The Tragedy of Negro Youth
Rustin, Bayard
The black slum proletariat has been growing in numbers and density. As agricultural mechanization and other factors continue pushing Negroes out of the South, the urban ghettos expand each...
...Nor is there any evidence that Negro teen-agers do not want to work...
...In Philadelphia, 6,000 were on a waiting list for a training program...
...From "A Way Out of the Exploding Ghetto," The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1967...
...This trend has not been affected at all by any antipoverty or Great Society programs...
...Nor can they really be blamed by a society which has itself produced these yearnings, reveled in its affluence, encouraged the consumption of trivia, and proclaimed the coming of computerized utopias...
...With the advent of advanced technology eliminating many semiskilled and unskilled jobs, and with the movement of plants from the central cities to the suburbs (New York lost 200,000 factory jobs in a decade), urban Negroes suffered rising joblessness or employment in low paying service jobs...
...The middle classes may nostalgically extol their immigrant parents' fortitude and perseverance in manual labor, but they do not steer their own children toward the garment district...
...As agricultural mechanization and other factors continue pushing Negroes out of the South, the urban ghettos expand each year by half a million...
...For white teen-agers, on the other hand, unemployment since 1957 never went beyond 15 per cent and is now at 10 per cent...
...The black slum proletariat has been growing in numbers and density...
...They show them the push buttons, not the push cart...
...What Negro teen-agers are not inclined to accept are dead end jobs that pay little and promise no advancement or training...
...Whenever job programs have been announced, they have turned out in large numbers, only to find that the jobs weren't there...
...When the migration of Negroes to Northern and Western cities was at its height during World War II, factory jobs were available at decent wages...
...only 40,040 Negroes annually find their way into the suburbs...
...Right now [the national Negro teen-age unemployment rate] is 25 per cent, but for 16-19-year-olds in the 10 slum areas surveyed, it is over 38 per cent...
...And who is victimized...
...If it is true that a Negro boy is nobody unless he owns alligator shoes and an alpaca sweater, who created things even when crippled by poor education, broken families, and the sale of these commodities, and who advertised them...
...While according to the official unemployment rates the joblessness gap between Negro and white men over 20 has been narrowing since 1961, even this official rate records a widening of the gap between Negro and white teenagers since 1957...
...Many would prefer to live by their wits as hustlers or petty racketeers, their version of the self-employed businessman or salesman...
...That their pursuit of this distorted entrepreneurial ideal only mires them deeper in the slum proletariat is not the point...
...only 250 were placed...
...In Oakland, a "Job Fair" attracted 15,000 people...
...Within the slum proletariat, youth constitutes a subdivision of increasing economic and political importance...
...Moreover, this rate was unaffected by the downward trends of the nation's overall unemployment rate late last year...
...Might they not then show some compassionate understanding of black youngsters who dream of better things even when crippled by poor education, broken families and the disabilities bred by slum life...
Vol. 14 • September 1967 • No. 5
