A NEW DAY FOR GARY

...Led by U.S...

...He has made passage of some of his program more difficult by refusing to dispense to councilmen even nominal patronage plums they would have received in the past...

...Nor does he retrench when odds mount...

...Krupa, a stocky, tough politician whose base of operations is his county clerk's office in Crown Point, swung the Democratic organization behind Joseph B. Radi-gan, a Republican political neophyte and furniture store owner who, before the Krupa move, had about as little chance for election as any other Gary Republican had had in the last thirty years...

...He asked Hatcher to delegate to him the authority to name Hatcher's city controller, police chief, and other key officials—assuming Hatcher were elected...

...Hatcher said he would make his own appointments...

...Richard Gordon Hatcher, first Negro mayor of this sinewy city of steel mills, set his course in his inaugural address on New Year's Day...

...A recruitment drive is under way to bolster the force for a sustained assault on unorganized crime—¦ the holdups, shootings, muggings, and rapes that make some Gary neighborhoods, like sections of many cities, unsafe...

...Morale among Gary's honest police, one officer told me, "is at an all time high...

...But if Mayor Richard Hatcher can even approach his inaugural goal, "to change the face of our city," he may also succeed in changing Gary's traditional political complexion...

...When Krupa cut off Democratic Party campaign funds after his nomination, Hatcher raised his own money by advertising for help nationally in The New York Times and adding out-of-town fund-raising speeches to his busy schedule...

...Krupa justified the switch by saying Hatcher "refuses to work in harmony with me...

...The Mayor may seek to use the leverage he now has with his impressive black voting bloc to deny support to candidates for county office who refuse to oppose Krupa...

...As president of the council, he worked with such persistence for a fair housing ordinance and public housing in white neighborhoods that the only recourse of white opponents was to tie up the legislation in court litigation after passage...

...He envisions the whole community working together, brightening the face of downtown Gary, eradicating slums, improving housing, attracting new businesses, improving schools, and curbing the air pollution that hangs in sooty clouds over the industrial city...

...We want the citizens of Gary to know where the Mayor's office stands on this sort of thing," Hatcher said in explanation of his personal participation in the crackdown...

...This intrepid young man has been threatened with death, and vilified and slandered by racists and assorted opponents of social change...

...While in high school he worked as a dishwasher at a cafe until the manager told some Negroes they would have to eat in the back of the restaurant...

...Hatcher says, "Good government comes in assorted colors and nationalities," and that his only criterion in appointments is merit...

...He overhauled the police department, firing the chief and replacing the entire vice squad...

...When elected to the city council in 1963, he led a two-year battle for passage of an open-housing ordinance undiluted by amendments...

...Steel and other industries to expect reform, costly to them, in air pollution control...

...If this is so, and if he does hold on to the Democratic reins in Lake County, thousands of Gary citizens of Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Serb, Italian, and Greek extraction may continue to look to him for political leadership, and "the new spirit of hope and expectation" Hatcher finds in Gary could encounter an unyielding wall of resistance...

...Angelo— a Hatcher supporter—called "a genuine reformer," decided it might be better off for a time with a Republican in office than such an unmal-leable Democrat...

...The lanky youth, with the aid of a small athletic scholarship for track, worked his way through Indiana University and Valparaiso University Law School...

...Hatcher has enraged some Negroes by refusing to replace city employes with the brothers and aunts and uncles of his supporters for no reason other than patronage...

...He accepted all openings Krupa offered...

...This was not easy...

...To convince the rest, the athletic young Mayor accompanied a raid in February on the Venus Cafe, the most lavish and notorious gambling center in town...

...The county chairman, who neither lives nor works in Gary, the county's major city, promised to "groom" a Negro of his own choosing for a later election...

...He is not a backslapping politician...

...Doubts raised by Krupa forces have been largely dispelled by the generally high level of Hatcher's appointments to city departments...

...He has filled the attractively tiled and carpeted mayor's office with an all-black staff, in sharp contrast to the predominantly white staff hired by the other newly elected Negro mayor of a major city, Carl B. Stokes of Cleveland...

...One of fourteen children of a factory worker and former Georgia sharecropper in near-by Michigan City, Dick Hatcher grew up poor...

...While Hatcher is a courageous crusader, he also is a level-headed, unflappable pragmatist...

