Races: The Other 97%

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an Exercycle in the recreation room of his $35,000 split-level home in a white section of New Rochelle, just north of New York City. For transportation he rides a commuter train through Harlem to his midtown Manhattan office, along with white suburbanites. Yet he has more of the knight errant in him than merely the song. On the night of June 22, after New York police disclosed a plot by the Revolutionary Action Movement to murder Young and other Negro leaders, he paid a late visit to Harlem to see for himself how he stood in the ghetto, where Martin Luther King was once stabbed by a Negro. Young found no menace, but one Harlemite asked him: "When are we going to get smart and stop killing each other?"

Operation Breadbasket. Young is convinced that nothing will end the tragedy more effectively than jobs, jobs and more jobs. So are most other Negro leaders. "Teenagers with jobs," says Randolph, "don't throw Molotov cocktails through store windows." Wilkins is trying to get more construction jobs for Negroes with "a massive assault on discriminatory hiring practices," has urged some 1,500 N.A.A.C.P. branches to picket federal and state building projects worth $76.5 billion unless more openings are made available.

King has launched "Operation Breadbasket" in more than 40 cities, aimed at getting new or better jobs for Negroes. King credits Breadbasket with getting jobs for 2,200 Chicago Negroes, hopes to open up as many as 60,000 new jobs a year for Negroes in cities with populations exceeding 100,000.

Similarly wide-ranging is the Opportunities Industrialization Center program launched by the Rev. Leon Sullivan three years ago in a converted Philadelphia jail. Some 3,000 Negroes have already been trained in Philadelphia alone, for jobs ranging from cook to electronics technician, and now 65 U.S. cities from New Haven, Conn., to Los Angeles are setting up similar centers.

Self-Help. In scores of cities, Negro self-help projects are under way. "Operation Bootstrap" in Watts, launched with a $1,000 loan and Negro-run, has placed 175 graduates in skilled jobs in the past six months. In Indianapolis, Schoolteacher Mattie Rice Coney organized 500 block clubs to clean up the ghetto, figures that her group has swept up 42,000 tons of trash in the last year. "Slums are made by people," she says, "not by plaster or bricks. Civic rebuilding begins with people who care about themselves."

Chicago's "Jobs Now," as one of its founders explains, concentrates on "the kids who can strip a car in ten minutes but can't pass a mechanical-aptitude test." Half a dozen churches with predominantly Negro congregations have rehabilitated apartments in communities from Cleveland to Kiloch, Wis. In the Hough slum, former Cleveland Browns Football Star Jim Brown and Team mate John Woolen formed the Negro Industrial and Economic Union to help Negroes start their own businesses with the help of no-interest loans.

Such projects generate an immense —and justified—pride. "We've been treated unfairly," says Indianapolis' Mattie Coney, "but fairness isn't the argument. Black people are easily identified—they just plain have to be better behaved or they give the prejudiced white man a weapon." In a letter made public last