Word: slum
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Chicago was suffering a deadly midsummer blight. By last week 14 slum children from one to five years old, more than half of them Negroes, were dead of lead poisoning. And of more than 40 others who had been seriously ill, most would be left with permanent brain damage. Ironically, Chicago has long had as rigorous a program for the prevention, detection and treatment of lead poisoning as any city in the U.S., and is now making it still more strict...
Appetite for Everything. All cities with old slum dwellings have a year-round lead poisoning problem. Interior paints used to contain a great deal of the metal; most exterior paints still contain some, but far less than formerly. Crawlers and toddlers in the chew-everything age nibble porch rails and windowsills, chew flakes of old paint or chips of painted plaster and take the lead into their systems, where it is deposited, much like calcium, in the bones. A little lead produces no symptoms and usually no damage. But it takes only a little more to bring on symptoms that...
...behind the stresses and strains is a consensus, by many school authorities, some courts and most Negroes, that de facto segregation must go. The problem is to break the low-income Negro's vicious circle of slum birth to slum school to bad education to low-paid job and parenthood of more slum children. The widely accepted premise is that the circle can and must be broken at the school stage. Equally important is that segregated neighborhood schools refute the original aim of Horace Mann's "common school," strengthening democracy by serving all races, creeds and classes. Integrationists...
...hundreds of predominantly Negro schools in the North (see map) from excelling, but in practice a school that becomes 30% to 50% Negro is in for trouble. Whites pull out and it "tips" toward 100%. Gone are the "motivated" bright white children who might have been models for slum kids to copy and compete with. Good teachers become hard to get (although the "spirit of the Peace Corps" is diminishing this problem, according to Cleveland's School Superintendent William B. Levenson). "Once we become concentrated, we become ignored," says a Boston Negro leader. Most of Los Angeles...
Nonetheless, the nation's biggest city school system is also the most enterprising. New York is trying to make slum schools so good that Negroes can rise more easily into an integrated society. It devised the famed Higher Horizons program, heavy on culture and counseling, which now involves 64,000 students in 76 schools. At state level, New York's Commissioner of Education James E. Allen Jr. recently requested school boards to report by September on what steps they intend to take to balance schools with more than 50% Negro enrollment...