...Mayor Hatcher, the man Negroes called their "black white knight" and "squeaky clean" candidate, threw a Negro supporter out of his office when he appeared after the election and sought the accustomed political protection for his clandestine gambling business...

...The first priority," he tells Negroes of other cities now, "is not jobs, not housing, not education, all of which we need, but the first priority is to develop a power base within the Negro community...

...The goals laid down January 1 by the thirty-four-year-old activist were as large an order as getting elected, but the new man at City Hall has made DONALD JANSON is chief of the Chicago bureau of The New York Times and ranges widely throughout the Middle West...

...He captured a resounding ninety-five per cent of the black vote...

...He believes it has in some quarters...

...Later, as a college student, he returned to organize a sit-in at the cafe, and integrated it...

...None of his choices fit the "radical" mold Krupa talked about...

...While serving as a deputy county prosecutor the next year, Hatcher joined with other NAACP attorneys in an unsuccessful suit seeking an end to de facto segregation in the Gary school system...

...After the bitter election campaign of 1967, asking for harmony seems to some like coveting the Milky Way...

...Senator Birch E. Bayh, who supported Hatcher last year, is up for reelection...

...In Richard Hatcher, Gary has more than its first Negro mayor," the conservative newspaper said...

...The "Rap Brown issue" ballooned...

...During his second month in office he got $5 million from the Federal Government to begin a 200-acre renewal project in Gary's worst slum...

...He may also ask state and national party figures to put pressure on county Democratic leaders to oust Krupa...

...More than eighty per cent of the city's dwellings fail to meet building code requirements...

...Nor is the city council opposed to Hatcher on many issues...

...For the Democratic organization a Democrat like Hatcher was enough of a problem as a member of the city council...

...Krupa says he will seek re-election as county chairman May 11...

...Despite a frequently sober demeanor, Hatcher has a ready wit...

...After three months in office, the racial bitterness which flared in the campaign has subsided, but in such all-white neighborhoods as Glen Park, it is far from extinguished...

...To Krupa's charge that the candidate was an "outsider" (Hatcher had lived in Gary eight years, but Michigan City, his hometown, is twenty-five miles away), the rejoinder was, "All I can say is that I got here as soon as I could...

...It is far too early to pronounce success or failure, but Hatcher's start has at least been imaginative and energetic...

...Hatcher ran as an independent Democrat and beat Katz narrowly in the primary when whites, who command a majority of registered Voters, divided their support between Katz and another white candidate, Bernard Konrady...

...When the county Democratic organization sought to defeat him by registering non-existent voters, he called in Federal investigators to expose the scheme and obtained a Federal court injunction...

...Model cities and other Federal aid pursued by Hatcher are seconded...

...A white bartender commented to me recently, "This town could stand a lot of improvement...

...Steel, which built Gary in 1906, that its tax assessments were too low and would have to be raised...

...It might also cost the Democrats the state in the Presidential and Senate elections this fall...

...A Negro mayor would be all right, Krupa said, but Hatcher was not the "right kind...

...The charges were vague but effective in the white working class neighborhoods that gave George C. Wallace overwhelming support in helping him carry Lake County in Indiana's 1964 Presidential primary...

...The Mayor recently expressed surprise and pleasure at the number of Gary businessmen, from corporate to corner store level, who had offered support and good wishes...

...Another white who did not vote for him, a waitress, said, "He was supposed to be Communistic, but I've seen no evidence of it...

...He reminds party leaders that Krupa also is guilty of the ultimate party crime—support of a Republican against the Democratic nominee...

...The city's only daily newspaper, the Post-Tribune, endorsed no candidate for mayor but since Hatcher's election has praised his appointments and urged wide public support for him in "this period of testing...

...Recently the Junior Chamber of Commerce honored Hatcher as Gary's young man of the year...

...Graft and corruption shall end, and efficiency shall begin...

...The Democratic Party has carried Indiana in previous elections only behind the united vote of both Negroes and ethnic groups in populous Lake County...

...Tentative indications of support have also come from the working class levels...

...Hatcher refuses, also, to pacify white qualms over race...

...This is something Richard Hatcher yearns for...

...Uniting militants and moderates and conservatives was one problem...

...He considers Krupa guilty of racial slurs against "every one of the 100,000 Negroes," ordinarily Democratic voters, in the county...

