The Nation's Worst Slum: Washington, D.C.

FEAR haunts the citizens of the nation’s capital. It is not safe to walk the streets at night. Crimes of every description — murder, rape, robbery, housebreaking, mugging — are at an all-time high. The rate of increase in the last decade is 50 percent. Last year there was a sudden jump of 17 percent. Women remain at home in the evening because they are afraid to be out alone. The movies, and the department stores that are open on Thursday night have suffered a financial loss. When we pick up the morning paper we ask ourselves the question with which Western frontiersmen greeted each other every day — who got killed last night?

Police Chief Robert V. Murray stated on April 1, citing recent reports, that 85 percent of the District’s crimes are committed by Negroes. Many of the major and minor offenses are committed by unemployed, penniless, and desperate young Negroes who for the past fifteen years have been swarming into the city from the urban and rural slums of the South, with false hopes that a better life awaits them in the seat of the federal government. Instead they encounter overcrowded living conditions, no opportunity for work, no human contact except with other Negroes suffering the same frustrations. The result is that racial tension and the smoldering hatred of the white population have become so acute that the very atmosphere of life in Washington is poisoned.

One race riot has already taken place — last Thanksgiving Day, when a Negro high school team was defeated by a white team. Not only the players but the spectators joined in the fray. Before the police could control the fighting, several hundred people were injured. Officials, journalists, and policemen, who are aware of the desperation experienced by the thousands of young Negroes who are out of school and out of work, feel catastrophe impending. Sterling Tucker of the Urban League predicts a racial explosion at any time unless the city’s Negro population finds work.

It is significant that exact figures on Negro unemployment cannot be obtained even by the United States Employment Service, since most young Negroes know it is useless to register. It is estimated that at least 10,000 and probably some 13,000 between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one have nothing to do but roam the streets.

Any incident might well set off a racial clash which would make the stadium rumpus seem trivial. The reaction of thoughtless whites is to blame the Negro for these alarming conditions and to answer hatred with hatred instead of realizing that officials both in Congress and in our local government have seen this situation building up for years, and yet they have done nothing to ameliorate it. Professor Eli Ginzberg of Columbia University stated two years ago that “Washington represents as backward a community as any that I know in the northern part of the United States.”It is even more disorganized today because of the rapid increase in the impoverished Negro population and the exodus to the suburbs of the more stable well-to-do white families. I nominate Washington, D. C., as our most underdeveloped Northern city, where many thousands of Negro children and adults never get a chance to live a decent, fruitful, and humane existence.

This is emphasized in a Washington Post editorial, published March 14, on the shooting by a policeman in broad daylight of a twenty-one-yearold Negro who defied arrest after snatching a woman’s purse: “It is true that the young man had a very bad reputation having been in trouble with the law since he was eleven years old. . . . He was an outcast, an enemy of society since early boyhood. But he was not born bad; he became bad. The community needs to know why.”Why has such a violent, uncivilized situation been allowed to develop in the nation’s capital? Why is the city in such dire peril? Why is it more a tinderbox than other Northern cities?

The primary fault lies with the District Committee in Congress, whose Southern membership has for many years deliberately starved all community needs of the city out of sheer hostility to a population of 800,000 which is now 54 percent Negro and which has an 84 percent Negro attendance in its public schools. President Kennedy has intervened with a new revenue bill for the District, which provides a more just contribution of taxes for property owned by the federal government, a raising of the debt limit and of taxes on real estate. Upon this bill depend the education of a rapidly growing population of children, public welfare services for the indigent, public health services, recreation, and police protection for what I can only call a besieged city. Yet Representative John L. McMillan (Democrat, South Carolina) has refused to introduce the President’s revenue measure. He, like former Southern Democratic chairmen, as Senator Keating put it, “is treating these children [of the District] as pawns in a wicked game to prove that desegregation cannot succeed.” Fortunately, six members of the District Committee, realizing that the welfare of the city and the honor of the nation are at stake, have forced the bill out of committee. Chairman McMillan has declared that it will be defeated.

But the citizens of Washington are also to blame for the plight in which they now find themselves. The federal government is the chief source for employment of qualified Negroes. The civilian labor market, on the other hand, is as rigidly discriminatory in Washington as that in the most backward Southern city. Negroes are not considered for the better jobs. The labor unions have been just as guilty as management. Construction is Washington’s major industry, but the conservative AFL unions refuse to accept Negro apprentices. Only the electrical union has made a token gesture by recently accepting two. It is ironic that the unions refused to let Negroes work on a federal building project at Howard University. Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz had to threaten the contractors that he would ask the Justice Department to enforce compliance with the nondiscriminatory clause in the federal construction contract if discriminatory practices were not stopped within ten days. And this happened on a Negro campus!

