In April 1907, Public School 67 in Manhattan held a ceremony for the graduates of its industrial evening school. Three hundred and twenty-three men and women, most of them black, received certificates in trades such as millinery, dressmaking, and mechanical drawing. Thirty-six of those students with a perfect attendance record were honored with a supper reception after the ceremony, held in a model apartment suite where the school offered instruction in “domestic science” to the women.

The group that organized the ceremony, the Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes in New York, hoped to establish a second industrial school in Brooklyn. Such programs would help black workers secure permanent employment, the magazine Charities and the Commons predicted: industrial education and certification would also “increase the confidence of the general public” in the efficiency of black workers, in defiance of racial and class stereotypes.

Almost ninety years later, in August 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), eliminating “welfare as we know it.” A black woman named Lillie Harden stood by his side in the Rose Garden. Harden was a single mother from Little Rock, Arkansas, who had enrolled in the state’s welfare-to-work program as a cook at a Best Western. Clinton had often invoked Harden’s story as evidence of the material and psychological benefits of stable employment in lieu of government aid. (By 1996, Harden had a new job at the deli counter of a supermarket.)