Race and Foster Care

...As the administrator of New York Foundling Hospital reported in 1976, "color determination" was a central concern of the hospital: "Very often we had children who had been abandoned children where we didn't have any information on the parent...

...It still allowed agencies to choose their clients according to religion and thus virtually exempted the Jewish and Catholic agencies from its provisions...

...AfricanAmerican children, however, encountered numerous roadblocks to effective care at every important turn...

...In 1942, Justices Bolin, Delany, and Polier joined with some reform leaders and pressed the New York City Council to pass the Race Discrimination Amendment to the city's charitable institutions' budget...

...Jewish and Catholic agencies were not required even to consider these predominantly Protestant African-American children, and the white Protestant agencies either excluded African Americans completely or had extremely limited quotas and relegated the chosen few to segregated eating and living accommodations...

...But the legal victory of the ACLU did not resolve the continuing role of race in shaping the foster care system...

...The nation's foster-care system has been flooded with thousands of "emotionally traumatized children" who are "products of families ruined by crack, AIDS and homelessness...

...Although more AfricanAmerican children were accepted by the Jewish and Catholic agencies, most were warehoused in public institutions some of which had developed as part of the corrections system...

...6 Another argument for the discriminatory system is that to change it is to tamper with the successes that some of the sectarian agencies have had in providing decent foster care for at least some of the city's children...

...3 Similar efforts to legislate change within the foster agencies in 1952 met with new forms of resistance...

...Carton 2, Folder: "Discrimination and Segregation: Racial and Religious, 1936-44," Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College...

...Polier recalled the case of a ten-year-old child who had a history of running away from home and surviving on pilfered food from local markets...

...Even within the sectarian sector, however, African-American children encountered the SPRING • 1993 • 235 Race and Foster Care intransigence of a system that had developed around race and racism...

...Hubert Delany, an African-American graduate of CCNY (City College of New York) and New York University Law School...

...2 Until the 1930s, the African-American population of the city was relatively small and the percentage of African-American children appearing before the Children's Court for placement in foster care was a mere 3 to 5 percent...

...A number of arguments have been used to justify the selective and highly discriminatory practices of sectarian agencies...

...Even after special legislation outlawed legalized segregation during World War II, custom, tradition, and religion perpetuated a two-track system based on race and religion, the legacies of which we live with today...

...18, 1990, Bl...

...SPRING • 1993 • 237...

...In fact, for all of this century, public tax dollars have supported the bulk of services provided by these agencies, and, by the 1970s, more than 90 percent of their budgets came from federal, state, and local taxes...

...It is undoubtedly true that twelve years of Reagan and Bush child-care and social service policies have exacerbated the problems faced by many minority families...

...In the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant and some Catholic charities were funded by the city to provide services for poor and dependent children...

...7 "Foster Placement by Skin Shade is Charged," New York Times, Jan...

...4 Plaintiffs' Exhibit 241, Deposition of Marie Laufer, Nov...

...In 1973 the New York Civil Liberties Union initiated the historic Wilder v. Sugarman lawsuit on behalf of ten thousand AfricanAmerican children to force sectarian foster care agencies and the city to abandon practices that resulted in the denial of services to AfricanAmerican and Latino children...

...It required the city to deny funds to any institution that discriminated according to race...

...By the Great Depression, Jewish and Catholic agencies grew in importance as Eastern and Southern European Catholics and Jews made up a greater proportion of the city's poor...

...We have witnessed a suburbanization not only of ethnic whites but also of the agencies that once served them in the central cities...

...The justices were particularly outraged by the impact of the existing segregated system on their own judicial decisions: the lack of placements forced them to send neglected African-American youth to the state-run reformatories or prison system...

...But the history of the foster-care system in America's large cities suggests that the dominant foster-care agencies themselves, along with local government, deserve a great deal of the blame for the current suffering of America's dependent minority children...

...and it would be necessary to have some kind of [racial] determination before placing the child...

...One investigation concluded that in January, 1940, "12 out of 16 Protestant institutional programs accepted no Negro children and . . . three of [the remaining] four institutions were for Negro children only...

...Box 20, unprocessed papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, Washington, D.C...

...2 Justine Wise Polier, "History of Wiltwyck School," typescript, Justine Wise Polier Mss...

...We suggest that today's foster-care crisis has its origins in a legally sanctioned segregated social service system that developed in New York City and elsewhere in the first half of this century...

...Others agreed to abide by the law, but several years later had still not accepted a single African-American child...

...The Protestant agencies were thrown into turmoil as some openly rejected the law, preferring to refuse services to all children referred to them by the city rather than integrate...

...3 H.W...

...Despite the fact the selection of children guaranteed that the few African-American children were higher-functioning, younger, and less disturbed than the majority of white children at these agencies, white children were still placed for adoption more frequently and more quickly than their African-American counterparts...