In the service jobs the same prejudice exists, though it is not so extreme. At the McFarland High School our very able Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Carl Hansen, managed to keep in school truant boys who were potential dropouts by setting up a program of maintenance and repair work with pay for services rendered in the school buildings. Most of these boys have become skilled and dependable, and yet so far only two of them have found an employer willing to accept them.

If the trained Negro has so little opportunity for work, it becomes difficult to hold Negro teenagers in school. They feel so frustrated that ambition, learning, and technical training have no meaning. Some 10,000 to 13,000 Negroes without jobs, without decent living conditions, and without hope for human betterment — these youngsters are the main source of the terror that haunts the city of Washington.

The nation’s capital, which President Kennedy said should be “a city of which the nation may be proud,” is in fact an illustration of our injustice to the Negro in its starkest reality.

Washington probably has the nation’s highest percentage of intellectual, professional, and wellto-do Negroes, but they have only just begun to take a mild interest in the less fortunate members of their race. The indifference of what the late Howard University sociologist, Franklin Frazier, called the “black bourgeoisie” to the fate of the folk Negro was denounced by Frazier in strong language, but to no avail. Many of these educated Negroes send their children to private schools so that they will not be obliged to mingle with their less civilized Negro brethren. Almost 7000 Negro children attend private schools in Washington, and more than 200 are sent to outof-town schools.

Instead of running away from the problem, the educated and the well-to-do Washington Negroes should throw themselves into the task of leadership. Until the Negro works for the Negro and is willing to contribute financial support for this endeavor, the future of the race in a nonsegregated society will remain ambiguous.

Thus, the Negro organizations have little right to complain that white families are moving out of Washington to the adjacent counties when the same reason prompts the cultivated Negro to send his children to private schools. This exodus complicates the financial problems of the city because it removes business, commercial, and service enterprises. It lowers the District’s tax revenues and the opportunity for jobs, whether for the skilled or the unskilled.

The public schools, to be sure, are desegregated. But with a constantly growing Negro population and a constantly diminishing white population, the Negro is segregating himself in the District schools. An official report on the Thanksgiving Day riot blamed the outbreak on lack of discipline in the schools. Yet discipline is clearly impossible in classrooms overcrowded with difficult children who when reprimanded tell the teacher to “go to hell.” As Superintendent Hansen said recently, we are “just keeping the lid on the volcano of problems in classrooms.” The surest method of reducing crime in Washington is to improve its educational system — more schools, more and better teachers, more guidance experts, more facilities for vocational training that can hold the interest of students who are not college material. Yet the school budget is always trimmed by the District Committee of the House. Instead, the Congress is now advocating appropriations for more policemen and more police dogs. To be sure, we need a larger police force, but we desperately need more teachers and classrooms. Our numerous Southern representatives prefer to coerce the Negro rather than train him for a useful life.

As a result of the lack of suitable educational opportunities many of Washington’s unemployed Negro youth are a poor risk for any employer. Not only do they lack schooling, but they come from deprived, fatherless homes and have grown up in an atmosphere not conducive to discipline of any kind. White Americans should, however, remember that sexual promiscuity and the instability of the Negro home are a heritage of the slave days, compounded by social and educational neglect since the Civil War. As Daniel Bell, author of The Dispossessed — 1962, puts it: “In the American South, because the slave was never legally and in moral theory recognized as a person, marriage did not have to be legally recognized and offspring could be taken away from parents, since there was no legal recognition of a father. All this has left its mark.” It has also left its mark on the conscientious whites. They cannot escape a sense of guilt when confronted by the Negro’s amoral! ty.

The percentage of illegitimacy in Washington is one of the highest in the country. In 1961— 1962 there were in the public schools 882 pregnant girls under seventeen years of age, of whom 34 were white. These girls are kept in school in separate classes. The venereal-disease rate is not only the highest in the country; 3.5 percent of the nation’s cases of VD are in Washington.

Lack of moral standards and lack of self-control make the recent immigrants from the South all the more dangerous when they are huddled together in overcrowded ghettos without the guidance necessary to help them adjust to city life. Discrimination in housing in the entire metropolitan area is firmly enforced by the real-estate interests. There is little decent low-cost housing within the city limits. To all intents and purposes, the Negro population lives in drab concentration camps without hope of escape. The barbed wire that fences them in may not be visible to most white people. But it is there.

