Young blacks unemployed

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33776, 24 February 1975, Page 15

Young blacks unemployed

(By JAMES RESTON of (he "New York Times" through N.Z.P.A.)

CHAPEL HILL (North Carolina), February 23.

In the capital of the United States, the economic slump is statistics and politics, but out here in the country, it’s people: anxiety over jobs, lay-offs, deficits, bankruptcies, drop - outs and crime.

The Federal Government, which is seldom excessively pessimistic, tells us that we can expect abnormally high unemployment for at least three years, and to take just one o’f its startling figures, that 41.1 per cent are now out of work.

Already, some of the labour unions leaders, meeting in Miami Beach, are talking about bringing the unemployed workers “into the streets,” which sounds like a formula for making things even worse than they

are, but the social and political consequences, of a prolonged period of excessive unemployment in the black ghettos could be much more serious than the Ford Administration has ever considered.

Total unemployment coun-try-wide was 8.2 per cent in mid-January, but it is higher now, worse than the national average in industrial New England and in the South, much worse among the young in general and the black young in particular.

If anybody thinks this country can have over 40 per cent of its black teenagers out of work for three years without serious trouble in the streets, I haven’t met him. But while the Ford Administration has published the figures, and talked about public service jobs, it has merely trifled with the problem.

The national statistics are deceptive. They give us general averages for the continent, but the unemployment is uneven, and social turmoil

often comes out of concentrated urban pockets of despair.

Wherever you go in this country, you see wild disparities between rich and poor communities in every state, and often within a single town or city. There is a lot of money around in the big cities — fantastic prices being paid at the top of the economic scale — but serious problems among the average folk at the beginning and at the end of married life. The situation here in North Carolina illustrates the crankiness of things, the element of accident, or as Jack Kennedy once said, the “unfairness of life.” This state has followed accurately enough the national economic pattern: over 8 per cent unemployed, but spotty. In Government towns, like Raleigh, and university towns like Durham and Chapel Hill, it is below the national unemployment average, but in tne mill towns and furniture towns, it is, as

they say here, “hurting bad.”

The university in Chapel Hill reports few drop-outs so far, white or black, but the pre-registration for the spring semester, particularly, from the poorer parts of the state and in the Appalachian branch units, is down, and the pressure from the state legislature to cut the university system budget is severe. The south-east of the country in general, which] was booming before the slump, is now falling below! the national average in construction, and all the in-| dustries that go with it; tex-, tiles, furniture, and so on. ' All this makes the prob-i lem of policy for the President and the Congress ex-! tremely difficult. For an' energy problem that fits one area of the country doesn’t fit the problems of totally different areas, and a policy that deals with 8 per cent or (even 10 per cent unemploy-1 ment in general, does not! deal with 41 per cent black !tee n-age unemployment, mainly in the guts of the big cities. President Ford has paid' his respects to dll these, problems. He has suggested public service jobs, in a limited way, and tax rebates,; and other aids to the poor, but he has not really dealt with his own most disturbing statistics, that 41 and I soon 50 per cent of the I young blacks will be out of 'work, and that their hope of (getting jobs for three years lis pretty dim. | Somehow, in the planning of the next year and the authorisation and appropriation of money, this problem ;of young black urban unemployment is going to have to get a higher priority than it now has. ■ The President has all kinds of models before him; , the civilian conservation icorps of the old New Deal l days, and dozens of other I experimental programmes, old and new, good and bad, but at some point he has to put his money behind a programme that will deal with a roving, unemployed, black teen-age population — I almost half of the young blacks in the nation. I The President has recognised it, and fiddled with It, but he has not really grap- ] pled with it or funded it. And if his figures are right and over 40 per cent of the ' young blacks are going to be j out of work for the next three years, this could be more of a violent energy problem than he now has in the Middle East.