Why didn’t the nation’s other cities go up with Los Angeles in a single sheet of flame? One of the reasons may lie in what an outnumbered and outgunned network of ordinary Americans is doing to help the outcasts -of the inner cities help themselves. It may not change the world when Soft Sheen Products, Inc., puts learning centers into Chicago’s worst housing projects; or Mayor Sharpe James of Newark gives his bootstrap rap to South Ward kids at city hall; or Charles Ballard of the National Institute of Fatherhood and Family Development in Cleveland coaches unwed fathers into acting like men. But they are dealing self-respect in neighborhoods riddled with crack, supplying models of success to wanna-be losers, finding hope in the ruins. And their logic should sting just about everyone else. “If you’re not consciously working on a solution,” says Bradley, “you are part of the problem.”
Recently black intellectuals like Shelby Steele have received a lot of attention for preaching a self-help gospel, but in fact it’s a strain of thought that runs from Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X. New groups like Atlanta’s “100 Black Men, Inc.” are tapping this long tradition of self-help. “The black middle class and black professionals have to assume a tremendous obligation,” says attorney Bill Campbell. His group adopted 36 members of an eighth-grade class and stood by it through high school, providing men to counsel the fatherless, a Saturday Academy to perk up grades, and tuition money for college to the 20 young women and 13 young men who made it all the way. Among them was Michelle Johnson, 19, who soared out of the Perry Homes housing project to the Georgia Institute of Technology. “She never asked me for anything for herself,” recalls Sonny Walker, her mentor. “She was always trying to help some girlfriend not in the class get a job.”
Tough guys find tough-love help in The Rites of Passage program offered by churches and community groups in Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities. The idea is to teach discipline and to build self-esteem so inner-city kids can make it to the mainstream. In Dallas, where mentors help 9-to 12-year-olds at the Elmer Scott housing projects, Hannah Moore, executive director overseeing one such program, says, “Even the troublemakers don’t get into trouble anymore.”
“Nothing stops the bullets like a job,” says Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit whose Jobs for the Future program finds work for gang members in East Los Angeles. He says it’s a myth that poor kids think only a chump would flip hamburgers for the minimum wage when fortunes can be made dealing crack. He pays crack dealers $5 an hour to go straight and says he succeeds maybe one third of the time. “If a car stops at a corner known to be a crack haven, maybe 10 dealers will pull up,” he says. “But if I drive right behind that car, maybe 20 kids will come up and ask me for a job.”
The hard part is to prep dead-end kids for the few openings available to them. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, Dr. Edmund Burton, a dentist, started 14 years ago giving neighborhood kids jobs after school and Saturdays using his Radio Shack Model One computer. Now he has 20 computers and eager hands working through his four-month training programs. He tells them not to wear jeans, and not to chew gum during interviews. “They can now say, ‘I know how to type and I know Basic Lotus and Word Perfect’,” he says. And they get hired. The Crown Heights Youth Collective just across the borough now has 5,000 kids involved in its programs, which include job development and counseling, help with resumes and interviews. The collective places 75 percent of its kids who complete job training in at least entry-level positions.
Finding ready capital is far harder than discovering willing labor. Not long ago, Mark Griffith, executive director of the Central Brooklyn Partnership, a nonprofit reinvestment group, discovered that redlining banks in his neighborhood were paying out about a penny for every dollar they took in from their depositors. The banks were investing in Manhattan and Long Island. To fill a vacuum, he is now working toward the first community credit union in central Brooklyn. He has recruited 1,000 depositors from churches, block associations and other groups. He’s filing the application with the National Credit Union Administration this week. He hopes to provide funds for small businesses and personal loans. He believes that when people can get money to own stores and homes, they will fix them-not burn them down.
Some conservatives like Jack Kemp agree; others more cynically talk up self-help to keep government spending down. With Washington throttling funds for cities, with foundations strapped and churches broke, self-help is a matter of plain survival. But “self-help alone is never going to be enough,” warns Frances Gamwell of Chicago’s Community Renewal Society. It cannot correct the systemic problems that create poverty; it can’t generate enough capital to clean things up. LBJ’s War on Poverty might have failed, but sooner or later government will have to try again. Meantime, says Father Boyle, self-help is “a drop in the bucket-but the right drop.” So pass the bucket, and pray for rain.
