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The War On Poverty In Craven County

University Press of Florida / 2017

Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “War on Poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union address, and its effectiveness has been debated ever since. In big cities like Chicago and Baltimore, the era came to be associated with protests and civil unrest.

Scholars have traditionally thought those loud liberal voices were most responsible for empowering the poor. But scholar Karen Hawkins argues that something different took place in rural communities.

She spent years studying primary sources from Craven County, North Carolina and concluded that political moderates and biracial groups who put their differences aside made a significant amount of positive change. Hawkins is a high school teacher in Durham and the author of “Everybody’s Problem: The War on Poverty in Eastern North Carolina”(University Press of Florida/2017). Host Frank Stasio speaks with Hawkins about how the War on Poverty affected small, local communities and brought industry to the agricultural Craven County.

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.
Robert is a journalist and award-winning documentary filmmaker in the Triangle. He grew up in White Lake, a rural resort community in southeastern NC. The tales he heard about White Lake as a child would become the topic of his UNC-TV historical documentary, White Lake: Remembering the Nation's Safest Beach. In May 2017, he received a bachelor's degree in interactive multimedia from the Media and Journalism School at UNC-Chapel Hill with a minor in religious studies.
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