When
Michael Harrington’s
The Other America was published in 1962, Larry Moore was in elementary school on the north side of Milwaukee. His parents had moved from the rural south a few years earlier to find work in an African-American neighborhood in the industrial Midwest—the kind of densely populated slum where, Harrington feared, “the poor [were] increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.”
Today Moore is executive director of the Metcalfe Park Residents Association—Metcalfe Park is one of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods. He’s a compact, muscular man with the sort of efficient, world-weary air carried by high school principals of a certain age. From a small office on top of a North Avenue storefront, Moore helps connect neighborhood residents with social services or sympathetic lawyers, and he oversees development projects funded through Community Development Block Grants.
By some important measures, Metcalfe ...
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