The 20 or so participants and caseworkers I interviewed across the city liked the program—not necessarily because it altered their behavior (“Motivate me? I was already motivated... I did most of this stuff anyway,” says program participant Sheena Lyons, a school cafeteria employee. “My problem is money, not work. I always work.”) but because it rewards their day-to-day struggle and gives them another weapon in their ongoing battle to keep their kids off the streets.

For Gordon-Cole, she’ll take any help she can get when it comes to parenting while poor. After having her first child in the 8th grade, Gordon-Cole gave birth to an additional child each year over the next three years—and dropped out of school before the 10th grade. These days she is surrounded by nine children—five of them are her own kids, and four are step-children. All told, 12 people subsist on her husband’s modest paychecks from construction and restaurant jobs, her disability payments and a patchwork of federal subsidies. The $6,000 or so she has received from the rewards program hasn’t been a game-changer—but it has instilled a small sense of middle-class normalcy that matches her faux-granite countertops. When a kid gets an A or a B, they go to Red Lobster or TGI Fridays, their pick.

“I struggled. I’m still struggling,” she told me. “But I’m not going to let the same thing happen with my kids. I’m hard on them. I try to teach then the right way because of my mistakes. I refuse to just let them ruin their lives.”

***

Memphis clings to the extreme western edge of Tennessee, but it’s really the capital of the Delta—the Mississippi state line is five miles to the south, and the city perches atop plantation-and-sharecropper country like the star on a Christmas tree. The vast majority of the city’s black population (61 percent of the city is African-American) traces its roots there, to the Delta’s economically poor and culturally rich settlements, names made famous through the blues like Clarksdale and Rosedale, Indianola, Greenwood.

Like any crossroads town, Memphis has been shaped by outside forces: war, disease, the vicissitudes of river commerce—and, in recent years, the ebb and flow of Washington’s political and policy battles over what to do about urban poverty of the sort that is Memphis’s unwanted legacy.

Tamica Gordon-Cole, above, was one of 600 people selected for the experimental run of a cash incentives program for poor people in Memphis. | Mark Peterson/Redux

When Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the caseload for Aid to Families with Dependent Children—at that time, the country’s dominant and dysfunctional welfare program—was hitting an historic high of about 5 million people. But public sentiment against public handouts had reached a curdling point, and even liberal state governments were agitating for entitlement cuts and stricter time limits on their programs. Congress, under Democratic control but being pushed to the right, had gradually squeezed benefits, reducing the average monthly family stipend from its early 1970s high of about $250 a month (in 2012 dollars) to about $180.

Into this anti-welfare environment stepped a protean governor from Arkansas, intent on redefining what it meant to be a Democrat. Clinton staked his political future on defusing an issue that Republicans had used to great effect as proof of their argument that Democrats were too weak—or corrupt—to confront their inner-city base. (Ronald Reagan was particularly adept at invoking the largely mythological image of the “Welfare Queen.” He never used that racially loaded term himself. But as early as 1976, he made welfare a central attack issue in his campaigns, and he did not hesitate to cite cherry-picked anecdotes of abuse, like the one AFDC mother in Chicago who allegedly used dozens of aliases to collect $150,000 tax free per year in food stamps, Medicaid and welfare.)

By the time he has secured the Democratic nomination in 1992, Clinton knew he had to preempt a new generation of Republican governors who were scoring big political points by campaigning against welfare, like Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, and demanding waivers from the federal government to enact tough new programs that compelled welfare recipients to work for their checks. In a nod to their increasing clout, President Clinton approved many of the GOP state-level requests. But it was a little-known centrist speechwriter on his staff—Bruce Reed—who lit the rhetorical brushfire by coining one of the most influential slogans in modern politics, Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we have come to know it.”

After a protracted legislative fight in 1995 and 1996, Clinton agreed to a new system that scrapped AFDC’s open-ended checks for the poor, replacing them with a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, whose two main features were a lifetime five-year limit on welfare benefits (food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid still have no time limits) and a mandate that states prove recipients are working, looking for a job or undergoing training for one. Most liberals viewed the whole thing as a sell-out—a few even resigned from Clinton’s administration, and Hillary Clinton reportedly gave her husband grief for not holding out for a nationwide child-care subsidy to help single mothers seek work.

After having her first child in the 8th grade, Gordon-Cole dropped out of high school after the 10th grade. Now, she takes care of nine children. | Mark Peterson/Redux

But Clinton won on the politics. And he had a back-door plan for replacing some of the lost benefits, doubling eligibility for the more politically palatable Earned Income Tax Credit, a program for the working poor first proposed by Republicans in the mid-1970s. The EITC is now, arguably, the most important anti-poverty program in the country, pumping as much as $6,000 into the pockets of working families with three or more children. It also constitutes the single biggest job incentive initiative currently in effect, a $63 billion entitlement in the form of a tax break, prodding parents to seek low-wage jobs that would not be worth the hassle otherwise. “Tax day is Christmas,” says Sheena Lyons, who defers most of her kids’ holiday presents to the spring, when the EITC check arrives.

The impact of Clinton’s reform law was immediate and, for a time, overwhelmingly positive. Welfare rolls over the next five years dropped by more than half, to just under 2 million, aided by the economic boom of the late 1990s. It’s an accomplishment Clinton often uses to define a checkered presidency, as he demonstrated in a 2006 New York Times op-ed with the quintessentially Clintonian headline “How We Ended Welfare, Together.” In it, he celebrated gains in the poverty fight he assumed would endure in perpetuity: A poverty rate that plummeted to 11.3 percent in 2000, from 15 percent in 1993. “[W]e passed a bill that worked and stood the test of time,” he concluded.

But while Clinton may have ended welfare as we knew it, poverty as we know it is alive and well. In 2008, two years after Clinton published his op-ed, the Great Recession hit and the national rate quickly climbed back above 15 percent, with a record 50 million Americans falling below the line during the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. It has remained at roughly that level during a nearly five-year recovery—a depressing fact often lost in the larger debate over middle-class job creation.

“There is not an overarching vision, or even a widespread recognition, that we have a problem with poverty,” says LaDonna Pavetti, a researcher with the liberal Center for Policy and Budget Priorities who has studied poverty and welfare trends for a quarter century.

Lately, the issue seems to be returning to the national political radar. The movement to address income inequality, a political wave that swept to power liberal populist Democrats like New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has powered new campaigns for higher taxes on the wealthy, new entitlements like universal pre-K for poor kids and, most strikingly, a nationwide movement to increase the minimum wage in cities like Seattle.