Nearly forty years ago, North Carolina governor Terry Sanford employed a unique approach to combat the state’s growing poverty epidemic, an approach which has unfortunately been neglected in contemporary efforts to address poverty within the state.
Poverty has long remained a deep-rooted problem in North Carolina.
Since the plantation economy characteristic of the pre-Reconstruction-era South had not been developed in the state, the Civil War did not impact the state’s economy to the extent it impacted those of its neighbors. Accordingly, North Carolina, unlike the rest of the South, had the financial and natural resources necessary to venture into new industries, particularly those of textiles, tobacco and furniture.
From 1900 to 1939, the state increased its value of manufactured products 1,397 percent, significantly more than any other Southern state except Texas.
Over time, the state’s manufacturers, such as American Tobacco Company and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, became leading employers in North Carolina.
It is no wonder, then, that the mechanization of the state’s key industries resulted in significant unemployment and out-migration.
Industries no longer necessitated the hiring of low-wage workers when new machineries were able to assume their responsibilities.
As a result, the percentage of the state’s total workforce in the textile industry, for example, decreased from 19.1 percent in 1960 to 10.3 percent twenty years later.
The automation of the state’s industries also led to the emigration of over 250,000 highly skilled, affluent citizens between 1940 and 1950—an event which left behind a population of unskilled workers who were unable to attain gainful employment and eventually succumbed to living in poverty.
Duke University professor Robert Korstad and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor James Leloudis explain that, at the time, “37 percent of all North Carolinians lived on less than $3,000 per year in family income, a full $1,000 below the national poverty threshold.” These circumstances influenced Governor Sanford to establish the North Carolina Fund, a nongovernmental organization tasked with ridding the state of its poverty predicament. After having secured private funding, Sanford, and the Fund’s executive director, George Esser, opened offices in urban and rural counties across the state. “This decentralized structure,” says the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Aidan Smith, “was designed to permit each office to coordinate locally administered public and social services and to assist the poor by developing an approach unique to each community's needs.”
In November 1963, the Fund distributed across the state a pamphlet which invited concerned citizens to propose community action programs to address local instances of poverty. By February, the Fund had received 51 proposals from committees composed of directors of social welfare agencies, educators, government officials and officers of various civic clubs and charities. Of those proposed, the Fund selected eleven projects spread amongst the western mountains, the eastern counties and the Piedmont.
In Durham, for example, the Fund financed the United Organizations for Community Involvement, and, in eastern North Carolina, it financed the People’s Program on Poverty. One of the United Organizations for Community Involvement’s first initiatives was a protest of a decision by Durham school officials to reject federal assistance for public education due to federal nondiscrimination requirements. The Durham school board eventually gave in and reversed its vote on whether to accept federal funding.
The People’s Program on Poverty found success in different ways. At the dawn of the Vietnam War, its founders incorporated a company, Bertie Industries, which secured contracts to manufacture uniforms for the military. The company’s workforce eventually increased to the extent that Bertie Industries became the sixth largest employer in the county and, by the mid-1970s, began reporting annual profits over $100,000.
Most economists, says the Raleigh News and Observer’s Rob Christensen, contend that the various social programs inspired by the North Carolina Fund effectively reversed poverty in North Carolina. The state’s poverty rate decreased to 20.3 percent by 1969, 14.8 percent by 1979, 13 percent by 1989 and 12.3 percent by 1999, after which it returned to earlier levels, partly due to the same reasons that caused Sanford to put forth his initiative decades ago.
At one point in time, North Carolina ranked first in the country in manufacturing as a share of its employment. A transition in the state’s economy from a primary focus on traditional manufacturing to a newborn focus on services, however, has caused the state to become among the leaders in the amount of manufacturing jobs lost. The state’s poverty rate increased to 15.1 percent by 2005, 16.3 percent by 2009 and 17.9 percent by 2011. Korstad and Leloudis explain that, today, North Carolina “faces problems similar to those confronted by Governor Terry Sanford and his colleagues forty years ago.”
Fannie Flono, a columnist for the Charlotte Observer, argues that a focus similar to that of the North Carolina Fund is necessary to tackle the issues of today. She describes the efforts of Mac Legerton, the co-founder and executive director of the Center for Community Action—a private, nonprofit, community-based organization which advocates for sustainable development, poverty reduction and social justice. Legerton’s nonprofit, like the North Carolina Fund, connects public and private organizations in an effort to develop local approaches to reducing poverty. “Solving poverty is not as complex as some make it out to be,” he says. “Most communities just don’t provide all the solutions needed to have a major impact on poverty. The community might have one or two successful model programs,” he continues, but an investment in “15 to 20 programs” which adequately address issues such as employment, education, health care, housing and social equity, on a local level, simplifies the process.
After all, that was what the North Carolina Fund was all about, and that is the reason why it had succeeded in its objectives. Nonetheless, the state is, yet again, suffering from a poverty epidemic and, insofar as history repeats itself, an initiative such as the North Carolina Fund is precisely what is needed.
Mousa Alshanteer is a Trinity sophomore and the editorial page managing editor. His biweekly column is part of the weekly Editor’s Note feature and normally runs on alternate Fridays. This is his final column of the semester. Send Mousa a message on Twitter @MousaAlshanteer.
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