Mobilization for Youth: Patchwork or Solution?
Arnold, Robert
There are two signs on Manhattan's E. 2nd St. One in neat blue letters announces the headquarters of Mobilization for Youth. The other in scrawled yellow paint stakes out 2nd St. as "Dragon's...
...The facts are sitting on his stoop...
...The answer: it has largely been a failure...
...There is no simple answer...
...More money and staff would simply mean frosting the cake...
...In the Negro and Puerto Rican community, the majority distrust the motives of Mobilization and its chief ally, the Lower East Side* Neighborhoods Association, and feel that these groups are more interested in securing publicity than in improving conditions...
...One way would be to strengthen the Lower East Side Neighborhoods Association...
...Until the barriers of discrimination, substandard housing, inadequate education, and economic exploitation are finally removed, there can be no true progress toward changing the face of the Lower East Side or any other slum neighborhood...
...As currently proposed, the government's program to help unemployed youth is totally inadequate...
...However, the new migrants are no longer strangers...
...Nor can they be solved through reading clinics and incentive programs...
...He did not complete the ninth grade...
...of the over 8 million heads of families who did not finish high school, 33 per cent live in poverty...
...Confronted by the hard realities of slum life, the best theory as to the causation and cure of delinquency may run aground...
...as long as human beings are robbed of their sense of worth in the interest of maximum profits, hundreds of thousands of youngsters are destined to be intellectually mutilated...
...beneath it the same hand has painted its biography, "I Was a Teenage Junkie...
...Angel dropped out of school last year, at the minimum age of sixteen...
...Close to 50 per cent of slum youth are in grave need of psychological, as well as academic, help by the time they leave high school...
...Unless such young people can be provided with expanding opportunities, the problem of juvenile delinquency cannot be dealt with...
...Education and the Slum Nor can the problem of the slum child in the slum school be solved merely through adding experimental schools and specially trained teachers— although these are necessary...
...The slum child in the slum school receives a second rate education by virtue of the fact that he lives in a slum...
...In his world the cop may be nice until you get big and then he is afraid of you...
...The officer has threat ened to have his probation revoked if he does not find a steady job...
...Angel Merecaido is seventeen, the oldest son of a family of six...
...Without effective political power, he cannot muster enough strength to fight exploitation...
...It was planned to create a laboratory school to demonstrate methods of teaching lower-income youngsters and a "Homework Helper" program whereby low-income but talented high school students would be hired to tutor low-income elementary school students who are failing academically...
...The majority of this ill health was to be found among three groups, Negroes, the very old, and the very young—the three groups in the population least able to protect themselves...
...This means there will be better than 2.5 million new job seekers every year...
...Two years of planning and research financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the New York School of Social Work, and the Ford Foundation preceded it...
...Of that number 32,700 young men were neither in school nor in the labor force: they had given up hope of findings jobs...
...Nearly 50 per cent of all youth in the lower-income bracket drop out of school before high school graduation (an estimated 30 per cent of youth entering the U.S...
...It is interesting that Mobilization's salaries for beginning social workers are among the highest in the New York area...
...However, as the official "Manpower Report of the President" recently noted, the annual economic growth rate dropped from 3.8 per cent in the years 1947-1957 to 2.9 per cent for the years 1957-1962 and the average annual increase in nonfarm jobs has fallen from 700,000 to 175,000...
...Its history is that of successive waves of migration, each generation bringing a fresh group of immigrants to seek the promise of a new life in America...
...The attitude of the independent organizations working in the area has been similar...
...In a society which assumes that the priorities to be imposed on the educational situation are those of the war-economy and the Organized System—i.e., more technicians to feed the military-industrial complex, ever-increasing consumption, maximumization of profits—it is impossible to meet the real needs of children...
...II Mobilization for Youth came to the East Side with a theoretical framework which stressed the social causation of delinquency...
...Since that time he has worked 87 days as a delivery boy for a local laundry (pay 75 cents per hour...
