Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s wave of Great Society legislation gave historic momentum to greater economic and racial equality. Much of that progress is embedded in society today, and yet the income gap between the richest and poorest Americans is the largest since the Great Depression, racial tensions continue to polarize society and gender equality remains a struggle.
How can the enduring challenges of inequality be addressed today? That is the question which was explored by the conference, Legacies of the Great Society: War, Poverty and Voting Rights, at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in March of 2015.
Panels of scholars, practitioners, experts and advocates assessed the impact of the Vietnam War, the effects of War on Poverty programs, and the consequences – then and now – of the Voting Rights Act. This Roosevelt House MagaScene – a selection of video clips and quotes – presents highlights and key moments of the two-day conference.
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Sheldon Danziger, President, Russell Sage Foundation.
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Speakers
Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Founder, CasaColumbia, and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.
Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University
Lawrence M. Mead, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at New York UniversityModerator
Hugh B. Price, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and former President & CEO of the National Urban League -
Introduction
Shyama Venkateswar, Director, Public Policy Program at Hunter College
Speakers
Robert G. Kaiser, Former Managing Editor at The Washington Post
Lawrence Levinson, Partner at DLA Piper LLPModerator
Andrew Polsky, Acting Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of Arts and Sciences at Hunter College -
Speakers
Mark Levitan, Adjunct Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College
Julian E. Zelizer, Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (Class of 1941) Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University and a Fellow at New America Foundation
Jane Waldfogel, Compton Foundation Centennial Professor at Columbia University School of Social WorkModerator
Sanford Schram, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Hunter College
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Speakers
Anthony Browne, Chair of the Department of Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies at Hunter College
Dale Ho, Director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union
Natasha Korgaonkar, Assistant Counsel of the Political Participation Group at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
Wendy Weiser, Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of LawModerator
Clay Risen, Senior Op-Ed Editor of The New York Times -
Economics is a cold science, rooted in metrics, formulas and algorithms. Throughout his career as a brilliant economist, Michael Weinstein has put warmth and heart into the picture. He headed the economics department at Haverford college, where he created a program to help people living in poverty manage their finances—even as the state required him to pay $20,000 for insurance out of his own pocket. At The New York Times he wrote prodigiously about economic policy, especially poverty and health care. Meanwhile, he continued serving poor people in his free time. After he took a demanding day job supervising the Robin Hood Foundation, Michael founded Single Stop, a program that co-locates agencies into one place, and has now expanded to 113 locations in eight states.
