While racial, ethnic, and class discrimination and disrespect stigmatized the poor over time, the public aid system has been more inclusive and situated to empower its recipients since the 1960s.

Public relief reflected the white–black color line early on. Colonies and states, the latter utilizing the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution, supported private households and charities for deserving indigent whites. When agriculture and industry spread, fueling the immigration of indentured servants, greater white destitution, and industrialism, state legislatures ordinarily funded orphanages, insane asylums, homes for the disabled, and poorfarms. Blacks were denied such assistance, with destitute slaves becoming wards of their masters and free blacks excluded. Accordingly, slave and free black families and churches formed secret societies and networks for subsistence and mutual support.

Federal welfare institutionalized in the wake of the Civil War and it encouraged the development of state programs. From 1865 to 1870 the Freedmen's Bureau aided ex-slaves and white refugees. Union military pensions, which were critical, also helped many black veterans and their survivors. Poverty had enlarged by the 1890s, however, particularly among southern black and white sharecroppers, farm tenants, and city migrants. Women and progressives gained indispensable reforms; forty-one states enacted Mothers’ Aid and anti-child labor laws, and twenty-one passed workmen's compensation, between 1911 and 1920. States still discriminated against blacks and immigrants, as did the rural health initiative of the Children's Bureau (1912) and Women's Bureau (1919) in the Department of Labor.

Although the 1930s ushered in the Great Depression, causing massive unemployment and impoverishment, the New Deal Administration (1933) crucially expanded the national safety net. The Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and Federal Emergency Relief Administration, while isolating minorities and women, provided employment and food. Social Security (1935) established universal old-age insurance and unemployment compensation, but tenant farmers, domestic workers, and other unskilled workers were overlooked for decades. Aid to Dependent Children, renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1950, assisted the disadvantaged.

Change proceeded. Civil and voting rights acts in 1964–65 inspired the formation of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO). OEO's indispensable “War on Poverty” program included AFDC; Food Stamps; Medicare, Medicaid, rent subsidies; preschool Head Start; Job Corps; Neighborhood Youth Corps; and the Community Action Program. Nationally, poverty decreased from 48 to 8 percent of whites, and from 87 to 31 percent of blacks, ca. 1965–1973 alone.