SPATIAL DECONCENTRATION
by Yolanda Ward
This article was researched and written primarily by Ms. Yolanda Ward,
sometime in the early Nineteen Eighties. It is based largely on material
that is publicly available, especially the “Report of the National Advisory
Commission on Civic Disturbances,” otherwise known as the Kerner Commission
Report.
A large portion of this document is, however, based on materials which were
not publicly available, specifically a number of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) department files which Ms. Ward and her collaborators
apparently stole from the HUD office in Washington, D.C. The material herein
contained details a policy, known as “Spatial Deconcentration,” which rivals
both Nazi Germany and present day South Africa in its injustice to
individuals, its utter disregard for human and civil rights, and outstrips
them both in the remarkable secrecy with which it has been, until now,
instituted.
This document was first published as part of a collection of notes for a
national housing activists conference held in Washington D.C. some years
ago. No more than five hundred copies were made at that time, and to the
best of our knowledge, this was the report’s only publication, prior to the
one you now hold in your hands. Shortly after this first publication, Ms.
Ward and two associates were accosted on a Washington street one night by
two well-dressed white men, who singled out Ms. Ward from her two friends,
ordered her at gunpoint to lie face down in the street, and then shot her in
the back of the head. The documents she and her friends allegedly stole from
HUD have never been published, nor are they included here.
— J.F.W., Editor (published in World War Three Illustrated circa1989)
This book is the result of painstaking work done during the second half of
1979, mostly in Philadelphia, but also in St. Louis, Chicago, New York City
and Washington D.C.
It includes a collection of materials from federal agencies such as the
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the General
Accounting Office (GAO); from community sources, such as Philadelphia and
St. Louis Legal Aid Societies; and from independent sources, such as
foundations, private corporations, books, private papers, etc.
The search for and collection of this material began in August, 1979, when
housing activists in Philadelphia first stumbled across the strangely-worded
theory called “spatial deconcentration.” A letter had been forwarded from
the Philadelphia-area regional planning commission to activist attorneys in
one of the legal service agencies announcing a new “fair housing” program
called the “Regional Housing Mobility Program.” It might have been all greek
to housing activists had they not already known that some type of sweeping
master plan had already swung into effect to depopulate Philadelphia of its
minority neighborhoods. The massive demolition operations in minority
neighborhoods; which had been systematic, and the total lack of
reconstruction funds from public or private sources spoke to that fact.
Activists had fought pitched battles with the city administration over
housing policies for some three years before the word “mobility” was ever
mentioned among their ranks. In march of 1979, in fact, Philadelphia public
housing leaders launched an attack on a city organized and HUD sponsored
plan to empty the city’s public housing high-rise projects. The question at
the time had been: “Where will all the tenants go?” When the mobility
program was unearthed in August, the answer fell into place like a major
piece in a jig-saw puzzle. The answer, naturally, was the suburbs. It seemed
to fit perfectly into the “triage” or “Gentrification” scheme, which froze
the inner city land stocks for the returning suburbanites who were finding
city life more economical than the suburbs.
Focussing their attention on this phenomenon called “Mobility,” the
activists dug for more materials at the planning commission office. With the
new materials available they began to slowly understand that the Mobility
Program was much more than met the eye. By late September they only
understood that the program seemed to be a keystone among federal housing
programs and that HUD was making special efforts to avoid a confrontation
over the matter.
It was tactically decided that the program was too massive to be fought on a
local level. Activists in other cities would have to be sensitized to the
Program and encouraged to swing into action against it. Between early
November and late December, such contacts had been developed in St. Louis,
Chicago and New York City — all key Mobility cities. All the information
that had been collected in Philadelphia before November was distributed to
community activists in these cities. This action helped uncover massive
amounts of new information about the program, which would have been
impossible to procure on the east coast for various reasons, and which
changed the basic nature of the struggle the activists were waging against
the government.
The Philadelphia housing leaders had fought their campaign between 1976 and
1979 under the assumption that their struggle against the land speculators
and government bureaucracy had an economic base. They understood
“gentrification” perfectly, but thought it had developed because the
speculators were slowly but steadily viewing the land in minority
neighborhoods as some kind of gold mine to be vigorously exploited at any
cost. The information uncovered about the mobility program slowly taught
them that they were entirely wrong, and perhaps this misdirection had
prevented them from realizing any measurable amount of success in forcing
the city or government to start-up housing construction projects in the
city. It is now clear, in 1980, that instead of being economic the manifest
crises that plague inner-city minorities are founded in a problem of
control.
