London Riots Lessons from the Sixties

The social unrest that is rocking London is probably a direct result of the Cameron governments austerity program. The worst thing a country can do when faced with high unemployment and an unstable financial situation is to institute an austerity program. NO,no, no That's like putting out a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

If folks would just pay attention to what FDR did in the 30s it was just the opposite. His Administration went on a huge spending spree to get the economy moving. The objective was to reduce the unemployment rate and if necessary CREATE JOBS. That’s how I ended up first on the NYA and later on the WPA. (NYA National Youth Administration Yupp I was a Detective looking for wife deserters.) On the WPA I worked on the building of Orchard Beach in the Bronx.

In the 60s we saw the some of the worst social unrest in US history. One major city after another was rocked by riots. The problem, not unlike London, was large numbers of bored, angry frustrated unemployed Black and Latino youth. How to respond?

Early on in the 60s Robert Kennedy the Attorney General had set up the National Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. That was an effort to deal with the social unrest problem among the 16 to 21 year olds. One of the experimental efforts to deal with this crisis was Mobilization for Youth, MFY. It was Located on the lower East side and sponsored by Columbia University. It was the beginning of the anti poverty efforts that Lyndon Johnson would make part of the Anti Poverty program.

MFY was setup as demonstration project to help poor mostly Black and Latino youth make it in the white mans middle class world. I was head of the work programs. I saw my job as providing successful real work experiences for 600 youth 16-21. These jobs at real work-sites would help them in transitions to jobs in private sector. We had managed to setup a restaurant, gas station, woodworking shop. print shop, sewing shop etc. Okay, It was the print shop that would get us into severe conflict with the Police and City Hall.

After a street altercation a police officer by the name of Gilligan had shot a black boy in Harlem. Much like we are seeing and hearing from London. The New York Daily News accused MFY of printing a poster with a skull and crossbones backdrop that said, “Get Gilligan the child killer.”

Oh man the Press was all over us when Robert Kennedy arrived unannounced to see for himself, “what the hell is going on here.” As I sat in the Police car with him, (he often showed up unannounced in a NYPD police car.) I explained that there was no way that we could have or would have printed such a poster. I toured him through all of work sights on the lower East side that made it crystal clear that we had absolutely no poster printing ability. As he told us to keep up the good work he departed with one of his staff saying, “the Attorney General was very favorably impressed with what you and your staff are doing.”

For most of the era of the sixties I would be involved in the youth employment issue. The point about our experiences at MFY was the bitterness of the right wing against anything the government was trying to do in dealing with the social unrest. While London concentrates on what the cops can do differently they better look closely to programs that will address the issues of the unemployed youth.

Yes, increased police presence will deter the rioting but it does not get at the underlying problems. To Lyndon Johnson’s credit he was determined to try to do something about the issues that lead people to act out in the streets expressing their bitter frustration with lives that simply had no place to go. In my years of working in that vineyard I learned the very tough lesson that simply increasing police deterrence will not make the problem go away. Oh yes it can hide the real problems but like a plugged up pressure cooker eventually it will explode and then lookout.

Along the way I became convinced that even without an overall solution it is better to address the problem with some actions than leave it to fester. It was in the Hot Summers of the 60s that we had as many as 50,000 youth on work projects. That was example of “action.” As Deputy Manpower Commissioner for Youth Employment the Mayor would remind me. “Your job is to keep the City from burning.” And indeed it was. This is how the London folks need to start thinking. How about a Summer Youth Work Program that can help in school youth engage in something more useful then smashing shop windows?

Out of the sixties experience of MFY came the Job Corps. It remains to this day as a residential job training program that has effected the live of millions of youth. A couple of million kids, 16 to 24 have gone through Job Corps training. Is it a solution to all the ills that ghetto youth are prone to? Of course not. It is what I call an “imperfect adjustment” to a social economic problem of today's society. For some time I have believed that is the best we can do in our present circumstance is to make “imperfect adjustments.” That’s what the folks in Britain need to think about otherwise they will be sweeping a hell of a lot more glass on their main thoroughfares. Especially the fancy ones.