Education: Experiment in Infiltration

In Manhattan's Harlem prowl some of the nation's most vicious teen-age gangs, and neither police watchfulness nor the usual type of social work has done much good against them.* Three years ago, the privately financed Welfare Council of New York City started a simple experiment in infiltration. To four of the worst gangs in Central Harlem—the Jay Bees, the Gay Blades, the Royals and the Knights—it assigned four young social workers, three of them Negroes. By last week, the council was able to tell, in a 162-page report, what its social workers had learned, and what they had accomplished by seemingly...

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