The Menchildren Speak

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."

After Brown dismissed recent civil rights laws as efforts to "placate, just keep the niggers cool," he and Dunmeyer suggested instead more direct action: wiping the ghetto dweller's criminal record clean so that he might apply the mathematical skills he uses in the numbers racket to operating a computer, or apply the business acumen developed in dope peddling to running "Goldberg's Haberdashery." Negroes, said Brown, "really are not as dumb as we look." When Ribicoff protested that nobody had impugned Negro intelligence, Brown assured him: "Senator, this was not aimed at you, because I think you are beautiful, baby."

Crisis of Optimism. Another witness calling for a more direct approach to ghetto problems was the Rev. Henry J. Browne, 47, a white Roman Catholic priest and community leader on New York's racially mixed West Side, who urged Government leaders to listen to the "vibrant people off the streets"--people like Dunmeyer--instead of being bound by impersonal statistical surveys, a practice that he likened to "contemplating your own navel and trying to come up with the condition of your appendix." Also testifying, Negro Author Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man), 52, seemed to be speaking for another generation when he wistfully described Harlem as an exciting, often elegant neighborhood where "the body of Negro myth and legend thrives." But Ellison was very much to the point in saying that many Negroes want to "transform the Harlems of their country" rather than move to the suburbs. Because the transformation is not taking place fast enough, however, a "crisis of optimism" has resulted. After all, said Ellison, cultural pressures that make other Americans "restless, mobile, daring," have the same effect on Negroes: "You see little Negro Batmen flying around Harlem just as you see white ones flying around Sutton Place."

Graphic Despair. Before the subcommittee adjourned until next year, it a1 so heard Eugene Hill, an anti-poverty worker in Albuquerque, utter the most unsettling words of the hearings. In testimony that involved not Negroes but Mexican-Americans, Hill told of an embittered, unemployed Mexican-American who, upon learning of John F. Kennedy's assassination, exclaimed: "Good! When do they get Johnson and the rest of 'em?" When the man's wife protested, he replied: "What have they ever done for me or you or our kids?" The episode showed, more graphically than any other, the despair, the helplessness and the hatred that the poor sometimes feel for the society that keeps them that way.

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