Race and Ecology in the Great Society

This paper looks to New Orleans’s Desire Area to explore the ecological meanings of the War on Poverty. As part of the War on Poverty’s Community Action program, Desire and other US neighborhoods received funding for youth recreation programs. However, as I show in this paper, officials often understood these programs as tools to occupy the “idle” Black children they deemed a social threat. More broadly, Great Society liberalism relied on racialized assumptions about nature. Just as Daniel Patrick Moynihan attributed Black poverty to woman-headed households, Great Society technocrats attributed trash, pests, and pollution in Black neighborhoods to personal habits rather than municipal neglect. Desire residents, especially Black mothers, recast these as matters of environmental racism. They also rejected the notion their children were a social problem to be managed. Toward the end of the paper, I show how Desire’s Black women residents retooled War on Poverty programs and funds to meet their children’s needs. In particular, they campaigned for parks and playgrounds—and, crucially, framed these as rights rather than amenities.