Door-Key Children

Hundreds of extra police patrolled the streets and dark corners of Harlem. Detectives in women's clothes roamed as decoys in nearby Central Park. Magistrates, schoolteachers, social workers and Harlem parents alike were aroused by the menace of Harlem's fierce, rampant children.

The city's panic started a fortnight ago when three Negro boys, one aged twelve, pounced on a white boy outside Central Park, stabbed him to death. Few days later, in dark Morningside Park, another gang robbed, stripped and killed a white man. Mayor LaGuardia, himself a Harlem resident, sent 324 more cops into Harlem to quell its young criminals. Four days later, under the Mayor's very nose, a burglar looted an apartment across the hall from his.

By that time New Yorkers looked seriously at the facts of Harlem life: ^ Harlem covers three square miles in the northern section of Manhattan above Central Park. It is an anthropologist's heaven, bulging with a population of 250,-ooo American, African and West Indian Negroes, 125,000 Puerto Ricans, 150,000 Italians, Chinese, Filipinos, East Indians, Haitians.

> Fully half of Harlem's youngsters are known to its schoolteachers as "door-key children." because their parents, away from home all day, turn them loose each morning with the keys to their apartments strung around their necks. They are apt to run wild in the streets and even use their apartments for immoral rendezvous.

> Many of them carry "switch-blade" knives--a knife with a long, wicked blade released by a spring-button. School principals often call in police to frisk their pupils during recess, sometimes unearth not only knives but blackjacks.

> In Harlem side streets and the hilly, wooded section of Central Park next to Harlem, bands of Negro and Puerto Rican boys prey on playing children, robbing them of bicycles, skates, wrist watches, clothes. When they rob a man, they often take his pants to forestall a chase.

^Bill collectors, tradesmen, even policemen fear to walk in Harlem at night.

Truant officers, after several beatings, asked to be permitted to work in pairs instead of singly. Because Harlem's hoodlums attack without discrimination, law-abiding Negroes are as terrified as whites.

Last week 200 educators, policemen, parole officers, lawyers, businessmen, social workers, magistrates were gathered by the Social Service Bureau of the city's Magistrate's Courts to consider what to do about Harlem's poverty, overcrowding, fabulously high rents for miserable tenements, broken homes, immorality, old unsanitary schools, lack of sufficient playgrounds,* unemployed Negroes. (Of 1,400 Negro boys recently trained by the city's schools for defense work, only 70 got jobs.)

What To Do? Aware that the economics of Harlem was too big a problem for them to tackle, educators and social workers agreed that Harlem's most pressing immediate need was to keep juvenile delinquency within bounds by removing the worst children from the worst homes and putting them in foster homes or institutions. Harlem has few foster homes, no institution, church-owned or otherwise, for its neglected Negro children. Only one reform school--New York State Training School for Boys near Warwick--admits Protestant Negro boys, and it is so crowded with bad characters that it often does them more harm than good. Catholic welfare agencies will take care of delinquent Negro boys, but since the majority of the Negroes are Protestant, few come under Catholic care.

That foster homes can be found was proved three years ago when an experimental bureau was set up in Harlem by the Children's Aid Society with a grant from Marshall Field and the Davison Fund (a Rockefeller philanthropy). It succeeded, with trained home-finders, in placing 300 neglected youngsters in good homes. But the project will soon run out of funds. Until permanent backing is found, Harlem, like the rest of New York, can only scream at its bad children, and run from the organized bands of vicious youngsters, hell-bent for hell.

* Ironic fact: 18 Harlem schools have gymnasiums or indoor playgrounds that are closed after school for lack of $9 a day to pay janitors. Paul Blanshard, executive director of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, proposed that they be opened with WPA caretakers.

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