The American Underclass

  • Share
  • Read Later

(5 of 10)

Donald Williams, 29, an ex-junkie, scuffs the streets of New York City as a panhandler. A former student at North Carolina Central University, he says that he was thrown out because he took part in a student demonstration. Williams' lament: "My values are gone. You're looking at a weird dude, a dude on the borderline of insanity. Every day, it doesn't seem to get better—only worse."

In Chicago, hundreds of unemployed young blacks mill on the street where Albirtha Young, 29, lives with her welfare-supported family—twelve people in all. "I didn't want to pick cotton all my life," she says, explaining her move to the city's West Side from Mississippi nine years ago. She brought two children North, now has four more—along with two left to her care by an aunt, plus two younger brothers and a sister to tend. The extended family lives in a two-story frame house bracketed by vacant lots, gutted houses and apartment buildings. Albirtha has not held a job since 1968. One reason: her wage would be less than her $420.60 monthly welfare payment plus the $298.80 she receives in Social Security survivors' benefits—and she would have to pay the cost of a baby sitter besides. Says she: "It's no easy job just sitting here from one year to the next doing nothing."

From everywhere in the ghetto comes the cry for more jobs. The unemployment rate among blacks is 13.2%, v. 6.1% among whites. The rate for black teenagers is 39%, v. 14.3% for whites. A generation of young people is moving into its 20s—the family-forming years—without knowing how to work, since many have never held jobs.

To those who did have jobs, the 1973-75 recession was a severe blow. During its worst months, nonwhites were laid off at nearly twice the rate of whites (the unemployment rate for blacks grew from 10.4% in 1974 to 14.7% in 1975), and since then blacks have been called back to work more slowly. Consequently, some people who had begun to struggle out of the underclass were abruptly thrown back. The underclass has been hurt by the flight of manufacturing firms—many requiring only semiskilled or even unskilled labor—to the suburbs and the Sunbelt. Since 1969 Chicago has lost 212,000 jobs, while its suburbs have gained 220,000; in the same period, New York City has lost 650,000 jobs. From 1970 to 1975, 248 manufacturing plants left Detroit, including branches of the 16 biggest local companies.

"Poor blacks don't have mobility," says Roger Fox, an executive of the Chicago Urban League. "They just can't pick up and move on to where there are jobs." Among the many reasons: high rents in the suburbs (even compared with the extortionate sums charged by many slumlords), lack of cars and mass transit, and the resistance of many communities to low-income housing. Margie Figueroa, 21, typifies the problem. She had to commute two hours each way, on three buses and a train, from Chicago's Humboldt Park barrio to her job as a maid at the Hyatt Regency Hotel near O'Hare International Airport. The effort was too much; she quit, and remains unemployed.

By default, the underclass economy is a welfare economy. Nonwhites received 37% of the $11.4 billion in federal and state welfare payments last year. Blacks make up no less than 44.3% of enrollees in the $10.3 billion Aid to

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10