Word: sullivans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Bruce Pennington, Walter Sullivan, and Michael Schmidt record events which would not normally arouse much interest, like walking, swimming, and watching fruit-pickers. But it can be fascinating to look into a fishbowl through the eyes of Schmidt...
Measure of Self-Respect. The decisive element, which has eluded most conventional job programs, was the inculcation of personal pride that Negroes so often lacked. "You can't train someone by just putting him behind a machine," Sullivan maintains. "You've got to see that he's properly motivated and has a measure of self-respect." The students, many of them migrants from the rural South, were taught the achievements of their own race and of other minorities. Not only were they told how to conduct themselves in a job interview, a basic lesson other such courses...
...Sullivan, 44, a strapping (6 ft. 5 in.) West Virginia-born Baptist minister, discovered the complexity of what he calls the '?Q.N." (for Qualified Negro) problem in the early '60s. After opening hundreds of jobs through a quiet, three-year consumers' boycott (in Sullivan's euphemism, a "selective-buying campaign") that never used a picket or a marcher, he discovered to his chagrin that he could not find enough skilled Negroes to fill the jobs. Realizing that "integration without preparation is frustration"-now one of his favorite slogans-he decided to set up his own training...
Philadelphia industries responded more than enthusiastically to Sullivan's program, providing both money and machinery for instruction. Sperry Rand contributed a $350,000 Univac computer. Smith Kline & French outfitted a laboratory for the instruction of chemical-lab technicians. The Budd Co., one of the nation's biggest makers of subway cars, gave equipment for training sheet-metal workers, then hired 200 of the graduates...
Protest & Progress. "We are not interested in giving people diplomas," says Sullivan. "We are interested in getting them jobs." That aim has been realized: in three years, O.I.C. has found work for 3,000 people, 90% of its graduates. Sullivan points out that since 97% of his students are classified as poor, O.I.C. has added $9,000,000 to Philadelphia's consumer purchasing, saved the state $2,000,000 in welfare costs. With six centers around the city...