Publication
Farmington Hills, Mich. : Gale, a Cengage Company, 2019.
Summary
The most ambitious and controversial part of the President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), which was established to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs. Central to OEO's mission was the idea of "community action," the participation of the poor in framing and administering the programs designed to help them. To assess the scale of poverty in America, the OEO developed the Community Profile Project, designed to increase the scope, accessibility, accuracy, and utility of information supporting the planning and evaluation of programs for community improvement. The Project compiled data for 3,135 U.S. counties and county equivalents that subdivided each state into independently-administered localities. Each profile, composed as a narrative with statistical indices, contains information showing general poverty indicators, size and composition of the poor population, and selected aspects of geography, demography, economy, and social resources. The documents in this archive are from the Presidential Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson, White House Office Files, Office Files of Fred Panzer: Office of Economic Opportunity Information Center, Community Profiles, in the custody of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in Austin, Texas.