...As George Von Hilsheimer, a member of Mobilization's Board of Directors, stated, Mobilization has been "wasting money" on contacts with the Board of Education and established settlement houses, while rarely giving money to experimental and independent groups...
...In terms of achievement and impact on the community, Mobilization has little to show...
...When the total environment of the child is inadequate, how can his education do anything but conform to the pattern...
...Instead of white picket fences, private houses, and Big Dan, the friendly policeman who says, "Hello little Jane," the slum child is daily confronted with hunger, violence, and disease...
...It has very little contact or influence within the Negro and Puerto Rican community...
...Make-work programs, their social utility aside, are no substitute for real work...
...Confronted by the out-of-school and out-of-work youngster and the over-all problems of permanent unemployment and poverty in the United States, the government has chosen to respond with inadequate and antedated crash programs...
...An all-out effort must be made to increase our rate of economic growth, control the forces of automation, and train these youngsters before unemployment begins to reach the recession levels of 7 per cent...
...The Negro and Puerto Rican living on the Lower East Side today is almost totally cut off from any effective political control of his community...
...During the school months of 1962, an average of 700,000 youths between the ages of 16 and 21 were out-of-school and out-of-work...
...Like the generations of immigrants who preceded them, the Negroes and Puerto Ricans have come to the city in search of jobs and a better way of life...
...In one predominantly Negro slum area of 125,000 people, approximately 70 per cent of boys and girls between 16 and 21 were both out-of-school and out-of-work...
...his mother works off-the-books part-time in a non-union dress shop...
...Of the million and a half unattached individuals who did not finish high school in the United States, 55 per cent live in poverty...
...Among young people unemployment has reached crisis proportions...
...as "Dragon's Territory...
...They are citizens born in the United States, part of the more than a million and a half Negroes and Puerto Ricans who have come to New York and other northern cities in the past decade...
...The Youth Conservation Corps and other local projects similar to Mobilization for Youth would at most provide employment for only a little over 60,000 young people...
...Second, the program proposed to create experimental projects in education to overcome the barriers facing "the slum child in the slum school...
...Delinquency does not lend itself to simple panaceas...
...Why has Mobilization failed...
...He does not expect to see father walking up the steps, briefcase in hand...
...At present, although Negroes account for over 10 per cent of the population, they represent less than I per cent of the apprentices in such skilled trades as carpentry and toolmaking...
...Where money has been given, as in the case of the March on Washington and the recent School Boycott, the general impression has been that Mobilization was covering its bets to insure a fail-safe operation...
...The family receives supplementary assistance from the city's welfare department...
...The results are expected to set the pattern for the development of similar government-sponsored programs in urban communities throughout the nation...
...As Henry Salzman, Secretary of the Ford Foundation's Great Cities Gray Area Program, pointed out recently, "The magnitude of the problem has made it clear that the problem cannot be solved through reading specialists...
...The prospects for these youngsters are dim...
...The corps would provide paid employment on projects of social utility for several hundred unemployed out-of-school youngsters, while the job center would attempt to reach the "hard-to-place" youngster with specialized vocational guidance...
...He is literally trapped between the forces of dislocation which seek to exploit him and the bureaucratic structure of a government over which he has no control...
...Mobilization for Youth proposed a three-pronged attack in the following areas: work, education, and community organization...
...The major responsibility for the care of the Merecaido children be longs to Ivette, Angel's 12-year-old sister...
...of the government to solve the basic problems of poverty, unemployment, and discrimination in this country...
...Clearly more than make-work is necessary if we are to meet the demands of these young people for jobs...
...As long as families are herded together in pigsties called apartments...
...the `consumption gangs' (drug and alcohol-using) have retreated from the struggle and accepted defeat...
...They have turned to New York's unskilled labor pools as their one source of escape...
...Coupled to this charge is the complaint that the uniforms worn by the young people employed by the project cost $5—$6, while Mobilization only pays 75 cents to $1 per hour to those who get jobs...
...The total expenditure by the federal government, as first outlined by President Kennedy, would not be more than $100 million the first year, about the cost of a single atomic submarine...
