Lindsay: Dilemmas of Policy and Politics

On the hot, muggy afternoon of July 19, more than 1,000 Negroes and Puerto Ricans completely disrupted the dedication of a new industrial park in central Brooklyin with a loud and angry demonstration against segregated schools. The signs they carried demanded "More Land for Schools, Less for Factories."

At 2 p.m. Mayor Lindsay, notfiied of the demonstration, flew by police helicopter from the Wall Street heliport to an airfield in Brooklyn. A few minutes later his black sedan drew up behind the crowd of shouting protestors. As he stepped out of the car and was recognized, there was sudden silence.

Then, before police or his aides could step in, a half dozen muscular Negro teen-agers rushed for the Mayor, hoisted him onto their shouders, and carried him through the throng. The angry crowd broke into cheers. "I'm alright, I'm alright," Lindsay shouted above the applause as a flying wedge of policemen came to his rescue.

Later, the Mayor spoke to the demonstrators, who tentatively put down their pointed demnads, "Jim Crow Must Go" and "Mayor Lindsay, We Want Schools," to listen. He talked about the need for better schools and about the city's growing resources to provide them. In the end, the crowd dispersed peacefully and everyone, including the Mayor, went home with a story to tell.

It was only two days later, as another stiffling afternoon began to cool down a little, that the nearby East New York section of Brooklyn blew. Calm had rested on the city like a highly flammable illusion through the record-breaking heat of early July. The Mayor's Office moved in nervously with quantities of community meetings and police re-inforcements at every hint of an outbreak. New Yorkers began to wonder if Lindsay's first summer would end without a baptism of violence in the ghettos. But, looking back, people will associate the summer of '66 with East New York, one of the city's many little-known ghettos, where the traditional Italian population has rapidly fled before an in-migration of Puerto Ricans and Negroes.

At five p.m., a three-year-old Negro boy was wounded by a sniper's bullet. At nine p.m., a few blocks away, Mayor Lindsay entered Frank's Restaurant for a scheduled meeting with community leaders. Just before 10 p.m. as the Mayor left the neighborhood, 30 white demonstrators from the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything (SPONGE) chased 25 Negro counter-demonstrators for several blocks. A few minutes later, a sniper shot and killed an 11-year-old Negro boy from the roof of a near-by building.

The Mayor rushed back and began touring the area slowly, circling and re-circling the blocks. But the tension had already burst. Gangs of 25 to 100 Negro and Puerto Rican youths roamed the streets, tossing garbage cans through store windows and looting. On roofs, others hurled tire jacks and bricks at passing police cars. As the violence spread, those who weren't on the streets gathered at windows and doorways. "Oh, this is good. I'm going in to get some chairs so we can enjoy it in comfort," a reporter overheard one Negro woman exclaim. Violence raged on most of the night. More than 1,000 policemen and 100 patrol cars were dispatched to the trouble area before a semblance of order was restored.

An angry demonstration that ended with Lindsay in the midst of a cheering crowd and a meeting of community leaders whose end signaled a night of blood and violence: these two incidents outline the double view that New York's thousands of Negro and Puerto Rican citizens hold of their Mayor. Lindsay demonstrates his almost puritanical commitment to the principle of social equality every day: he walks the streets of Harlem, he appoints a civilian review board, he fights with Washington for more anti-poverty money. But these sincere efforts have so far failed to bring forth much that people can see. The boredom, frustration, and poverty of the East New York streets exploded with an impatience for results.

In his 1965 campaign, Lindsay promised the city's one million Negroes and half a million Puerto Ricans a better deal. He talked about restructuring the poverty program, suggested setting up neighborhood city halls, and promised to work for equal city services in all areas. Negroes responded by giving him more votes than they had given to any other post-war Republican candidate.

Since his election, the Mayor has taken several high-level steps toward meeting his promises. First, he commissioned several studies directed toward government re-organization. Mitchell Sviridoff, director of the successful New Haven anti-poverty program, proposed a drastic re-organization of New York's badly fragmented anti-poverty structure. A Human Resources Administration, which will be headed by Sviridoff himself, has been created to oversee all poverty programs; quasi-independent community corporations will be organized in poverty areas to coordinate programs at the local level.

A similar study of the housing and urban renewal structure was undertaken by Boston's project builder Edward Logue, but its preliminary recommendations met with insurmountable opposition from city bureaucracies that do not want to be reorganized out of existence. A third study, now in progress, will explore the feasibility of introducing to the city government a system of program budgeting similar to that of the federal Defense Department.

