Rep. Powell and the 'Peace Corps'

Harlem has the highest juvenile delinquency rate in the country; Harlem also has Rep. Adam Clayton Powell.

The fledgling Domestic Peace Corps, just beginning to tackle the juvenile delinquency problem, now finds the Powell problem hanging around its neck like a rather weighty albatross. Because of its affiliations with the Congressman-clergyman, the Corps has been attacked in Congress, condemned by much of the press, and defended by almost no one.

The Criticism is far from unjustified; Powell as usual, has cut no more corners than other Congressmen, but he has cut them far wider than most. The Corps was one of 16 groups to receive grants from the President's Committee on Youth Crime to found anti-delinquency projects last year. Fifteen of these have not been heard from since.

Powell set out as if he wanted to insure that his project would be criticized. He served as one of the incorporators of the project's parent corporation, Associated Community Teams, Inc (ACT). He rented office space in the Adam Clayton Powell Community Center to ACT at $24,000 a year. When the first head of the Corps proved unable to get the project underway, Powell turned it over to Livingstone Wingate, his former administrative assistant. Wingate became director of ACT at a $16,000 a year salary.

Finally, Powell insured notoriety for ACT'S project by selecting the name "Domestic Peace Corps," and intervening personally with Robert Kennedy to allow his group to keep the name when Kennedy wanted to use it for the National Service Corps, a completely separate organization.

Budget Problems

Meanwhile, ACT's Harlem headquarters was beset with organizational problems. Pressed to meet a deadline, the group submitted a budget that called for $157,000 in staff salaries; many of the jobs called for were never set up. There were other difficulties with the budget; a recruiting director with a salary of $13,000 a year had no money for recruiting. Funds necessary to pay the volunteers' way to New York were seriously underestimated. Ten jobs with salaries of $10,000 a year or more were set up; the average ACT worker's $8,000 salary was almost twice as high as national social worker's average of $4500.

But a number of unnecessary jobs were cut from the roster, the salary scale was reduced and recruiting was carried out mostly through Negro fraternities and sororities. Slowly the program began to move. Eighty-nine applications were received, all from Negroes, primarily from Negro colleges in the South.

"I was very upset that the volunteers were all Negro," said Carl T. Johnson, director of the Domestic Peace Corps. "The last thing we want is for this project to take on racial overtones; we'd hoped to have six kids from Harvard and Radcliffe, but the recruiting program was so badly handled that we never even made contact with Harvard until two days before the deadline for our first group." About a dozen students from the University are among the volunteers for the June group of Corpsmen.

The first group of volunteers assembled in Harlem in late January, a bit confused by the extent of the problem they faced, almost ignored by the community; as one ACT official put it, "at first we were just written off as the latest of Adam's schemes. Later on, though, things changed."

What changed things was the Corpsmen's response to a fire that burned out a tenement three blocks north of ACT headquarters. The volunteers were on the scene shortly after the blaze began, bringing coffee and food for the firemen, first aid and clothing for those left homeless by the blaze. Later, the Corpsmen took up a collection of old clothing for the homeless; the contributions swamped the Corp's headquarters. The overflow had to be stored in a nearby armory where new contributions came in for days. Old women gave their favorite dresses; men on unemployment relief gave half their monthly checks. "It was incredible," said a Corpsman, "and you know, from that time on, we've been accepted around here. Until then we might have been from the moon. Now we feel right at home."

The fire set the entire ACT program working again. It not only opened the community to the volunteers, but it quelled the vestiges of discontent among the Corpsmen, then nearing the end of a lengthy training period. "We hadn't been able to tell them exactly what their jobs would be for the first few weeks, because we were testing them psychologically as the training program progressed," Johnson explained. "Naturally some of them began to wonder, 'just what am I doing here anyway.' I think that's pretty much all over with now."

It certainly seems to be; if their response to the fire did not end the volunteers' unhappiness, the beginning of work in the field did. "When I came here, I had second thoughts about the whole project for the first three or four weeks," said a Corpsman. But now I've got a really challenging job to do, and I love the kids I'm working with. I'd certainly say I like the Corps--and maybe 'love' would be a better word."

The Projects

New York's P.S. 100 is an ancient elementary school where Mayor Robert Wagner was greeted by a rat on an inspection tour last year. There the peace Corpsmen will undertake projects involving work with slow students, conferences with parents, and help for P.S. 100's disastrously limited staff.