...In the last years of the Great Depression, Fiorello LaGuardia appointed three justices to the Domestic Relations Court, all of whom would focus their energies on the injustices of the prevailing system...

...The justification for this public funding is that sectarian agencies provide a service that is comprehensive and more effective than any possible public system...

...But, their problems were accentuated by the special relationship between the city and sectarian leaders, as only "select" African-American children were allowed into the voluntary system...

...Rather, the new form of discrimination was based on an informal system of distributing children to the foster care agencies according to "gradations of skin color and hair texture...

...It dragged on through the courts until 1984, when the ACLU won a victory and the city "agreed to place children with foster care agencies on a first-come, first-served basis, regardless of race or religion...

...Light-skinned African-American children were selected over darker skinned children, high-achieving children over children with lower I.Q.s, and well-mannered children over those with behavioral problems...

...q Notes 1 "The Placement of Negro Children by Protestant Child-Caring Agencies, 1940-1951," Jan...

...5 By the early 1970s, the two-track system had left the public agencies in disarray...

...In 1947, the city took over the former home of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and established the Children's Center for the temporary care of the African-American children who were victims of the delaying tactics and withdrawal of service by the sectarian agencies...

...New York City's foster-care system provides a window to view the evolution of this tragedy...

...Another set of ostensibly "non-sectarian" facilities, publicly funded and staffed but run by boards drawn from among the leadership of New York's philanthropic community, also evolved as essentially segregated all-black and Hispanic institutions...

...Some children awaiting possible placement in the sectarian agencies languished in prison, as sectarian agencies engaged in long preplacement screening and selection processes...

...Wiltwyck, for example, was backed by Justine Wise Polier and Eleanor Roosevelt, because of the unwillingness of the sectarian agencies to honestly address their own racist policies...

...5 Plaintiff's Exhibit 254, Deposition of the New York Foundling Hospital by Sister Marian Cecilia Schneider, July 8, 1976, p. 33, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, Wilder v. Sugarman...

...6 "Project Plan Paper for MARC Staff Study and Recommendations on 'The Disposition of Minority Group Children in Need of Placement and/or Services by Public and Private Agencies in New York City,' " in Kenneth Clark Mss...

...Further, these same agencies have increasingly redefined their programs in order to avoid the narrow requirements of the Wilder decision as it affects foster care...

...It is telling that today, a half-century after Justice Wise Polier first observed the hypocrisies of a system based on race, the same arguments are used to defend the voluntary system of social services...

...and Justine Wise Polier, a Radcliffe and Yaleeducated lawyer and daughter of Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and child-care reformer Louise Wise, began a campaign to remedy the growing crisis for minority children...

...Carton 2, Folder: "Racial Discrimination, 1938-49...

...For the relatively small SPRING • 1993 • 233 Race and Foster Care percentage of African-American children who were referred for placement, the choice was much narrower...

...Jane Bolin, the first African American to graduate from Yale Law School and the first black woman judge in the country...

...There were no public services for dependent children except for those convicted of crimes, who could be sent to prisons or reformatories...

...The origins of New York's foster-care system lay in the historic relationship between religious charitable institutions and the political leadership of the city...

...Among them is that their religious orientation and financial links to the ethnic and religious communities of the city make it understandable that they would respond to the needs of their own religious and ethnic populations first...

...Shelters for temporary placements of sixty to ninety days before children were "returned to the community," either through adoption or foster placement, became warehouses in which some children were kept as long as three to four years...

...It was not until the 1960s that reformers despaired of forcing the sectarian agencies to provide adequate facilities and programs for the growing number of AfricanAmerican children then migrating to the City...

...Almost always, the sectarian agencies wanted to know the race of children referred to them by social workers or the courts before accepting them for placement...

...Undergirding this argument is the assumption that the Jewish and Catholic communities provide the financial base of these agencies...

...8, 1952, Justine Wise Polier Mss...

...Faced with the intransigence of the sectarian agencies, some called for public facilities to handle public wards...

...Marsh, Commissioner of Welfare, to Edwin J. Lukas, May 23, 1945, Polier Mss...

...Other ostensibly "voluntary" agencies were also publicly funded and staffed but were controlled by the leadership of the sectarian agencies and used to offset criticism of the voluntary agencies...

...Behaviorally disturbed children, often with mental deficiencies, overwhelmed the underfunded and understaffed public facilities...

...But the major political thrust was to try to entice the religious agencies to serve AfricanAmerican children...

...In the first year following the passage of this law, the number of placements of Protestant African-American children actually declined from 242 to 171...

...Foster Care Workers Tell of Horrors," "Foster Care System Reeling," "Troubled Children Flood Ill-Prepared Foster Care System...

...Many Catholic agencies escaped the law by establishing segregated services within the same agency...