Second, Lindsay fought uphill battles to establish two controversial institutions to protect the rights of minority groups: a Police Department review board and a set of neighborhood city halls. The review board, now in operation, can only recommend disciplinary action against police officers. It is, nonetheless, vehemently opposed by the Conservative Party and the Policeman's Benevolent Association, which have collected more than 55,000 signatures to put the issue on the November ballot. Lindsay's pet reform, the establishment of neighborhood city halls to handle residents' problems and complaints, was temporarily frustrated by city legislators. The Board of Estimate and the City Council overrode the Mayor's veto, passing an appropriations bill without funds for the little city halls. (It was the first time anyone could remember in recent history that a mayor's veto had been over-riden.) But the Mayor is having the last quiet chuckle on that issue by setting up the complaint centers on private money: the first was opened in East New York after the July riot.

Lindsay's third attack on the status quo focused on improving the level of city services in ghetto areas. The Mayor's creative, publicity-minded Parks Commissioner Thomas Hoving hired some teen-age leaders from Bedford Stuyvesant and Harlem to advise him on the design and placement of parks in their neighborhoods; he imported swimming pools into ghetto parks, and he provided free bus service for groups to any park in the city. Welfare Commissioner Nathan Ginsberg began a more difficult battle against his 18,000-man bureaucracy. He cut out the infamous "midnight raids" on welfare clients which were used to check whether there was a man illegally living in the house. And he began a campaign to replace the humiliating income-checking procedure with an affidavit system and to liberalize family planning policy.

Back at city hall, the Mayor has taken to the streets himself to demonstrate his personal commitment. At least twice a week during this first summer, Lindsay has spent a couple of hours walking through the ghettos, accompanied by plain clothesmen and one of his aides. Tanned and in shirt sleeves, the Mayor walks unannounced into the offices of community organizations and businesses, stopping to answer questions, to clean up litter, or to note down a rubbish-filled vacant lot or a particularly dirty street. Residents are only too eager to show him their problems. On one walk a few weeks ago in Harlem, a group of teen-agers ran up to the Mayor waving a dead rat, one of them shouting: "Man, Mayor, this is where the clean-up is it, baby. Look at this rat."

Behind the scenes, Lindsay has taken further steps to bring the far-away government closer to where the action is. In his office and in his car, direct lines keep him in touch with the Police Department. And a police helicopter is available 24 hours a day to carry him to the scene of any disturbance within 20 minutes (in a few that will cut the time in half). weeks he will have a jet helicopter

But so far, when the government does get down to the streets, its impact as often as not is destructive. The stories of poverty program ineffectiveness, of inconsistent funding practices, and of unfulfilled promises are as true for New York as for any other large city. In addition, Lindsay's prestige received a major blow this summer when the city had to return over $10 million in unspent poverty funds to the federal government at the end of the fiscal year. The Mayor further embarrassed himself by denying the loss for several days.

Also, community leaders in poverty areas are fast learning the rules of the funding game. And the number one rule is that violence brings results. Well-known ghettos such as Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant and the Lower East Side continue to get the lion's share of the anti-poverty pie. As leaders in competing ghettos see it, they get money because they have an "in," because they are well organized, and because they act ferocious.

Countless forgotten ghettos--Williamsberg, Coney Island, Morrisania, the South Bronx, the Upper West Side --are learning that to get anything from a high school to a recreation program, a community must be organized and must show that it can be a trouble maker if it is not well cared for. "I can't exactly tell people to get out in the streets,"' explained one Board of Education leader in the South Bronx, "but that's what they'll have to do to get schools."

There are many signs that by going into the anti-poverty business, the government has begun to generate thousands of dissatisfied customers who will soon know the ropes as well as the downtown bureaucrats. A welfare case worker described the change: "People are beginning to act as if help from the government is a right instead of a privilege. They know what they are entitled to." Early in August, welfare recipients from New York and other large cities proved the point by holding a convention in Chicago to plan strategy for demanding their rights.

Another sign of the mushrooming self-consciousness of the poor is the sprouting of a Black Power movement in New York. Shortly before he was assassinated, Malcolm X, the organizer of New York's black nationalists, wrote that:

The cornerstone of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength--and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee seems to have taken those words as its battle hymn in organizing a Black Panther Party in Harlem this summer, similar to the one it has fathered in Lowndes County, Alabama.

Haryou-Act, Harlem's much publicized anti-poverty agency, is also expanding its already firm power base through block-by-block organization. In recent months, each block in the neighborhood has elected a representative and these representatives expect to be a powerful political pressure group.

Lindsay's next three-and-a-half years will see these forces converging. Charisma and promises are the glories of a new mayor. So far, Lindsay's idealism has been both his major source of energy and his biggest curse. His commissioners also have big ideas, but bigger, tradition-bound bureaucracies. Results will be the final measuring rod, and a year or two from now the mayor will need more than that sign in his office that reminds him to SMILE