enlist the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor. Vitally important was OEO's “program of loans and guarantees” with companies that contracted to train and hire the unemployed.