Sargent Shriver Poverty Fighter

The death of Shriver at age 95 reminds me that our 1960s breed of anti poverty fighters are rapidly dyeing out. I never met Shriver. Yet he played an important role in my career. It was at Mobilization For Youth. MFY it was one of several big city experiments to see what kind of interventions might help Ghetto youth become gainfully employed members of society. At the time MFY was far and away the best known of those efforts. I came to work at MFY when a sociologist Professor at Brooklyn College asked me if I would be interested in running a work program for 4-500 Juvenile Delinquents on the lower East side of Manhattan? As a result of being blackmailed I had ended up working as a Chief Engineer for a division of United Shoe Machinery Corp.

After a brief Washington meeting with Bobby Kennedy, the Attorney General I had extensive interviews with the folks who were putting MFY together. After some tough bargaining about pay, that would be a lot less than I was making I took the job. It was a better fit for someone who had spent his working life in the Labor Movement. (I had been expelled 3 times from my union. A Guinness Record.) This time I would be helping Ghetto kids make it the world of work.

We were about 6-7 months into creating a series of workplaces, Gas Station, Restaurant, Print Shop, Woodworking shop sewing shop, construction, etc. when the Daily News made a front page attack. We were accused of printing a large Poster that showed a Policemen with a skull and crossbones over him. He had been accused of shooting a Black kid. Besides they charged that MFY was overrun with “commies and assorted radicals.” We were besieged with demands for people to resign. The City Administration got into the act be demanding the the Legal Aid an MFY Project stop organizing tenant strikes against landlords.(MFY Legal Aid for the poor continues to this day.)

We organized a Staff Committee to Save MFY. We raised a lot of money and declared “That nor single member of our MFY staff would be victimized as a result of the attacks. Now the real question was what would Washington funding source do? That’s where Shriver came in. I got a call from his office saying that he was dispatching Jay Rockefeller his I.G. to take a look at our Programs and report back to him.

The following Monday a tall skinny young man in dungarees appeared in my office door announcing he was here for Shriver to see what we were doing. “Can I just follow you around.” He asked. “Be my guest. It’s a public project with citizens money so I assume anybody can come here and see what we’re up to.” He said fine and we were off. He spent a week arriving every morning around 8. We had coffee, a bagel and we were off to the work sights. At each one of our operations he would wonder around ask the enrolees as well as the Crew Chiefs what exactly we were doing. Then he would ask the enrolees, "what are you learning?"

Upon realizing that he was a real "blue blood" Rockefeller I was duly impressed with his commitment and discipline n trying to understand what we were trying to do. In the print shop he made extensive inquiry about the alleged “Poster.” Of course we didn’t print it as we did not have the capacity to do so. Several times he would ask if we had any “printing facility in the basement.” My reply was always, “okay lets go look.” Of course there was none as we never had such a press. Our budget never would have approved it. We never would have printed such a poster even if we could have.

At the end of the week Jay and I retired to the local Bistro run by MFY. He wanted the answer to a few more questions. Most of which had to do with my background in the unions. We had a long conversation primarily about what the MFY type of programs could teach us about working with troubled Ghetto kids. With a warm handshake and a “Good-luck with all the great things going on here" he left.

A short time later we received a copy of a letter Shriver had written to the MFY Board. He said he was very proud of the work we were doing and held it up as exemplary for others to emulate. Sargent Shriver was a dedicated public servant. He would not be intimidated by all the Tabloid hysteria about reds and radicals running anti poverty programs. In his report Jay Rockefeller said, paraphrasing, “If we can’t have the kind of people we have at MFY running those work programs we can forget our anti poverty efforts.” He did eventually become the Senator from West Virginia. Shriver continued his own journey in making this world a little better place for the disadvantaged. He will be missed.