Reddit reviews The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty

>something happened (integration, maybe?) and blacks as a group seemed to digress in terms of their accomplishments.

I think this is pretty accurate. Part of it is certainly the fact that the Civil Rights Act generated a lot of backlash from racists. A professor at FSU actually wrote a book (which I would like to read eventually) about how this led to decrease public support for welfare – after integration people began to see black Americans as "the face of poverty", and the notion that social programs were good stopped being a given when racist white people started worrying that they might accidentally help a black person.