Lawmakers in Louisiana are weighing new policies that align with the vision for addressing America’s homelessness crisis outlined by President Donald Trump last summer. This approach breaks with a misguided, decades-old national practice of offering homeless people publicly funded support without also asking them to help themselves. In response, outraged activists have compared Louisiana’s proposals to nothing less than the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation in the era before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In a statement about the Louisiana bill, the activist coalition Housing Not Handcuffs referenced “chain gangs” and “entrenched white supremacy.” The National Homelessness Law Center declared that the bill evokes “debtors’ prisons, convict leasing, and Jim Crow.” Other activists compared the bill to slavery.