...He has warned U.S...

...Hatcher hopes that other Democratic county leaders will prevail upon Krupa to step aside in the interest of party unity...

...His outstanding feat, a rare one, was to organize and inspire support so effectively in the ghetto that all elements of the Negro community cast aside voting habits of decades and bolted from the entrenched Democratic machine to elect him in a mighty demonstration of black power at the polls...

...The soft-spoken young lawyer caught the ear of Negroes around the country when he included an aside to black residents of Gary's crumbling ghetto: "A special word to my brothers and sisters who, because of circumstances beyond your control, find yourselves locked into miserable slums, without enough food to eat, inadequate clothing for your children, and no hope for tomorrow...

...So the machine, under Lake County Chairman John G. Krupa, backed incumbent Mayor A. Martin Katz for renomina-tion...

...The highest standards of integrity will be expected of you," Hatcher told city employes, "and anyone who fails to meet that requirement will be summarily discharged...

...Even many Negro ministers refrained from open endorsement of Hatcher because their churches were subsidized by the machine...

...They campaigned for John F. Kennedy in 1960...

...Steel, the city's major employer, they also support his job and job training proposals...

...As much as he would like peace with the progress he plans, however, he insists he will compromise none of his goals for the sake of a smoother path...

...He has established good relations with business and industry, which have as much of a stake in Gary as he has...

...The Johnson Administration also backed Hatcher, a move which Krupa took as an affront that meant the Administration had decided to sacrifice Indiana to bid for the Negro vote nationally...

...Most of the operators of vice dens and gambling establishments got the message and departed for friendlier environs...

...Soon he and some Negro friends formed a group they called Muigwith-ania ("we are together"), the name of a newspaper once published by Kenya nationalist Jomo Kenyatta...

...There has been a net gain of only 260 rental housing units in Gary in forty years...

...Pummeled about "black power," he said Krupa's primary concern was not over black but over green power, an allusion to storied machine corruption in Gary...

...Ascent to the mayor's office in this city of 178,000 was arduous...

...He attends church regularly, has an abiding faith in God, and believes justice triumphs eventually if prodded...

...Hatcher, for four years a city councilman in close touch with the entire ghetto as the result of intensive civil rights work, has built and consolidated a firm political base of black support in the fifty-five per cent Negro city...

...To get an opposition campaign moving, he injected race, only a subsurface issue until then because Radigan had not used it...

...Hatcher told U.S...

...The Mayor's polite, gentle manner masks a stubborn determination not to be turned around...

...Beyond that, the Democratic organization, run by white ethnic leaders, had long controlled the ghetto vote through the usual precinct network of block-level politicians, patronage, pay-offs, "ghost" voting, and protection of Negro gambling operations...

...But Krupa has not capitulated, either, and a new battle is in the offing...

...Hatcher is not a spellbinder in the Martin Luther King manner...

...He came to Gary in 1959...

...It has a young man who has thus far demonstrated traits of leadership, of ability to overcome obstacles that would have seemed insurmountable to some, of integrity, and of the conviction that integrity can be made to work in city government...

...He helped found the Freedom Movement to work for the ordinance and participated in marches and other demonstrations to dramatize the need for it...

...The clincher was a Krupa charge that Hatcher was refusing to disavow Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael...

...Arrests have escalated since Hatcher revitalized the police force, but the problem remains immense...

...Most are well qualified selections...

...Krupa claims to have overwhelming support for re-election by precinct committeemen and vice-committeemen...

...Krupa seized upon Hatcher's refusal to denounce Brown and Carmichael by name...

...Krupa still controls the party machinery in white sections of Gary and most of the county outside Gary...

...My conversations with Hatcher, before and since his election, produce the clear impression that he would like nothing more than to serve all the people of Gary, including the working class, Middle European white ethnic groups that went Republican for the first time to oppose him because of his race...

...Hatcher says this would imperil what harmony has been achieved in Gary and re-divide the city along racial lines...

...He refuses to waver on moral values, even insisting that a friendly wager be for dinner rather than money...

...He marched at the head of Negro pickets protesting segregated room policies of a Gary hospital...

...He leaped into the race for mayor, without party endorsement, as soon as he thought he had a chance to win...

