Nine minutes into his State of the Union address, on January 8, 1964—50 years ago last week—Lyndon Johnson brought up a neglected topic.

Harrington stressed in The Other America that the problem of poverty was compounded by growing economic segregation. “If the middle class never did like ugliness and poverty, it was at least aware of them,” he wrote. “‘Across the tracks’ was not a very long way to go. . . . Now the American city has been transformed. The poor still inhabit the miserable housing in the central area, but they are increasingly isolated from contact with, or sight of, anybody else. . . . Living out in the suburbs, it is easy to assume that ours is, indeed, an affluent society.”

Politically, this was understandable. LBJ and other government leaders knew that Americans were more interested in helping the poor than living near them.

More time was spent on gang-related business in the program’s training centers than on job training. Few participants were actually placed in jobs. Fort and another Rangers leader were soon arrested on murder charges, and three other Rangers who worked in the training centers were arrested for rape. Two students in the program were shot, one fatally, by an instructor. In the spring of 1968, OEO shut the program down. “In the history of the OEO, there was no grant that was as complete a failure,” Lemann observed in The Promised Land. After this debacle, Lemann went on, “Daley no longer had much trouble with challenges, from the OEO or anybody else, to his absolute control over the antipoverty programs in Chicago.”

The community development programs neatly avoided “what is perhaps the most perilous of all issues for elected officials—racial integration,” Lemann observed. Advocates of integration maintain that community development efforts need to be combined with efforts to deconcentrate urban poverty. In metro Chicago, this would mean public officials taking steps to ensure that affordable housing is available not only throughout Chicago but throughout its suburbs; that fair housing laws are enforced; and that supportive programs are offered to residents of poor neighborhoods who are interested in moving.

President Obama lately has been speaking more forcefully about “economic inequality,” and even at times about poverty, a word he studiously avoided in his first term. But might he ever talk about the role of segregation? That’s probably too much to expect.