...It makes little sense to train young people in these trades, as Mobilization has done, if there are no opportunities for jobs...
...ILGWU Houses, etc., and the middle-class area around Cooper Square...
...There will never be enough of them...
...They just sit there writing with a pencil...
...For school drop-outs, unemployment rates are three to four times as high as those of the adult labor force...
...Manhattan's Lower East Side, the area designated by the project, is one of the oldest slums in the United States...
...It is divided into several neighborhood councils...
...At any one time it can be safely estimated that between 10 and 20 per cent of the population is dependent on some form of public assistance...
...These figures become more telling when we remember that the bulk of this educational deprivation is in the non-white group-60.6 per cent of all non-white families live in poverty...
...Among Negroes the fetal death rate is almost twice as high, the infant mortality rate twice as high, and the maternal death rate nearly four times as high as that for whites...
...His father works in a factory producing electric hot plates (take home pay, after taxes and dues for a "sweetheart" union that guarantees him the minimum wage, is $44.63...
...The bulk of this retardation occurs among the non-white group...
...Together with his parents and younger brothers and sisters he shares a three-room apartment on E. 11th St...
...the criminal gang seeks to achieve money ('scores') through theft...
...Finally, Mobilization for Youth's proposals fail to take into account the realities of power within the community...
...Many of the youngsters in the area feel that Mobilization has placed a premium on gang membership in terms of its employment program and other services...
...What I would suggest is that the failure involves a much larger failure on the part * LENA is a loose federation of established settlement houses and predominantly middle-class community organizations active on the Lower East Side...
...The basic fallacy of such thinking becomes appar ent when we examine Mobilization for Youth's employment program...
...To meet this demand the American economy would have to create at least 25,000 new jobs every week for the next 10 years...
...Conant and other semi-official spokesmen have admirably stated the difference between slum education and that of the middle class school...
...In New York City the unemployment rate for 14- to 19-year-olds was 17.8 per cent for non-whites as opposed to 8.4 per cent for whites, while for Puerto Ricans the rate was more than 20 per cent...
...Rather than providing the training and status afforded by meaningful work, these programs amount to a tacit admission by government that there is no place in society for these young people...
...A couple of coffee shops have been opened, a service station has been leased from an oil company to provide work experience for a few dozen youths, slightly over 150 youngsters have been placed in subsidized work projects, and some 100 high school juniors and seniors have been employed as tutors to about 300 elementary school pupils...
...To believe they can, is to ignore the basic facts of the slum child's existence...
...Of the 71,854 sixth graders in New York City in 1962, 36.8 per cent were one or more grades behind in reading, and 10,778 were on the third-grade level or below...
...Angel's situation is typical of the plight of hundreds of thousands of youngsters growing up in the depressed metropolitan areas of the United States...
...The other, through direct effort on the part of Mobilization for Youth, would be to help the isolated community residents organize themselves to solve their problems...
...In its view "much delinquency can be understood as representing illegitimate ways of achieving success-goals...
...Basic Problems Remain None of the above observations, however, answer the question of why Mobilization has failed...
...Even if programs like Mobilization's could provide employment for significant numbers of presently unemployed and unemployable youth, which they cannot, they would be no alternative to real job opportunities...
...For Negro and Puerto Rican youth the figures are even higher...
...labor force in the 1960s will not have finished high school...
...The 'fighting gang' seeks to achieve prestige ('rep') through violence...
...Between these signs stands an investment of over fourteen million dollars on the part of federal, state and local agencies and the research of a team of social workers, psychologists, and community planners in the largest effort mounted thus far to attack delinquency in a slum neighborhood...
...Many of these children have never seen father, or maybe they've seen two or three fathers, but never with a briefcase in hand...
...as long as parents are separated from their children all day working in sweatshops...
...One junior high school boy, who took part in a picket line protesting Mobilization's employment policies, declared, "I don't want to kill somebody to get a job...
...The failure involves much more than the usual problems of shortage of funds and inadequate staff...
