Word: inner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Given the vicissitudes of inner-city life today, the odds against escaping the ghetto and the treachery of the street seem greater than ever before. "It was difficult for me and my generation," says Claude Brown, whose 1965 autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land, drew a harrowing picture of teenage delinquency in Harlem. "It's almost impossible...
...Native Son crisis is contributing to the breakdown of the family structure in the inner city, a trend that is seen as both a cause and an effect of the poverty cycle. According to Census Bureau statistics, nearly two-thirds of all black children are born to unwed mothers. Of the nation's 4.6 million black families with children, 2.6 million are headed by a single woman -- and in some ghetto areas it is estimated to be close to 90%. As a result, most inner-city black children never know the experience of having a father at home with steady...
...pregnant women are getting married. Census figures show 42% of single black women ages 18 to 29 have one or more children, vs. 7% among whites that age. "They are not following up pregnancy with marriage," says Chicago's William Wilson, "because joblessness among young black males in the inner city is so high that the male marriageable pool has declined to almost nothing...
...problem facing inner-city youths, however, has been that they seem to reap little of the economic benefit even when the job market is expanding. Congressman Jack Kemp, a Republican from upstate New York, is a leading advocate of urban enterprise zones, which would use tax incentives to encourage businesses to provide jobs in depressed urban areas. Others feel that it is necessary to create work programs that will draw young blacks away from the inner cities, where the underclass culture makes it extremely difficult to break out of the poverty cycle. Nicholas Lemann, a journalist with the Atlantic, describes...
Basic education is also crucial, but with so many of America's inner-city schools in disarray, outside programs are often the key to childrens' academic success. "It's a vicious cycle," says Babette Edwards of the Harlem Tutorial and Referral Project. "Low standards, the lack of a rigorous, challenging curriculum is detrimental to kids." Her organization stresses basic reading and writing skills in individual and small-group after-school sessions...