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FREEDOMWAYS FOURTH QUARTER 1968
able to cope with local needs," because "today the area of an effective community is approximately 100 times that of the effective community of the early 1900's." The poverty areas include large parts of the South, parts of New Mexico and Arizona, parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota. This widespread phenomenon of millions of people completely bypassed by prosperity and relegated to the non-status of leftovers rotting in lifeless areas cannot be explained solely by the blanket phrase, white racism. There is prejudice against the poor per se and not only against dark skinned people.
The traditional American ethic says that any American who is poor has only himself to blame. Or, to put it another way, the poor are poor because they deserve to be. And so, they deserve and receive fewer benefits from society than the successful get: less health care and less education and what little they get is poor in quality. If they survive the high infant mortality (higher than that of 17 other advanced nations), they can look forward to a hungry childhood, sometimes malnutrition bordering on starvation. If they have the clothes and the shoes to wear to school, they will receive an education geared to producing functional illiterates. It won't be of much use where they live nor will it avail them better opportunities in Northern cities. Over 700,000 adults in rural America have never been inside a school; 3.1 million have had less than five years of schooling, and more than 19 million have not completed high school. This pool of not well educated adults is fed by a daily stream of rural youth dropping out of historically neglected rural schools. The youth of tomorrow like the rural adults of today can look forward to a life of under-employment and unemployment in their native town or in a big city, and to all the frustrations and lacks that this implies.
Whatever has been happening to the poor in general has been happening to a greater extent to the nonwhite poor. The most easily measured example is infant and maternal mortality. "Although infant deaths have declined for both white and nonwhite groups, the relative difference between white and nonwhite infant deaths has increased. The infant mortality rate for nonwhites was 71 per cent higher than that for whites in 1940, 87 per cent higher in 1963, and 90 per cent higher in 1964...The nonwhite infant death rate after the first month of life was 108 per cent higher than for whites in 1945-49, and 170 per cent higher in 1964." Infant mortality is especially high in the rural South (where the Negro population is large) and in the states with large Indian and Mexican-American
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