...66.4 per cent of all non-white individuals live in poverty...
...The majority of its active membership and leadership comes from the cooperative housing projects below Delancey St...
...First, to stress the importance of creative work as an alternative to delinquency, Mobilization proposed the creation of an "Urban Youth Service Corps" and "Youth Jobs Center...
...better than 20 per cent of all non-white youth are functionally illiterate...
...Mobilization for Youth set itself a difficult task...
...By aligning itself with the Lower East Side Neighborhoods Association, rather than seeking to place control in the hands of Negroes and Puerto Ricans, Mobilization has tended to strengthen the position of the middle class forces in the community, rather than that of its weakest members...
...Twenty-five per cent of them are three or more years behind in reading, as well as all other academic areas, by the time they reach junior high school...
...In addition, the government must outlaw discrimination in hiring through the passage of an enforceable Fair Employment Practices Act...
...A Pocket of Permanent Poverty Disease has not failed to take its toll of the slum child either...
...Poverty, violence, over-crowded living, and fragmented family life form the backdrop against which these slum children must attempt to act out the drama of growing up...
...The boys feel that the social workers "get their money easy, we have to work hard...
...Their proposals do not seriously attempt to cope with the problem of unemployment and job training...
...If there is a lesson to be learned from this failure, it is that no effort at changing the pattern of slum life can hope to succeed without attempting to destroy the context of poverty and deprivation in which Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities are forced to live...
...One in neat blue letters announces the headquarters of Mobilization for Youth...
...Some 26 million young people will be entering the labor force in the current decade...
...He arrests you and shoots the friends you grew up with, and you drop garbage or bricks on his head for turning off the hydrant on a steaming summer night...
...he was arrested six months ago for breaking into a school...
...The world of Dick and Jane, the middle-class children of the first grade reader, could not be more remote from the experience of the slum child if he lived on the moon...
...Against this background Mobilization for Youth came to work on the Lower East Side...
...the national average unemployment rate for Negro and other non-white youth is roughly double that for white youth...
...At an age when other youngsters are leaving their dolls to enter into the mysteries of adolescence, Ivette is "in fact" the mother of two children...
...She must see to it that they are fed and washed, and that the household is cared for...
...Finally, Mobilization proposed to develop in the residents of the community the necessary skills to cope with their own problems...
...The facts of prejudice and an economy that tends to drive its poorest members into a gray land of hopelessness have created among the newest migrants to the Lower East Side a pocket of more or less permanent poverty...
...No one has to tell the slum child that Negro teenagers have the highest unemployment rate of any group in the labor force...
...However, the chief impression one receives from a close examination of the program is that it has been a costly failure employing more social workers than youngsters...
...Every other Wednesday he must report to a probation officer...
...Today, as in the past, it is this "melting pot" character that marks the Lower East Side...
...Among families with incomes ranging from $2,000 to $3,999 in 1958, 8 per cent of all persons were either disabled or limited in their activities by chronic ill health...
...In a recent job survey of an area in a large city, 90 per cent of out-of-school youth were found to be jobless...
...The question then is: how successful has Mobilization for Youth been in confronting these realities in its more than two years on the Lower East Side...
...rather, they substitute a program of make-work for viable opportunities for these youngsters...
...Instead of jobs and security, however, they have found the tragedy of life in "El Barrio," Harlem, and the Lower East Side: rows of dirty, graying tenements facing each other across streets scarred with refuse, the cries of numberless infants, the six-story climbs through rat-infested, urine-stinking hallways...
...In New York City, 76,800 youths between the ages of 14 and 24 were out-of-school and out-of-work...
...No amount of patchwork can solve the problem of the slum school apart from the total context of slum life...
...You are a "nigger" or a "spic" and he is "The Man...
...It is difficult to see where such an alignment will benefit the Negroes and Puerto Ricans—particularly in the area of housing, where they are already hard pressed by the recent development of the Lower East Side as a speculative housing market...
...However, they have failed to clearly face the issue...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
