Report of the National Conference on the Poor White Problem (1934)

Before the study, white poverty had long been the subject of debate in South Africa, and poor whites the subject of church, scholarly and state attention. White poverty became a social problem in the early 1900s, when many whites were dispossessed of land as a result of the South African War, especially in the Cape and Transvaal. It was not uncommon to find whites who were driven into wage labour managing a lifestyle similar to that of Bantu wage labourers. As white proletarianization proceeded and racial integration began to emerge as an urban phenomenon, white poverty attracted attention and concern. In the 1870s, for example, a visitor to Grahamstown wrote that "miscellaneous herds of whites and blacks lived together in the most promiscuous manner imaginable."

According to one memorandum sent to Frederick Keppel, then president of Carnegie, there was "little doubt that if the Bantu were given full economic opportunity, the more competent among them would soon outstrip the less competent whites". Keppel's support for the project of creating the report was motivated by his concern with the maintenance of existing racial boundaries. The preoccupation of the Carnegie Corporation with the so-called poor white problem in South Africa was at least in part the outcome of similar misgivings about the state of poor whites in the American South.