Poverty Warrior

“My most valued colleague, Michael B. Katz, just passed away after a long struggle with cancer. I already miss him terribly,” Thomas Sugrue wrote on his Facebook page August 24. Sugrue, the David Boies Professor of History, went on, “He was a model mentor and scholar, someone who fearlessly engaged the world outside the academy. He tackled America’s most pressing social problems—public education, inequality, poverty and welfare, urban policy—with deep passion and real rigor.”

Katz, who had taught at Penn since 1978, was Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and a pioneering scholar in the history of American education, urban social structure and family organization, and social welfare and poverty. His obituary in the New York Times called him “an influential historian and social theorist who challenged the prevailing view in the 1980s and ’90s that poverty stemmed from the bad habits of the poor, marshaling the case that its deeper roots lay in the actions of the powerful.”

Katz’s many books include Reconstructing American Education, One Nation Divisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming (with Mark J. Stern), and The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare. He published a fully updated and revised The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty in 2013.

Educated at Harvard, Katz had been a Guggenheim Fellow and was a fellow of the National Academy of Education, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Society of American Historians, and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1999, he received a Senior Scholar Award—a lifetime achievement award—from the Spencer Foundation. 

His loss is deeply felt at Penn, where a celebration of his life and legacy was held on September 22 by the Department of History and the Urban Studies Program.  You can read Tom Sugrue’s full essay honoring his colleague and friend here.

Read the New York Times obituary of Katz here.