finding rural youth and their parents, too, coming and asking, "How can we get to be a part of this?" preventing a great deal that we might otherwise have to pick up later.

The other thing that I feel is coming out is a realization that this is the day when the nonprofessional needs to be developed, and who better than our teenaged youth with their talents, enthusiasm, and energies can be developed in that direction. On this, we are working.

We want to commend the legislation for including an emphasis on new designs, new methods, new roles for volunteers, because we think that only with this kind of encouragement and with the funds to make the program come through can we hope to get at things that are going to be sufficiently effective to meet the current needs.

We in the National Council of Negro Women want to join in strongly supporting H.R. 7642. Most of all we want to say that we see this as a kind of selp-help program for the youth and for nonprofit organizations because when we have this kind of support with which to work it encourages us to redouble our efforts so that the private sector can be in full partnership in behalf of delinquency prevention with our youth.

Thank you.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Miss Height, the points you have raised today are certainly very valid points, particularly in regard to the high rate of unemployment among young Negro women.

I think it was last Sunday that the Washington Star had an excellent editorial on this subject, reciting some figures prepared by Mr. Califano of the White House, indicating the enormity of the problem and that there are not easy solutions to it.

At our opening session yesterday, our colleague from New York, Mr. Carey, raised some extremely pertinent questions as to where we have been with this concept in the last 4 or 5 years.

This legislation before us now would make permanent a program of direct assistance to local communities, establishing facilities to deal with problems of delinquent youth. But we also have a title in the bill which would set up some $4.7 million in the first year for research.

We have already spent $17 million on research and demonstration projects since 1961. New York City has had a reasonably ample share of that money. I was wondering if you can tell us what have been the practical results? What have we learned out of this research that we didn't know prior to 1961 when we passed the first Juvenile Delinquency Act that can give us some guidelines for implementing this program?

What, for instance, in your judgment, is the most single, significant thing that has come out of some of the research projects in New York City?

Miss HEIGHT. It seems to me that the wonderful thing that has happened through all this is that much of the research has been actionoriented. It is action research in that something has been happening to the people even while the research was underway. For instance, I think one of the great learnings is that it isn't good enough to try to teach young people new behavior. They are not interested in humanrelations training. They will learn as they are involved and as they have a chance to do something.

I think we have learned that unless we can help get people prepared quickly to move into the labor force, using the skills that they have, at whatever level they have them, but constantly helping them to feel themselves persons of worth, unless we do this we are simply delaying the day and we are entertaining them when that is not what we want to do.

I think this is one of the important learnings. It certainly has shown us that young people will learn if they have a chance to earn and to feel some sense of self-worth.

I know that when we talk about research and planning, it sounds like we are talking about dreaming. I am talking about the kind of planning that involves the very population that we are talking about, the self-involvement that we see, the kinds of things that are happening when we are training young people to be aids, to be partners.

I think many of our women are desperately concerned because we even had to deal with ourselves to help us understand delinquents. There has been a looking down of noses on the part of many people with middle-class values, and a realization of how deeply the deprivation has taken its toll among the people.

I think the results of these past years are invaluable to the future of our Nation, and without the kind of investment that has been made I don't think we would have begun to know how people feel about the problems and, more importantly, how we who are the adults with what it should take to help the young people feel about the young people we are trying to help.

I wish I could have brought a young person here who has lived through this kind of thing. One told us very recently that she thought she was a poor student. She said, "What I found out was that nobody who was teaching me had ever really thought about me.'

This was the difference between her being an effective research aid at this moment and the person she was a short while ago.

I have a tape recording from a group of our own women as they were talking about what they could do of service. I am not talking about women of means sitting off in a distance. I am talking about women who live in the ghetto, who often themselves have suffered humility because they are accused of neglecting their children.

These women so desperately were concerned, and yet they could only say to children that they ought to do this, they ought to be made to do that, they ought to be made to do the other. They, themselves, said, after some training under our grant, "We will never start pointing the finger again. We will try to start and understand.”

So I think the adults are benefiting from this as much as the young people.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Ford?

Mr. FORD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Your special area of interest, in terms of the kind of people you are dealing with, is young women, or do you get involved with the total generation?

Miss HEIGHT. Yes.

Mr. FORD. Including the young men?

Miss HEIGHT. Yes. As a matter of fact, all of our programs include young men as well, but we are doing some very special things for the girls.

Mr. FORD. I might say to you, honestly, that one of the reservations I have had for a long time about the YWCA and YMCA approach to these problems is the segregation by sexes. I have been reading about Louisville, Ky., as everyone has. I spent one semester in college down there during the war, at a time when they still did not let boys and girls go to school together in that city. It has only been since the end of World War II that they allowed that. I had an opportunity to discuss with some of my contemporaries the kind of problems they had in adjusting when they found themselves in the competition of the college atmosphere and at the same time in the company of young people of the opposite sex.

I am a little bit concerned as to whether we have learned anything concerning what happens when we take young people who are under pressure and subject to other problems and try to solve their problems by segregating them out, putting all the people with same problems together, to wit, putting in a group all the boys with the special problems of being a teenage boy and other problems that seem to have a little bit more psychological effect on a boy than on a girl, at least at an early age, and doing similar things to the girls.

I wonder if this kind of project does not contribute to the problem. Miss HEIGHT. I think I would like to say I am against segregation in all of its forms and can certainly agree with the basic premise from which you start on this. But I would like to add that I view looking at the particular problems that teenage boys have or teenage girls have as being equally imporant with helping them to establish a good relationship with the other.

I think you will find now that both in the YW and the YMCA there has to be some place where we look at particular problems. The problem of the young mother, for example, has often been looked at as her problem.

