The Slimmest Hand in Town

...That same summer—it was the year that I was ten—I learned about gangs, formed in those innocent days of the late 1940s out of an abiding fear that we "gotta be ready" if the Navy Street Boys should invade the neighborhood to dispense crude justice for having been displaced by the blacks on these very tree-lined streets that once were so proudly theirs...

...And they are not inclined to believe the preachments about preparation...

...He has been through enough by the age of seventeen, having been beaten by representatives of any number of other gangs, including the corporations that will not hire him, that he has achieved a certain cynicism about the way in which the society is organized...

...To him, the law was an instrument of the rich to protect what they had for their own against the incursions of the likes of him...

...Standing on a Chicago corner that felt much like my own one afternoon, I was talking with a dispirited member of the Black P Stone Rangers, one of the biggest gangs in the country...

...The lore of the day had it that "white guys all the time do you up in gangs...

...But Green found after several years at McDonnell that all of the men who worked there carried themselves in a stooped posture, bending their manhood to a stance that accommodated to the McDonnell way, the corporate way...

...Thus, Martin Luther King could speak of reaching a moun-taintop or of having had a spectacular dream without black people asking where the mountain was located or on what night he had his famous dream...

...Although the nationalists urged the women of the neighborhood to "buy black," that was often impracticable because there were no black-owned stores to speak of at that time...

...The suburbs, in turn, resist blacks, thus making it harder for blacks to obtain the very jobs that they are told will help them move from poverty into the middle class...

...The compliance report that would have shown the company was taking "affirmative action" to eradicate discrimination was never filed, according to the Defense official...

...Louis, the game becomes less funny as the city becomes poorer and poorer and blacker and blacker...

...The point of the Commission enterprise was that the big companies have moved to the suburbs, taking the blue collar jobs that had been in the city...

...The black metaphor originated in the antebellum South when the slaves needed a means of expression the true purpose of which would escape the slave master's understanding...

...In the city in which I now make my home, Washington, D.C., the topic of conversation that takes precedence over the weather and even politics is crime...

...But if you stood on the corner today of the street on which I was raised in Brooklyn and peered into the network of interests that make our nation tick, you might be inclined, from that vantage point, to choose another term to describe what you saw...

...Congress, as this is written, is considering legislation that could imprison certain juvenile offenders for twenty years...

...It's almost as if these gangsters have gotten together and plotted this type of thing...

...Each time Green tried to stand up fully as a man—a black one at that— he found he was banging his head against the rafters of the Establishment...

...After a hurried and presumably intense investigation, the Pentagon announced that henceforth the number of blacks employed by a defense contractor would have to be treated as a trade secret, to be classified like mysterious formulae for unique processes...

...Here in Washington, it is common for people to say that they accept the fact that these teen-age gangsters steal...

...It would have a law that allows a drug suspect's house to be burst in upon without a hint beforehand, and it wants to loosen the standards of admissibility of evidence gathered through wiretapping...

...Clearly, for the moral crisis to be abated in the streets, it must first be abated in the highest councils of our society...

...He released a barrage of statistics showing that McDonnell had almost no blacks doing other than menial labor, and he claimed that the company had the deck rigged in such a way as to prevent blacks from transferring to more attractive jobs...

...There are others: labor and liberal Democrats, farmers and Dixiecrats, automakers and cement spreaders, to name a handful of the obvious ones we recognize as interest groups that support each other's causes in times of need...

...As the use of metaphor moved North and kept pace with the urbanization of black people, its purpose changed from cautious allusion to dramatization...

...Thinking such an idea unwise for his teen-age daughters, my father squashed the plan with a simple, dramatic metaphor...

...Strangely, people fearful of vicious muggers have gladly supported, or failed to condemn, these proposals, as though the fewer civil liberties muggers have, the easier they will be to apprehend...

...You might be inclined to include the group that runs the policy racket, the outfit that collects the book on the horses, the holders of the heroin franchise, and the gentlemen who control the ladies of pleasure...

...All parties involved must recognize sooner or later that mutual inter-dependency is necessary to the survival of the whole system...

