In the first two weeks of investigating the plight of the nation's cities, Abe Ribicoff's Senate subcommittee dwelled mostly on the statistics of the problem, demanding answers and offering aggressive criticism. Last week it was the com mittee's turn to sit back and listen— and what it heard from a parade of witnesses was the chilling flesh-and-blood story of what life can be like in the ghetto slums of large U.S. cities. The Senators got an uncomfortable view of places where people have to hustle for pocket money and a moment's pleasure, where honesty's reward is hunger, and where prostitution, illegitimacy and crime are socially accepted ways of life. Chairman Ribicoff was moved to ad mit: "We seem to be talking about two different worlds."
Sex with the Butcher. The other world was evoked first by Claude Brown, 28, a forceful, outspoken Negro who at age five saw his father slit a man's throat, later spent time in reform school after peddling heroin in his Harlem neighborhood. Now a Rutgers University law student, Brown is the author of the bestselling Manchild in the Promised Land, an account of a Harlem peopled by pimps, prostitutes and dope pushers. In such an environment, he told the Senators, men are emasculated not only by unemployment but also by the related fact that "Mamma is having sexual relationships with the butcher for an extra piece of pork chop for the kids." The neighborhood hero is the man who betters his lot by any means —the man who "wears a $200 silk suit every day, $55 alligator shoes and this sort of thing. He drives a big Cadillac, because they know he is winning the war. He is a soldier, you know, like he is a real soldier. He is a general in the community. If he gets busted [arrested], well, he is just a prisoner of war."
Accompanying Brown to Capitol Hill was a witness whom he described as a "more typical manchild," Negro Arthur Dunmeyer, a 30-year-old grandfather from Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant area who recently managed to get a $100-a-week porter's job despite his lengthy prison record. Dunmeyer told the Senators that he was born illegitimately, that he fathered an illegitimate child at 15, and that a daughter of his gave birth to an illegitimate baby at age twelve. Describing illegitimacy as "just a way of life," Dunmeyer added: "I might think of having some children, not thinking if the woman is married to me or not, because I want to have children."
Dunmeyer's mother, he related, was a prostitute, but in her own eyes "she was just a woman that had to learn to live by her wits." As a child, said Dunmeyer, he saw slumlords, dope peddlers and graft-taking cops enrich themselves by "flimflamming somebody"—which encouraged him to do likewise. "If you can't get downtown to take the big stack," he said, "you took the little stack uptown from the little guy who lived right around you." Added Dunmeyer: "You are in jail in the street or behind bars."