The Truly Disadvantaged.

• Author: DeParle, Jason

. . . And Start Helping the Underclass

Lafeyette Walton lives in a Chicago housing project. He is 12 years old. On his birthday last summer he headed across the project lawn with eight dollars in his pocket, aiming to buy a radio. Then the sound of gunfire intruded, and Lafeyette crawled back home to safety. Gunfire is a sound familiar to him. In the apartment where Lafeyette lives with his mother and his five siblings, the curtains have bullet holes. He's seen two children shot and watched one die on his doorstep. His brother, Pharoah, shakes uncontrollably at loud noises.

The Wall Street Journal told Lafeyettehs now-famous story in October, as six Democratic candidates traveled the country, met in debate, and offered their vision of America's future. They've said a lot about the farm crisis, debt crisis, and trade crisis, and they've trumpeted their leadership and their character. But there hasn't been much said about Lafeyette Walton's crisis, and the crises of millions of others like him. The enduring miseries of inner-city blacks is one of America's greatest problems; why won't the candidates confront it?

By way of contrast, it is useful to remember the presidential campaign that Robert Kennedy began 20 years ago. In its three-month span, Kennedy repeatedly challenged Americans to do something about what he called "the inexcusable and ugly deprivations" of the nascent black underclass. Kennedy got people to listen by combining genuine anger about poverty, which poor blacks understood, with an image of toughness that appealed to conservative whites. He pestered the affluent and the underclass each to take responsibility. As a result, his support included not only blacks and Hispanics but also whites whose second choice for president was George Wallace. Kennedy fashioned the original rainbow coalition and was proving its viability in the primaries when he was shot.

Admittedly, it's harder in some ways for today's candidates to take up an antipoverty crusade. Kennedy had tanks on his side. It's easier to inject a sense of urgency when the cities are filled with rioters. Today the Japanese salary man has replaced angry urban blacks as the focus of American anxiety. With most middle-class Americans happily insulated from the realities of the Waltons' world, these truly are invisible men. It's Lafeyette Walton who's getting shot at, not us.

Meanwhile, most Americans think we've already done enough. In the popular mind, too much money had been spent, too little has resulted, and further effort seems futile. What organized political anger does exist no longer flows out of the ghetto, but rather in the other direction, rich against poor. At the same time, the image of the poor has changed. When Kennedy began speaking out about poverty, the image that encapsulated black deprivation was that of school children facing police dogs and jeering crowds. Now it's the stud of Bill Moyer's documentary, who fathered six children by four women and supported none of them. "Well the majority of the mothers are on welfare," he said. "What I'm not doing, the government does." Any politician trying to quicken the American conscience has a tough image to fight: the poor seem less deserving.

The miseries of the black inner city are especially bitter, as William Julius Wilson reminds us, for they increased "during the very period in which the most sweeping anti-discrimination legislation. . . [was] enacted and implemented." Since 1969, the percentage of black men earning more than $25,000 has grown steadily, but so has the proportion earning less than $5,000. While the movement that crossed the bridge in Selma catapulted millions of blacks into the mainstream of American life, you couldn't prove it by Lafeyette Walton. In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson attempts to explain why.

Industrial evacuation

He begins with the facts. Consider the Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago's largest housing project...