...336 women were raped, up from 260 the previous year, and there were 12,000 robberies...

...You'll wake up in the morning," he told the girls, "with a quarter and a thank you note squeezed in your hand...

...Last year, 289 of our citizens were murdered, a 100 per cent increase over two years before...

...The Despair of Young Blacks The Slimmest Hand in Town by ROBERT C. MAYNARD Language is a series of communication modes...

...Not long ago, Green testified before a hearing of the U.S...

...The same disease that is infested there at McDonnell is infested in some of the outfits [elsewhere in St...

...But the women always were stern in ordering us children to avoid, unless impossible, the stores of the whites who remained behind...

...Moving over the urban landscape in my manhood, I crossed paths often enough with that "gangster" metaphor to listen finally to the shrewd sociology that lay behind it...

...But lest McDonnell be thought unique in this regard, Green reminded the Commission: "You multiply it by every large corporation here in St...

...5,300 versus $8,900...

...As of the end of 1968, black family income was sixty per cent of that of whites...

...Louis organization of other young blacks who have given up on the system and are looking for other ways to make their way...

...When last you hear of the president of one of these big old corporations"—he sneered again at the sound of that word—"going to jail for fixing prices, or selling people rotten meat that could kill them, or even for income tax evasion...

...Strangely, though I, too, walk these streets in fear some nights, I am not surprised that these tough gang youth are vicious...

...Nonetheless, the Pentagon went ahead and awarded the firm a contract to build the next Air Force fighter plane, the F-15...

...Pharmaceutical manufacturers and the American Medical Association have demonstrated over time such concern for mutual well being as to be considered another example of an interest group...

...Easily, then, the circle completes itself, and we come face to face again with the matter of definitions...

...He perceived that the government and the corporations—to him they were just plain "gangs" that had won the lottery of power—had a mutual nonaggression treaty...

...Harriet Tubman, the redoubtable rescuer of slaves, would sing instructions to them, to "follow the drinking gourd," the big dipper, North to freedom...

...As though to punctuate his point, a Chicago city policeman swiftly moved into a bar across the street, grabbed a deadbeat customer off a stool, and herded him into a meat wagon...

...In St...

...Those blacks who prepared by going to college for two years earn $7,400, only $200 more than a white high school dropout...

...Imagine being young, black, and intelligent enough to understand the reality which those figures reflect...

...It is not that they steal, my white neighbors say, but it is the viciousness of what they do—they have been known to kill for pennies, to maim and commit mayhem on their victims...

...When last you hear of a millionaire going to the electric chair...

...Try to imagine their rage...

...I must say he was not morally outraged at the arrangement, only bitter that having made the arrangement so successful they would not share even the crumbs with others...

...The crunch one day was too severe and Green was out, a sworn enemy then of all that McDonnell stood for...

...As I grew older, the term "gang" followed me as a metaphor describing white groups that engaged in certain practices collectively...

...This young man "wanted out" of the whole business of the streets but he had no place he knew of to go...

...They have surveyed our society and observed—with rather more astuteness than they are recognized to have—that they have been dealt the slimmest hand in town...

...Louis and you get the same...

...More disturbing to me than the viciousness of the gang youth is the response of the Government...

...And on the street corners, during my adolescence, the nationalists often would preach of the beauty of our African heritage, a millenium of glory as they described it, "until those gangsters from Europe came and stole our ancestors...

...Look through the eyes of a black youth at those statistics: the ones that appear to prove, according to official Government reports, McDonnell Douglas discriminates even though that is against the Federal law and even though it is using Federal funds to make aircraft of questionable worth to some minds...

...Nothing I know of supports that proposition...

...Black communication relies heavily on the metaphor...

...I suggest simply that social imbalance imperils us all in time...

...I mean to suggest, quite simply, that the whole system, to work, must be mutually interdependent...

...The white noose draws tighter," one witness said, "around the black neck...

...Young blacks who are gangsters observe the arrangements made for them in the society and conclude that society is worthy only of their contempt...