IT IS now over ninety years since Negroes were promised equality by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Is it surprising that many Negroes are getting tired of waiting for this promise to be fulfilled? Congressman Adam Clayton Powell received an ovation from his audience at the Capitol Press Club when he attacked the white power structure as being determined to keep the Negro in subjection. On the same evening, Dick Gregory, with deft penetration of Negro psychology, described the burden of shame and selfhate which haunts many Negroes. Without Powell’s vindictiveness, Gregory encouraged his fellow Negroes to assert their self-reliance and pride.

Some of our fair-weather liberals who have long supported equal rights are now losing their nerve and claim that the Negro wants to go too far too fast. In Washington we cannot afford to run away from the crucial situation that faces us without inviting tragic results. The Negro — especially the illiterate folk Negro — is becoming rebellious, overaggressive, and violent. This does not lessen our responsibility as citizens of Washington to face the validity of Negro claims for recognition as full American citizens.

In 1955 the city accepted with enthusiasm an urban-renewal program entitled “No Slums in Ten Years.” After eight years the slums are worse than ever. The usual urban social agencies which get the big contributions from the Community Chest have not been able to reach the tough, mpoverished Negro slum dwellers who form the ore of discontent. These agencies prefer to deal with “nice” children who will not upset their “nice” programs. The only volunteer organizations that reach a few of the discontented are the Junior Citizens’ Corps and Hospitality House, both run on a shoestring by capable, self-sacrificing Negro men and women.

The long-term plans to combat crime and create a more orderly community are promising. It is reassuring to have the President’s support for a more substantial, more rational District budget. In addition, Charles Horsky, the President’s adviser on the District’s problems, has set up a United Planning Organization to coordinate the efforts of the various District and metropolitan area agencies concerned with human welfare. For it is obvious that we must use all our local resources in a united effort. Jack Goldberg, an experienced social scientist, has been called in from New York City to work out methods of fighting delinquency. The Urban Service Corps, a volunteer group of 600 lay people, is augmenting the influence of the public school system.

The Youth Employment Act now before Congress should be passed without loss of precious time. Section II, which would help Washington, like other cities, to establish paid work and study programs in the schools, is more important than the revised CCC program of Section I. Mainly, the bill would have psychological value, as it would persuade the million or more unemployed youngsters throughout the country that they are not written off as expendable.

All this is hopeful for the future. But I am concerned about keeping the lid on the boiling kettle of Negro discontent today, tomorrow, next week, if possible, but certainly before tempers rise.

WHAT can be done at once? The main objective must be jobs—jobs, especially, for youth, since they represent the future. The Washington Board of Trade, realizing that the city’s crime rate has become a threat to business, has recently advocated more funds to improve the District’s educational system and provide outlets for the employment of Negroes. To approach this difficult task in a city where sufficient jobs cannot at present be found, all existing agencies must cease their patronizing attitude of working for the Negro and begin to work with him. Our Negro fellow citizens must feel that in the maze of city anonymity they count, that they can have a voice in their own future, that they will be heard and given an opportunity to express their anxieties, problems, and aspirations. If status is given to their own leaders, they can be persuaded that they have a role to play in creating order in our chaotic social jungle. The right type of leadership can be found through the Junior Citizens’ Corps, Hospitality House, and the excellent police officers in charge of the Juvenile Division.

These leaders should be assigned to neighborhood committees to organize recreation programs such as boxing, wrestling, basketball, and other active sports. Leisure-time pursuits of a vigorous nature in which youth can let off steam in a wholesome way are second in importance to work and income. Church halls and public school gymnasiums should be made available for these activities until community centers can be built.

The illiterate Negroes, whether young or old, should be taught to read and write as an essential part of job preparation. At present most of them cannot even fill out an application blank for a job. Funds must be found, if necessary from private sources, for this and for additional practical vocational training programs in the public schools.

Above all, new industries that require simple skills should be encouraged to come to the Washiington metropolitan area, with the inducement of liberal tax remissions for such enterprises. Both management and labor unions must learn to be more flexible, the one about employing reliable Negro workers, the other about accepting more Negroes as apprentices, if the trained Negro is not to feel that he is boxed in.

The reader may ask, why should the city of Washington be given emergency aid to create work opportunities when all other large cities have an unusually high percentage of unemployment? The answer is that the District congressional committees for years have starved the budget of our voteless city and thereby created a backlog of social, educational, and economic problems of such a serious nature that they have become insoluble without speedy federal intervention. If the American people do not wish to see their capital become an ever more dangerous place to live, a festering sore in the body politic, they will surely concede that Washington must now receive immediate compensation for long-standing congressional maltreatment.

Whatever we do with the new financial support President Kennedy has promised the District, the public schools should be used temporarily as the best available focal point of any coordinated program to combat crime and delinquency.