As we are working on it now, we are doing much more with unwed parents and we are seeing the way in which these things have to be dealt. But one cannot deny that there are particular things that a young woman has in that instance that a young man does not have.

For instance, some of our sections in Indianapolis are doing a total program in which they are starting with the young boys, because one of the problems in the Negro section of the community is that while the white woman may be fighting for equality with the male, the Negro woman has to fight with it for the male.

So as we are working in this, we have to be very conscious of the particular problems of the male and the female working together.

I wanted to stress the girls, because in New York City last summer when 100,000 jobs were set out under a special program, a poverty program, the employers would not take girls because they saw girls as having special problems. So long as women perform the functions they do in society, there will be this feeling that if you get a boy you won't have any attendant problems.

I do not want to speak of this in a segregated way. I want to speak of it in saying that I think that while delinquency is largely or so largely related to girls, too often it is thought of only in terms of boys. That is why I wanted to speak to the girl problem. But I am against any form of strict segregation, as such.

It is really individualization of need, rather than segregation that I was speaking to.

Mr. FORD. I have taken a quick look at the demonstration projects that have already gone on under the legislation. Some of my friends, who have been deeply involved with young people for a number of years, recently discussed with me their concern that in recent times in Detroit we have been doing such a good job of identifying for the community special problems of some people that we are tending to identify that group of people as somewhat set apart for their special problems. This starts to have the effect of identifying every problem they have as a special and different problem from those in general. Judge Lincoln, a juvenile judge in the city of Detroit, who has been on the bench for a long time, and who has been one of the people in the forefront of this country asking the politicians to do something besides talk, made this observation, on the basis of conversations that he had had with quite a number of people attached to his court. I think they are beginning to see a trace of this now.

We really have not had anybody from the outside take a look at these problems, any nonprofessional people, other than the nonprofessional do-gooders, like some of us here in the Congress.

Has anybody ever come into evaluate these programs who isn't first motivated by something besides doing something great for humanity, or the person who comes to audit how much money you are spending who has an entirely different point of view toward the professional social worker who has very firm and stereotype ideas, despite the fact that they express themselves to the contrary.

As a practicing attorney, I had great difficulty with this.

Have we any program whereby someone other than these people who normally come in contact with this would take a look and walk away and just give their impression so that we could look to that to see what happens?

Miss HEIGHT. I think most of the people around this table could speak to that. I think one thing that is happening is that we all have a feeling of living in a fish bowl. From the moment it is known that you are in a specially funded program there is constant scrutiny from many different channels. Maybe some of the others might speak to any organized evaluation. I would like to say one word on your first point.

I think one of the values in what we are trying to do now is that we are not having people with middle-class values or from one segment of the population go to do something for the other.

I think the new thing that is happening is that in fact there is a joining of hands and a working with people at many levels. This is the new thing.

So the persons who sometimes have been stigmatized as having a problem, and, therefore, being the problem, are now in a different kind of relationship. It is this that we are trying to bring about. It is a new and a different relationship where the concept of brotherhood has some real meaning.

This, I think, is part of the value of what is coming out of these problems. It is not that I, with this kind of education, will do this for the other who has no education, but it is that together we are working to see what it is that will help the person who needs to learn, and that person is both of us. Each of us needs to learn something that will make a better life in that community for the potential delinquent. Did you want to speak to some of this?

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Mr. PUCINSKI. We will come back to the other witnesses in a moment. Mr. FORD. I was trying to question this lady because she was leaving early, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you very much.

I hope before this panel gets through and I have to leave, I will read someplace in the transcript that one of you, at least, will criticize what we have been doing up to now in recognition of the fact that we are failing very badly in dealing with this growing problem of juvenile delinquency.

I hope we will hear some constructive criticism of what we are doing, rather than simply a suggestion that if we had more money and did more of the same it might be better. Some of us are looking for something more dramatic than that.

Thank you.

Miss HEIGHT. I think, Mr. Chairman, our chief criticism of what we are doing is so tiny in relation to the depth of the need and the severity of the problem.

Mr. PUCINSKI. One interesting observation that Miss Height makes, and which I am sure the others will make, is that there seems to be a tendency among many in this country to believe that the problem of juvenile delinquency and crime in general is not one that the Negro community concerns itself with, and yet the record will show that it is the Negroes in this country who usually are the most frequent victims of crime.

One of the things I think we have to demonstrate is that everyone is concerned with this problem. This is not a problem that any one section of our country can resolve and deal with. I am impressed by the fact that we have had witnesses before, and we are going to have more, who emphasize, as you have, Miss Height, the deep concern with this problem in the poverty areas. Too often people seem to think that just because people are poor or because they are members of a minority group, that they are not concerned with the problem.

Yet as we listened to your testimony, we find that perhaps the greatest degree of concern is in those communities that you described, simply because these people are the greatest and most frequent victims of crime.

Miss HEIGHT. Mr. Chairman, if I may add, one of the things that we know is that the danger that we feel in the streets and in the communities where we live is there because of the fact that many of the crimes are committed right within the neighborhoods of neighbor against neighbor, and this adds to the severity of the problem you are trying to work through.

You have a whole environment that has to be changed.

Mr. PUCINSKI. Mr. Ashbrook.

Mr. ASHBROOK. First of all, I want to thank you for appearing here. I wish we had people like you in every community in the country expressing this concern and working as you have been working.

I think something you said brings out a point that probably w would be better off not to talk about, but since this is a problem, let do.

I think the tendency in juvenile delinquency, in many of these rel tions, is to try to sweep many things under the rug. A very controversi point, but one which I am sure is known to you, the people workin