...He has served as a consultant on urban education to the Brookings Institution study of community schools, and he is a member of the lay faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry...

...Recently he was a Nieman fellow in economics and urban sociology at Harvard...

...They see that whites have access to the best, that middle class blacks have access to a not bad second best, and that they are at the end of the chain...

...Just as we are discovering that we cannot saturate our air indefinitely with automotive and industrial waste, so we are soon to learn, I surmise from these statistics, that we cannot indefinitely flaunt the wealth of the many in the faces of the few without having a serious adverse effect on the whole of the system...

...Whether a plot or a consistent accident, the picture of black people in the American economy suggests McDonnell is far from unique...

...Department of Defense...

...Crime that the police classify as serious rose nearly thirty per cent overall...

...Their viciousness surprises me not in the least, fearsome though it is...

...Percy Green called that act "an insult to the black people of St...

...The man was moaning something about his glasses as the wagon headed for the drunk tank...

...McDonnell has made it clear in ensuing litigation that the feeling is mutual...

...It is appropriate here, because we are concerned with the Government's response to the problems of youth, to report on how it handled the revelations that McDonnell appeared to be violating the civil rights laws...

...And if a street corner youth tells his companion that he "put a hurtin' on that cop," he need not have literally bested that policeman in fisticuffs but only outwitted him...

...On one of those muggy August nights when the fireflies were even too drowsy to light, in the days when air conditioning was thought to be a fantasy, two of my older sisters pleaded with my father to allow them to sleep out under the apple tree in the backyard of our Brooklyn, New York, home...

...Louis...

...Because McDonnell, with more than 30,000 employes, is the largest employer in St...

...Certainly black people rely on styles of expression that differ sharply from most of the other language spoken in the United States...

...The law," the Ranger sneered...

...Because the youth on the corner is a member of a gang, he tends to see the world as a series of gangs, a few of them on his side but most of them arrayed against him...

...Louis, its pattern of practice was especially interesting to the Commission...

...Sending us a longer distance to the big chains, they claimed the smaller storekeepers were "thieves and gangsters...

...Green started out as a man in the system, a medium grade technical type at McDonnell Douglas Corporation, third largest contractor with the U.S...

...They are not the best advertisement to young black Americans for joining the System...

...I mean that not to sound pious...

...For young blacks it is a cruel-funny game...

...All the good stuff, he said, "is either staked out or played out...

...From now on, the Government said, no one would be allowed access to such data except company and Defense Department officials...

...the statistics that show that a black American's labor is worth only sixty per cent of the labor of a white American, and the grim numbers that show crime in my city has reached astounding and frightening proportions...

...You might call it a collection of gangs...

...Their share is heroin, to be paid for by snatching the purses of secretaries and breaking into the empty apartments of middle range bureaucrats...

...For a black family income to equal that of a white family that year took three earners (they would have made $7,890) to one white earner ($7,700), according to official Government reports...

...I would argue that nations, as large scale social organizations, are subject to the rules of something I shall call moral ecology...

...I am constrained to speak again about the concept of gangs and gangsters...

...Louis...

...Consider, as many do, American society as a series of interconnecting and interdependent interest groups: Defense-related industries and the Pentagon share a sufficient number of interests to be called an interest group...

...Civil Rights Commission investigating discrimination in housing and employment in St...

...ROBERT C. MAYNARD is a member of the national affairs staff of The Washington Post...

...Percy Green, a powerfully built, handsome black man, leads a St...

...They don't pay no attention to no goddamn law unless they want to...

...To its genuine surprise, the Commission learned from a Defense Department civil rights specialist that McDonnell had just been awarded a multibillion contract despite the fact that it failed to comply with the requirements of the Civil Rights Act of 1964...

...When you hear anything like that...

...The disaster remains the inner city teenager, forty per cent of whom are unemployed in some cities, no fewer than twenty-five per cent unemployed in any city...

...Louis...

...The Nixon Administration, eager to make good on its anti-crime campaign in 1968, seeks new weapons as well as long jail terms...