The so-called “gentrification” of the inner-cities, the lack of
rehabilitation financing for inner-city families, the massive demolition
projects which have transformed once-stable neighborhoods into vast
wastelands, the diminishing inner-city services, such as recreation,
health-care, education, jobs and job-training, sanitation, etc.; are all
rooted in an apparent bone-chilling fear that inner-city minorities are
uncontrollable.
Lengthy government-sponsored studies were conducted in the wake of the riots
of the 1960s, particularly after the 1967 Detroit fiasco which cost 47 lives
and was quelled only after deployment of 82nd Airborne paratroopers flown in
from North Carolina which had been commissioned for duty on the emergency
order of then-President Lyndon Johnson. Among intelligence agencies pressed
into service to study the problem was the Rand Corporation. In late
December, 1967 and early January, 1968, Rand was requested by the Ford
Foundation to conduct a three-week “workshop” concerning the “analysis of
the urban problem.” It was “intended to define and initiate a long-term
research program on urban policy issues and to interest other organizations
in undertaking related work. Participants included scientists, scholars,
federal and New York City officials, and Rand staff members.
Johnson also ordered a particularly significant study of the riots to be
commissioned which has led to the emergence of some of the most dangerous
theories since the rise of Adolf Hitler. It was the National Advisory
Commission Report on Civil Disorders, more commonly called the Kerner
Commission Report. Strategists representing all specialities were contracted
by the government to participate in the study. Begun in 1967 immediately in
the wake of the Detroit riot, it was not published until March of 1968. But
only weeks after its emergence, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated and
the most massive wave of riots that was ever recorded in American history
almost forced a suspension of the Constitution.
Samuel Yette reported in his 1971 book, The Choice, that the House
Un-American Affairs Committee, headed by right-wing elements, had put heavy
pressure on Johnson to suspend the Constitution and declare martial law in
the cities. Johnson resisted and instead ordered government strategists to
employ the finest minds in the country to analyze the cause of the revolts
and develop strategies to prevent them in the future.
The workshop participants were asked to prepare and submit papers
recommending “program initiatives and experiments” in the areas of
welfare/public assistance, jobs and manpower training, housing and urban
planning, police services and public order, race relations, and others. The
papers were grouped into four headings, including two called “urban
poverty,” and “urban violence and public order.”
The Kerner Commission strategists came to the conclusion that America’s
inner-city poverty was so entrenched that the ghettoes could not be
transformed into viable neighborhoods to the satisfaction of residents or
the government. The problem of riots, therefore, could be expected to emerge
in the future, perhaps with more intensity and as a more serious threat to
the Constitutional privileges which most Americans enjoy. They finally
concluded that if the problem could not be eliminated because of the nature
of the American system of “free enterprise,” than American technology could
contain it. This could only be done through a theory of “spatial
deconcentration” of racially-impacted neighborhoods. In other words, poverty
had been allowed to become so concentrated in the inner-cities that
hopelessness overwhelmed their residents and the government’s resolve to
dilute it.
This hopelessness had the social effect of a fire near a powderkeg. But if
the ghettoes were thinned out, the chances of a cataclysmic explosion that
could destroy the American way of life could be equally diminished.
Inner-city residents, then, would have to be dispersed throughout the
metropolitan regions to guarantee the privileges of the middle-class. Where
those inner-city minorities should be placed after their dispersal had been
the subject of intense research by the government and the major financial
interests of the U.S. since 1968. In the Kerner Commission Report, Chapter
17 addressed itself to this prospect. Suburbs were its answer: the furthest
place from the inner-city.
A high proportion of the commissioners for the Report and their contracting
strategists were military or paramilitary men. Otto Kerner, himself,
chairman of the Commission, was the Governor of Illinois at the time of the
Report but before that had been a major general in the army. John Lindsey,
Mayor of New York City, had been chairman of the political committee of the
NATO Parliamentarian’s Conference. Herbert Jenkins, before becoming a
commissioner, had been chief of the Atlanta Police Department and President
of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a reputed
“anti-terrorist” organization. Charles Thornton, the fourth of the seven
commissioners, was chairman of the board of Litton Industries at the time he
accepted his commission, one of the country’s chief military suppliers and,
before that, had been general manager of the Hughes Aircraft Corporation —
another major military supplier — and a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, a
trustee of the National Security Industrial Association, and a member of the
Advisory Council to the Defense Department.
