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Forty Years Of Welfare Policy Experimentation: No Acres, No Mule, No Politics, No Rights, Julie Nice

Julie A. Nice

This essay is drawn from a keynote address for a symposium on Ten Years After Welfare Reform: Making Work Pay. The keynote was delivered on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was then on the cusp of launching his Poor People’s Campaign. Professor Nice argues that the momentum toward a meaningful anti-poverty movement was stymied by the untimely deaths in 1968 of both Dr. King and the leading anti-poverty scholar, Professor Jacobus tenBroek. Examining anti-poverty policy over the forty years since their deaths, Professor Nice criticizes the narrow focus of scholars on social policy, …