Deep within the battle-scarred terrain of Woodlawn on Chicago`s South Side, poverty is as tangible as the broken windows of abandoned buildings and debris-strewn topsoil of acres upon acres of vacant lots.
High unemployment and crime grip the mostly black neighborhood where street gangs war over control of a burgeoning drug trade. Stray bullets claim innocent victims. Life is hard and plain: You live. You die.
And then there are the dope addicts, ”a lot of dope addicts” says 73-year-old Richard Dickerson, watering the lawn of his red brick apartment building in the 6600 block of South Minerva Avenue.
”You can see them walking out here in the morning looking like zombies looking for that stuff. I feel like crying.”
Long after President Lyndon Johnson`s War on Poverty came to Woodlawn and other black urban neighborhoods, they appear ravaged and overrun by social ills. And although the aim was to nurse these targeted areas into good health, serving as ”Model Cities” for the nation, they became de facto casualties of that war.
The Bush administration has blamed what it calls the failed tactics of Johnson`s war for the decrepit conditions of inner cities, conditions that helped fuel the recent violence after the verdicts in the Rodney King police brutality trial.
Defenders of Johnson`s programs, recently joined by new voices reassessing the programs` impact, counter that major victories were won, at least in helping many minorities to join the American mainstream.
But the reality is that if any of the War on Poverty was won, it was perhaps a conditional victory-one that accepted the fact that all people would not be saved and that these communities would sink to an even poorer condition.
”The place has been decimated,” said Rev. Gerald Wise, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, in Woodlawn. ”There just aren`t any jobs.
”You can have all the social development you want, but if you don`t have the basic economic structure,” Wise said, ”the whole thing falls apart.”
Woodlawn, Lawndale on the West Side and Grand Boulevard on the South Side were target areas of Chicago`s anti-poverty effort during the late 1960s and early `70s. All remain stagnant and poor.
And although Woodlawn, for the most part, eluded the rampant arson that consumed the West Side after Martin Luther King`s assassination in 1968, it is no less submersed in a sea of troubles.
Confronting the community is a relentless brand of poverty that has outlasted the government`s counterattack and gained an even stronger foothold as jobs disappeared from the city. This despite hundreds of millions in federal and state dollars poured into ambitious social services administered through the Model Cities Program in Chicago.
Nicholas Lemann, author of ”The Promised Land,” reported that Chicago`s federally subsidized anti-poverty programs had a budget of $200 million in their heydey.
Among them were plans for special education, job training, family and community relations and health care that benefited many of the people for whom they were intended. But far too many residents were unable to tap into these new, limited resources, analysts say.
Those who did get in gained well-paying jobs and others received educational training. But with their new-found social mobility, and in the wake of the ban on segregation won by the civil rights movement, many blacks soon abandoned their downtrodden communities, studies of the era conclude.
In fact, the movement of middle and working class African Americans gained momentum in the 1960s and grew steadily for the next three decades, according to U.S. Census figures. The number of blacks in Chicago suburbs climbed 50,782 in the 1960s, 100,220 in the 1970s and 103,453 in the 1980s.
Analysts say the period from the mid-`60s to early `70s showed the largest growth in the black middle class in U.S. history.
Along with them went role models and successful business minds that offered the greatest hope for redeeming the community, many analysts and community activists say. Also gone were the manufacturing companies that provided so many good paying entry level jobs.
Left behind were the poorest of the poor, who were much less likely to acquire the wherewithal to escape the downward spiral of despair, according to Lemann.
”No community can survive with just poor people,” said Kenneth Crumbley, 40, who has lived in Woodlawn since 1961. ”The problem in most urban areas is, we tell our children to go to school and get an education and leave.”
And many, Crumbley said, too many, have taken that advice.
Mary Lou and Raymond Todd first moved to Woodlawn from Ohio in 1949, where they raised three sons.
Mary Lou Todd, who works as a secretary at First Presbyterian, spearheaded one of the first Head Start programs during the summer of 1965 at the church with a $10,000 federal grant under Johnson`s plan.
But now sons Dale, Noel and David all are grown and gone. When Dale, her oldest, hears about how bad things have gotten in the old neighborhood, ”he says, `Do what I did, Mom: Get the hell out,` ” Todd chuckled.
But she isn`t going anywhere.
”Where the hell would I go?” Todd said. ”There`s a whole lot one person can do to change things. People just give up. That`s why I stay here.” In Woodlawn and across the nation, a battle may have been won with the emergence of the black middle class. But the war to win the poor neighborhoods was clearly lost.
From 1970 to 1990, about 41 percent of the housing in Woodlawn was lost, according to 1990 Census data. The population fell by 33 percent from 1970 to 1980, while the percentage of families below the poverty level grew to 39 percent from 29 percent.
”Not enough people moved up,” Wise said. ”It was very little way too late and not long enough. An awful lot of people were left behind.”
That is all too apparent.
Dickerson, a retired CTA repairman with a bad back, and his wife are raising their two granddaughters, ages 12 and 8. The girls attend Catholic schools, rather than public elementary schools in the neighborhood, which Dickerson calls ”lousy.”
A 7-foot-high gate guards the entrance to their yard, symbolic of the neighborhood`s deterioration of moral fiber. The windows of their red brick apartment building are protected with black iron bars. A German shepherd is the family`s added protection. And if that doesn`t keep prowlers away, Dickerson is convinced that his pistols will.
Dickerson doesn`t like living on the edge.
”I`ve got three or four dollars left, but where can I go?” Dickerson asked. ”I`m an old man. Otherwise, I`d have been gone somewhere away from here.”
But like many of his Woodlawn neighbors, he is trapped by the realities of his own economics and a scaled-back War on Poverty.
President Bush-as well as the Democrats-has promised renewed federal assistance, including more job training, education vouchers to allow poor children to move to private schools and programs to lure businesses back to poor neighborhoods with tax incentives.
Like many African Americans, Dickerson welcomes the promise of placing renewed emphasis on combating poverty, but is leery of the president`s intent to deliver.
”Lip service is not going to help,” he said.
Still, though Woodlawn and other urban ghettos remain trapped in poverty, there are glimmers of hope.
Across Chicago and the nation, activists and neighborhood organizations are rallying to save their communities from the blight and social ills. Black professionals are moving back in small numbers to the old neighborhoods. And new homes are springing up on the South and West Sides. In fact, on Wednesday, dedication services were held for a newly renovated cooperative in Woodlawn, sponsored by Covenant Development, a non-profit housing corporation.
At the corner of 67th Street and Kimbark Avenue, a vacant lot is now a community vegetable garden, one of several planted by senior citizens and small children of First Presbyterian Church. They call it ”God`s Little Acre.” It is a budding showcase of rejuvenation and the unwillingness of this community to simply lie down and die.
”That`s the main thing about Woodlawn,” Wise said. ”We`re still here.”
