After years of antipoverty experimentation in the city, New York’s poor black communities understandably assumed the War on Poverty was intended for them. In a city where poor whites outnumbered poor blacks two to one, the pilot antipoverty agency, MFY, had been established in an area with a largely black and Puerto Rican population, and the next two set up in the years before 1964—HARYOU-ACT and Youth-In-Action (YIA)—were located, respectively, in Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant, the city’s two largest black ghettoes.