At nearby P.S. 120, a junior high school, four other Corpsmen are undertaking similar projects. They are also counseling slow learners and troublesome students, trying to keep them from dropping out of the school and onto Harlem's already overcrowded streets.

Also in the field of education one volunteer, a 56-year-old woman, is undertaking a study of the causes of the high dropout rate in Harlem's schools.

In overcrowded Harlem Hospital, four Corpsmen are currently at work in the Mental Hygiene division, counseling patients and learning the routine of the hospital. Ultimately they hope to set up a volunteer visitors group at the hospital.

Scattered among four Harlem community centers are the remaining 13 Corpsmen, currently undertaking such projects as teaching preschool children and holding "vocational guidance" classes with students to explore job opportunities.

"Actually," said Gwendolyn Jones, who found the jobs for the Corpsmen in co-operation with local social agencies, "enough things need to be done in this neighborhood that we could employ a thousand volunteers. We had to restrict carefully the kind of jobs the boys do. We couldn't let them just go as additional clerical help to some social agency, but since they're non-professionals we had to have some kind of supervision."

Miss Jones said the June volunteers will go to work on projects involving housing, labor, and voting registration. "We want to spread-out our volunteers a bit so they'll be able to train local kids in quite a number of areas," she explained.

Ambitious Plans

After the Corps is running smoothly, ACT plans an even more ambitious program: an Urban Youth Services Corps in which Harlem teenagers would be trained to operate social work programs in their own neighborhoods. The Domestic Peace Corps workers would serve as teachers for the Urban Corps units, but they would leave the Harlem youths to run their own program once the units were set up.

This kind of program has never been undertaken before in Harlem and it's easy to see why; even to get the Urban Corps underway ACT is planning to ask for a million-dollar government grant for more staff, new equipment, and more facilities for an increased number of Corpsmen.

ACT currently has an ambitious working program, a number of eager volunteers, a fine reception from the community and broad plans for the future. The organization's future would seem to be assured; it is not.

Ever since Sen. John R. Williams (R-Del.) included an attack on ACT in his scattergun blast against Powell on the Senate floor last January, criticism of the Domestic Corps has been widespread; newspapers from the liberal Washington Post to the conservative Chicago Tribune have blasted the Corps; more than 15 Senators and Representatives have attacked ACT in Congress.

None of these attacks, however, has been directed against the Corps' program. The opponents have been content to criticize Powell for employing his own assistant, for serving as incorporator, and for renting the Powell Center (the back half of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, of which Powell is rector) to ACT.

PBH Criticism

The only criticism of the program itself has come from Jon W. Clifton '63, president of Phillips Brooks House, who visited ACT's head quarters in January and returned disillusioned with the project. Clifton said an official of ACT to whom he had spoken seemed totally unaware of any detailed future plans for the volunteers. "Every question we asked about the program met with a blank wall," he reported.

Officials of the Domestic Peace Corps grimace when reminded of the incident. "The man Clifton spoke to was a very competent organizer who had helped us greatly in getting the program underway," one explained. "But he was also something of a con man, who was trying to retain as much power as possible within the organization. He was trying to get things done behind my back and (ACT director) Livingstone Wingate's. For example he never told us of Clifton's visit at all."

Actually by the time Clifton visited Harlem the plans for the Corps had been developed in great detail; the volunteers began their field work three days later. Any of ACT'S responsible officials could have answered all Clifton's questions.

Organizational blunders of this sort have proved nearly disastrous for the Corps; with the constant Congressional criticism the Corpsmen must be careful to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

In any case the future of the domestic Peace Corps in Harlem does not look bright. In the year of the $99 million budget, Congress is increasingly unwilling to provide funds for welfare projects, and the unwillingness is increased when the funds are ticketed for Adam Clayton Powell's district. The President's Committee on Youth will probably be willing to back the Corps as long as the Committee itself has funds, but shortly the Committee will have to go to Congress for more money. "When that happens I think Congress will take a long, hard look at the possibility of ending this particular program altogether," one Republican Congressman said recently.

It would be a pity if opposition such as this should destroy the Domestic Peace Corps; ACT has worked out a good program, and Harlem surely can use any number of new social work projects. But with Powell around its neck, the future of the Domestic Peace Corps seems bleak indeed