Charles Loring Brace and Dangerous Classes: Historical Analogues of the Urban Black Poor

Abstract

An overview of the work of Charles Loring Brace (1826-1890), one of the founders of the Children's Aid Study, and with particular attention to Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (1872). Brace was one of the most influential late 19th century social reformers who largely articulated the concept of self-help and opposed all charitable efforts which (in his view) tended toward pauperization. Sees Brace as an appropriate source from whiCh to approach contemporary American urban poverty and relates Brace to contemporary American urban poverty and relates Brace to contemporary urban reformers, e v g, , Daniel P. Moynihan and Bayard Rustin. Discerns in Brace" (and preeminently in the contemporary Moynihan) a pragmatism whose constructs, literally implemented spell out in clear detail the routes which lead out of poverty as they have been formulated over the course of a century."