As Bob Dole’s main link to urban America, Jack Kemp went to the heart of public housing problems, referring specifically to the Henry Horner development on Chicago’s West Side in his acceptance speech.
Promoting the proposed Republican tax cut, Kemp said it would help working parents and “the struggling single mother in the inner city,” who “will find it easier to work her way off welfare.”
Kemp then quoted from Alex Kotlowitz’s 1991 book, “There Are No Children Here,” an exploration of the lives of children growing up in public housing on the West Side. Oprah Winfrey later produced and starred in a TV version about the development two blocks from United Center, where the Democratic Party will hold its convention Aug. 26-29.
“I disagree with Kemp politically, but I think he is sincere,” said Kotlowitz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter. “He understands the sense of urgency.”
Before referring to the work, Kemp said society “can never achieve the outer reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.”
“Recently I read the account by a reporter of his conversation with a 10-year-old child at Henry Horner public housing in Chicago. As the reporter told it in his book, `I asked (the boy) what he wanted to be.’
” `If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver,’ he told me. `If,’ not when. At the age of 10, (he) wasn’t sure he’d even make it to adulthood.”
The oft-cited passage quotes 12-year-old Lafeyette Rivers. The book focuses on Lafeyette and his 9-year-old brother, Pharoah.
The book’s full title is “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America.” It looked at life and the dangers of gangs through a personal lens.
Kemp, who was President George Bush’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, pushed for more tenant management and ownership in public housing. The current HUD secretary, Henry Cisneros, has changed the emphasis, said Kotlowitz, encouraging more working people to move into public housing, including the town homes under construction at Horner Homes.
