Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope—some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

Lyndon B. Johnson delivered these lines in his State of the Union Address to Congress on January 8, 1964, early in his first full year as president after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. With the civil-rights struggle cresting and persistent deprivation visible in both rural and urban America, Johnson used the address to launch what became the “War on Poverty,” a central pillar of his Great Society agenda. The speech framed poverty as a national emergency intertwined with racial injustice, and it signaled forthcoming federal initiatives—job training, education, community action, and expanded social supports—later embodied in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and related programs.

Johnson’s metaphor of living on the “outskirts of hope” casts poverty not merely as lack of income but as exclusion from the nation’s promises—civic, economic, and moral. By linking deprivation to “poverty” and “color,” he insists that racial discrimination and economic inequality reinforce one another, making the problem structural rather than individual. The phrase “unconditional war on poverty” borrows the language of total mobilization, implying urgency, scale, and federal responsibility. At the same time, the goal he names is not charity but “opportunity,” suggesting that government should remove barriers and expand access to education, work, and dignity so that despair is replaced by participation in American life.