While both series from Blackside Productions' "Eyes on the Prize" are still easily available, Blackside's five-part documentary series "America's War on Poverty" (1995) has never been issued on DVD, nor are VHS copies available anywhere except a few dozen college libraries.
Yet it is an important corrective to the prevailing conventional wisdom about poverty, the one epitomized by Ronald Reagan's inane statement, "We declared war on poverty, and poverty won." The War on Poverty has been blamed for welfare dependence, poor schools, the breakdown of the family, and a number of other evils, despite the fact that the U.S. has one of the world's stingiest social safety nets.
Yet as this documentary shows, the truth is that poverty didn't win; America surrendered. The first hour explains the conditions that led to the War on Poverty, such as destitution in places such as the Appalachian coal mining communities and the Mississippi Delta. Subsequent hours tell about the successes (yes, there were successes!) and failures of the programs, and most notably (and perhaps the reason that the documentary has been hidden away for over 25 years), the ways in which the War on Poverty aroused opposition from companies and individuals who profited from keeping people poor.
The powers-that-be began raging against the War on Poverty, and by the time Ronald Reagan made his statement, most of its programs had been dismantled.
Now that inequality has reaches record heights, we need to revisit this product of the 1960s, when Americans believed that positive change was possible.
