Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Kenneth ClarkKenneth Clark
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 763

the newspapers misquoting or distorting anything I've said when I've been in any of these struggles and fights. I mean, whatever problems I've had, in terms of press coverage of my fights, have not been from misquotes, but from accurate quotes. You know, the newspapers -- I am one of those people who can never blame newspapers for giving distorted or misleading ideas -- giving the public distorted or misleading ideas of what I say. They have been, up to the present, damned accurate, and I respect the press for this, as far as I'm concerned.

Well, anyway -- it had to come to some conclusion.

Well, interestingly enough, it did not come to the conclusion of Northside getting those funds. The best we got out of that was that the Jewish Board of Guardians did not come into Harlem, and we did not have that program under those auspices in Harlem.

But out of that controversy came a series of meetings with leaders of voluntary agencies in Harlem, held at Northside, under Mamie's and my auspices, in which we planned our strategy, and in those meetings, we began to learn that --(it was ‘61, it was the first year of the Kennedy Administration)-- that the Kennedys were developing a serious program to deal with the problem of juvenile delinquency, and that there was a President's Committee on Junveile Delinquency that had funds, available for community planning on juvenile delinquency control projects; and that the Lower East Side had been beneficiary of such planning funds, in terms of Mobiliation of Youth programs. And we said, “Hell, sure, the Lower East Side has a delinquency problem, but so does Harlem.”

So we organized a group to look into ways of getting some of





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help