...Her concern was "the disparate treatment of minority group children in need of care" which was due, in her opinion, "to the claims of voluntary agencies that they may define and effect their responsibilities for such care as they wish, without any effective accountability" to the public...

...Agencies that once depended on funds earmarked for foster care now draw funds from state and federal grants reserved to serve the mentally ill, developmentally disabled, handicapped, and mentally retarded...

...Nor is it the only cause of the growing racial antagonism that affects the quality of life in major American cities...

...7 As Marcia Lowry, the ACLU lawyer who has guided the case since its inception, recently told us, "After all the effort of the past two decades, it is frustrating to see how difficult it continues to 236 • DISSENT Race and Foster Care be to find quality services for Black kids in need...

...These rationalizations are reminiscent of southern segregationists who argued in the 1950s and 1960s that integration would lead to inferior education for whites and blacks...

...More important, new and perhaps more insidious methods for avoiding the court order to refrain from maintaining segregated services appear to be evolving within the nonprofit agencies...

...By the early 1970s, despite the impact of the civil rights and "Black Power" movements and New York's image as a progressive, liberal, enlightened community, the resistance of the sectarian agencies to integration had led to a two-track system of services: Jewish and Catholic children were assured services through the dominant voluntary agencies...

...But as the African-American migration from the South accelerated during the depression and World War II, the inequities of the system of foster care took on a tragic appearance...

...The Joint Planning Service, a referral unit for the Jewish agencies, "always" asked about race as well as religion for children referred for both long- and short-term placements...

...It should come as no surprise that these were virtually all-black facilities...

...4 A particularly horrifying example of the importance of race in the selection process of children for long-term placement in foster homes and adoption was the case of New York Foundling Hospital, which, as late as 1974, would send foundlings of indeterminate race to the Museum of Natural History, where an anthropologist would inspect skull size, skin tone, facial, and other characteristics to determine the race of abandoned infants...

...The Wilder case arose in the context of the disorder and racial divisions that characterized the early 1970s foster-care system...

...The result of this, however, is that these agencies are public in all but name, yet they are not fully accountable to the public in that they have obviously not met the needs of large numbers of those children...

...A scattering of institutions such as the Colored Orphan Asylum in Manhattan and the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn were reserved for minority children, and these were perpetually overcrowded...

...The suit, soon assumed by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), charged that the city conspired with the voluntary foster care agencies to create "a dual child-care system that separates children on the basis of race and religion" and that this had led to "cruel and brutalizing" treatment of minority children...

...During the 1950s and 1960s a new form of segregation emerged, with the vast majority of white children in the voluntary agencies and the vast majority of African-American dependent youth in public institutions like Spofford and a series of "training schools" for boys and girls in Warwick and Hudson...

...p. 20, 1.18, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, Wilder v. Sugarman...

...Those religious agencies that accepted African-American children did so only when these children met their own particular needs or interests...

...Although the Wilder decision mandated greater public oversight over referral procedures of the sectarian agencies, public officials did not use their newfound power to truly reverse and reform the system...

...The probation officer told her that "there is nothing to do [for this child], your Honor, until he is 12 or commits a felony [after which] he can be sent to the State Training School...

...21, 1973, p. 19, 1.2...

...At that point, with the active opposition of the 234 • DISSENT Race and Foster Care sectarian agencies, New York established a small number of facilities to provide long-term care for children rejected by the voluntary services...

...Today we have lurid stories of the breakdown of the foster care system and sensational exposés of troubled African-American youth, but no attention is paid to the ways that race and racism have shaped the institutions of the city and the lives of these children...

...Through World War II, most of the children referred to the sectarian agencies were ethnic whites who were dispersed among the variety of orphanages, foster homes, or child-guidance clinics affiliated with the Jewish Board of Guardians, Catholic Charities, and the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies...

...Justine Wise Polier, who in the late 1960s was instrumental in spurring the New York Civil Liberties Union to bring forth the Wilder case, went to Kenneth Clark to discuss a matter that "had been . . . almost a personal crusade...

...Fostercare agencies, using photographs and advertisements, reinforce the public's perception that their agencies are valiantly trying to address the needs of minority children abandoned by their families and communities...

...The public services provided through city institutions were understaffed and of low quality to begin with...

...By law as well as custom, children who came before the city's Children's, Family, or Domestic Relations Court were placed in agencies according to their religious affiliation...

...Carton 3, Folder: "Wiltwyck-History," Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College...

...Yet, abandonment of African Americans in the postwar years by major institutions points to a much broader responsibility than is often acknowledged...

...The racism of the foster-care system certainly is not the only cause for the social breakdown that has destroyed the lives of many African-American youth...

...In 1990, the ACLU was forced to return to court when it became apparent that the city was not living up to the settlement...

...The sectarians' domination of the foster-care system perpetuated the racial segregation of the city's dependent children...