62 pages 2 hours read

Unbought and Unbossed

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1970

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Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Looking Ahead”

Part 4, Chapter 14 Summary: “A Government That Cannot Hear the People”

In this chapter, Chisholm analyzes the failure of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and critiques the Nixon administration’s abandonment of civil rights progress. She argues that both administrations demonstrate a fundamental disconnect between government policy and the needs of American citizens, particularly marginalized communities.


Chisholm begins by examining why Johnson’s ambitious anti-poverty initiative, launched with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, ultimately failed to eliminate poverty in America. She contends that the program’s fatal flaw lay in its design by white middle-class intellectuals who lacked firsthand experience with poverty and discrimination. These planners correctly identified the lack of opportunity as a root cause of poverty and developed employment training programs to break the cycle of deprivation. However, they fundamentally ignored the underlying issue of racism that kept minority groups trapped in poverty.


The chapter reveals how the War on Poverty inadvertently politicized minority communities. Local politicians, threatened by this potential shift in power dynamics, worked to co-opt these programs by installing handpicked, middle-class representatives who aligned with existing power structures rather than truly representing the poor. Despite these limitations, Chisholm argues that the anti-poverty programs succeeded in teaching minority groups, particularly Black Americans, valuable lessons about the necessity of political organization and collective action.

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