Jobs Program Grew out of Civil Rights Struggle

By: Alysia TateThe federal summer jobs program is a child of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In 1963, police were spraying tear gas on demonstrators in Savannah, Ga., using electric cattle prods on protesters in Gadsden, Ala., and turning police dogs and fire hoses on African American children in Birmingham, Ala., according to Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s "Voices of Freedom, An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s."

Protests also spread to northern cities. In Chicago, 200,000 black students stayed home for a day to protest school segregation, according to Hampton and Fayer. Blacks clashed with police on the streets of Harlem. And 125,000 people marched in Detroit’s Walk to Freedom in June 1963—two months before the historic March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famed "I Have a Dream" speech.

All told, 100 cities saw more than 900 demonstrations in 1963, according to Hampton and Fayer. More than 20,000 people were arrested, and 10 died. After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the "War on Poverty," which included money for summer jobs for poor teenagers.

"The program is one of the most mismanaged programs we have," said Robert Taggart, who directed those efforts under President Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980. "Year in and year out, it always sneaks up on you."

The Carter administration did make inroads, Taggart said. At one point, 45 percent of the black teens who held jobs nationwide were employed by the government, he said. Those in summer programs worked an average of 37 hours a week for 11 weeks.

The programs were authorized the Comprehensive Employment Training Act of 1973, which a decade later was replaced by the Job Training Partnership Act. Its legislative goal: to move jobless workers into permanent, unsubsidized employment.

But decades of youth employment programs have never produced concrete, positive results, experts say. And Taggart, who reviewed the programs in 1980, said it was difficult to evaluate such short-term efforts.

Lorenzo D. Harrison, administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Job Training Programs in Washington, D.C., is expected to take over a new youth office Sept. 1—a position that was eliminated after Taggart left in 1980.

"One might crassly state, the jury is still out on the success—or lack thereof—of the [jobs] programs," Harrison said.