...The Krupa group, convinced they were confronted with what State Democratic Chairman Gordon St...

...He named a white officer, James F. Hilton, who has the confidence and respect of the entire city, to head the police force, and ordered him to clean up Gary...

...His aim is to make Gary, which is closely balanced racially, a showplace of white and Negro harmony and cooperation...

...Negroes seeking special favors fare no better...

...Housing projects outside ethnic bastions win approval...

...I think Mr...

...Several appointees accepted Hatcher's bid to help at a financial sacrifice...

...Appointees include Joaquin Azcona as civil defense director, the first Latin American ever named to office in Gary...

...Even that will be just a start...

...Hatcher's successful quest of Ford Foundation funds to employ consultants at three universities to seek new solutions to crime, urban renewal, job, pollution, government reorganization, and other problems in Gary has been welcomed...

...a rather impressive beginning...

...Those who have come to his aid have learned they must do so without expecting concessions to special interests...

...Negroes disappointed that Hatcher's election did not produce immediate jobs and swift enforcement of the housing code are complaining more than whites, King told me...

...Even Hatcher's foes say that control of street crime would earn the reform mayor the respect of the entire community...

...Hatcher's response was that he opposed any advocacy of violence...

...Hatcher rejects any definition of black power that condones violence, but wholeheartedly endorses bootstrap development of political and economic leverage through democratic processes...

...When asked to disavow Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Marlon Brando and others, he said he would not disavow Marlon Brando...

...He did not crumple in the face of scurrilous verbal abuse in the election campaign, and is not likely to bend now that he is in power...

...Hatcher, he said, stood for "black power," did not support the Vietnam war, and was subject to the influence of "left wing" friends...

...They seem convinced the Mayor is correct in reporting, "Something exciting is happening in Gary...

...To Krupa's assurance that he would "rather be dead than red," Hatcher suggested the party chairman would "rather be white than right...

...Krupa conferred with his party's new nominee...

...Hatcher is not stopping with studies...

...He accepted volunteer bodyguards last year, but he has yet to be intimidated...

...The teetotaling, non-smoking Baptist said he would start with a crackdown on organized crime, a novel idea in a city where gambling and vice have been rampant for decades and the crime syndicate, for a price, could always count on a generous degree of tolerance in official places...

...to tear down slums . . . to destroy crime . . . to expand industry...

...While prescribing programs designed to benefit all of Gary, he concedes that the greatest beneficiaries in most programs will be Negroes because they have the farthest to go...

...Hatcher's appointments to city departments have been about equally divided racially, though they are headed by a Negro, businessman Evans Baptiste, in the job of controller, which in Gary is equivalent to assistant mayor...

...Hatcher hopes such depth of feeling will diminish...

...He speaks softly and dresses conservatively...

...His winning margin came from the thirteen per cent of the white voters who preferred him...

...Hatcher has solidified his power base in the ghetto, but that alone is not enough to upset the county machine he beat in the city...

...It is a primary goal of this administration to make your life better, to give you a decent place to live, to help create job opportunities for you, and to assist you in every way in breaking the vicious chain of poverty, to give you your rightful share of the good life...

...Hatcher will be good for Gary...

...When he has time, which has been seldom in the past year, this bachelor mayor likes nothing better than to relax with a good book or good music in the handsomely paneled living room of his small house on a winding street near the edge of the ghetto...

...Hatcher won by only 1,389 votes out of 77,271...

...Realtors have for three years prevented implementation of the fair housing ordinance by legal maneuvers, but Hatcher is pursuing the case in the Indiana Supreme Court...

...Money for more staff and legal assistance to cut the Mayor's fourteen-hour working days and to bring more order to his office was granted...

...The city was almost totally polarized between white and black...

...Charles H. King, Jr., Negro executive director of the Gary Human Relations Commission, said he was finding "many whites who are willing to take a second look at Hatcher...

...Business and civic leaders support his drive on crime...

...Much of his white vote came from Jewish, Puerto Rican, and Mexican-American neighborhoods...

...One of his first actions as mayor was to integrate all the fire stations in the city...

...He refuses to soothe racists by stalling integrated education or open housing...

...Today is a new day . . , those who would sow the seeds of discord and peddle the poison of racism, let it be clearly understood, are no longer welcome in Gary, Indiana...