One of the central missions of The Flatlands was to allow poor people — marginalized in the media and in the operations of power — to speak the truth of their lives and, especially, to testify to their difficulties with welfare, as it was administered, and with their landlords.
In “The Poor Speak Out,” from The Flatlands‘ third issue, the unnamed reporter acts as an oral historian, gathering the voices of those who would otherwise be unheard. Notably, the voices are black, white, and Mexican-American: The Flatlands aspired, two years before the launch of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, to assemble a multiracial coalition of the poor.