(8 of 10)
But that will take time, and the city's short-range solution for the Negro who is snared in the ghetto cycle is public assistance. Nearly a fourth of Harlem's people are on welfare, many under the Aid to Dependent Children program. Critics complain that the program encourages loose women to increase the monthly check by reproducing as often as possible. Whether this is true or not, there is certainly some chiseling. Some men leave home or are sent packing by their women so their families can qualify for ADC support.
Gang-Busters. New York City Welfare Commissioner James R. Dumpson, 52, a Philadelphia-born Negro, claims that only 275 cases of fraud were unearthed in 1963. Once, he said, welfare workers could not tell one Negro child from another and all the kids in the neighborhood ran from house to house, a few steps ahead of the social worker, to pad the rolls. But now his department workers demand birth certificates and school records.
Dumpson also uses what he calls the Early Morning Visit, in which investigators charge into a woman's flat at 5 a.m. like gangbusters and, if a man is present, try to find out whether he is filching welfare money or dodging child support. Not surprisingly, some welfare workers object to the technique.
To many officials, the best hope of breaking the self-renewing jobs-housing-education cycle lies in the schools. By the time they reach sixth grade, Harlem's children are nearly two full years behind their classmates downtown. The dropout rate is 55%, and the children often as not wind up on the streets, for the unemployment rate among Negro teen-agers is 40%. These youths are the despair of Harlem, for they are, in a sense, living proof of its failure. "Look at those damned kids," snapped a Negro man as packs of teenagers ran wild last week. "They won't listen to nobody. They won't listen to no damned thing."
Even so, says the Rev. Dr. M. Moran Weston, rector of St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem, "there are a lot of natural leaders out on those streets. Somebody just needs to help them." Weston's church, for one, is helping by offering basketball and music, field trips and job placement services to 500 children a day. Some 150 social services are also at work in Harlem, spending as much as $10 million a year.
Into the Honey Pot. The most ambitious project of all is the threeyear, $110 million HARYOU-ACT* program, partly supported with federal funds. It is the brainchild of Kenneth Clark, 50, a City College professor whose brief on the effects of discrimination helped shape the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision. It envisions a network of community councils and organizations dedicated to fighting poverty and helping the ghetto's youngsters by setting up half a dozen businesses that will be run by some 3,000 teenagers, after-school study centers for those with nowhere to go, job information and training centers handling 2,300 youths a year, preschool academies to get toddlers out of fetid tenements, and a crash remedial reading program for Harlem