Word: rican
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Typically, the books have brightly colored pictures-on the cover and inside-of Negro, Puerto Rican and white children sitting together on tenement steps or splashing together in the spray of a fire hydrant. They depict the plight of slum children with touches of humor and pathos. One story tells of a kid who moves to Manhattan's Tenth Street and has to beat up the toughest boy on the block to be accepted. Main flaw in some books is that the integration is too tidy: illustrations too often show exactly three kids together-one Negro, one Puerto Rican...
Even under local control, the selection and creation of books that portray minorities realistically are difficult, delicate matters. The happy primer whose Negro, white and Puerto Rican kids always laugh together can be as misleading as portrayals of the ever-grinning slave. Histories that try to make heroes out of such rightfully obscure Negroes as Sojourner Truth, who was merely one of many Negro campaigners against slavery shortly before the Civil War, lose their credibility. Despite these flaws, the long-overdue drive for balanced books has produced texts that are generally more accurate, realistic and engrossing than those that today...
...Perth Amboy, N.J. (pop. 39,000), a police arrest was followed by four nights of disquiet among the city's 7,000 Puerto Ricans, during which police claimed to have been attacked with rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails. A Puerto Rican spokesman charged, however, that "it was the police who rioted" by seizing innocent people in the streets. Either way, city officials promised to consider rescinding an antiloitering ordinance that many Puerto Ricans resented...
...trouble's swift suppression to some foresighted if only partly proved civic remedies. The frenzied Harlem riots of 1964 taught officials a frightening lesson. Negroes on the police force have been given better assignments. Mayor Lindsay recently appointed a seven-man review board-including two Negroes, a Puerto Rican, and two men active in civil rights groups-to handle the predominantly Negro complaints of police brutality. Beyond that, a costly poverty program, run by Negroes for Negroes, has offered a measure of hope to thousands of restive slum dwellers...
Twenty-six hours later, two patrolmen answered a call from a sleazy North Side hotel reporting that a Puerto Rican prostitute had told the manager: "There's a man up there with a gun." The roomer identified himself as Richard Speck, a name that did not yet ring a bell with the officers, though they had a tentative physical description of the suspect. As for the gun, he said that it belonged to the girl. Though most policemen would instinctively detain a man in such circumstances, the cops merely confiscated the weapon-a .22-cal. revolver (the murderer...