The Commission’s list of contractors and witnesses was no less glittering in
military and paramilitary personnel. No less than thirty police departments
were represented on or before the Commission by their chiefs or deputy
chiefs. Twelve generals representing various branches of the armed services
appeared before the Commission or served as contractors. The Agency for
International Development, the Rand Corporation, The Brookings Institute,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, the Institute of Defense Analysis, and the Ford Foundation
all played significant roles in shaping the Commission’s findings.
A hardly-noticeable name listed among the intelligence and military giants
was that of one Anthony Downs, a civilian. Unlike most of the other
contractors, whose names were followed by lines of titles, Downs was simply
listed as being from Chicago, Illinois. His name was to become very
prominent among inner-city grassroots leaders around the country by the end
of 1979. Philadelphia housing leaders had remembered Downs as having been
the author of the so-called “triage” report of 1975 which led to a storm of
controversy at the time.
In his HUD-sponsored study, Downs argued that the inner-cities were
hopelessly beyond repair and would be better off cleared of services and
residents and landbanked. The middle-class should then be allowed to
re-populate these areas, giving them a breath of new life. The activists, in
their rush to uncover information about the Mobility Program, discovered, to
their surprise, that Downs had written Chapters 16 & 17 of the Kerner
Commission Report; the chapters devoted to demographic shifts in the
inner-cities and spatial deconcentration.
Housing activists studying theories of “mobility” and “spatial
deconcentration” stumbled upon yet another “strategist,” also, like Downs,
out of Chicago, named Bernard Weissbourd. Weissbourd wrote two papers in
Chicago in 1968 concerning the crisis of exploding minority inner-city
populations. In one paper, entitled An Urban Strategy, he proposed a
so-called “one-four-three-four” plan. Inner-city minority populations
represented such a growing political threat by their growing numbers, he
argued, that a strategy had to be quickly developed to thin out their
numbers and prevent them from overwhelming the nation’s biggest cities. He
proposed that this be accomplished through a series of federal and private
programs that would financially-induce minorities to migrate to the suburbs
until their absolute numbers inside the cities represented no more than
one-fourth of the total population.
It is not clear if An Urban Strategy was written before the Kerner
Commission Report was released or before the end of the Rand Corporations
“workshop.” Around the same time, however, he wrote another paper entitled,
Proposal for a New Housing Program: Satellite Communities. Weissbourd argued
that the bombed-out inner-city neighborhoods should be completely rebuilt as
“new towns in town” for the middle-class. As in his Urban Strategy paper, he
discussed the threat of explosive inner-city minority populations and their
threatening political power. He suggested that this threat could be repulsed
with the construction of new housing outside the cities for inner-city
minorities. He also suggested that jobs be found for these people in the
suburbs and that “. . . some form of subsidy” be developed to induce them to
leave the inner-cities. It is not clear whether Downs knew Weissbourd or
borrowed his theories in time for his Kerner Commission Report, or if, in
fact, the Report was finished after Weissbourd published his works, although
it is likely, since both worked out of Chicago. It is clear that both
strategists saw American middle-class life-styles as being challenged by the
same explosive, racially-impacted inner-city neighborhoods.
In the same year that Downs had completed his Kerner Commission Report
chapters and Weissbourd published his theories, President Johnson requested
the formation of a research network that could focus on analyses of
inner-city evolution and area-wide metropolitan strategies. This “thinktank”
is called the Urban Institute. Since its founding in 1968, the likes of
Carla Hills, Robert McNamara, Cyrus Vance, William Ruckelshaus, Kingman
Brewster, Joseph Califano, Edward Levi, John D. Rockerfeller, Charles
Schultze and William Scranton, have served as members of its board of
trustees.
The five Blacks who have served, or are serving, are Whitney Young, Leon
Sullivan, William Hastie, Vernon Jordan, and William Coleman; all prominent
middle-class “yes-men.” The board of the Institute has had an interlocking
relationship with the boards of trustees of the Rand Corporation and the
Brookings Institute, both close CIA affiliates. Rand’s Washington office, in
fact, is located in the same building where the Institute has its
headquarters.
The Institute, to say the least, is a bizarre agency. It was supposedly
founded in the spirit of harmony between the races, but has been dominated
by a substantial number of presidential cabinet members and major U.S.
corporations and Universities, such as Yale and Chicago. Worse, the
Institute has conducted a substantial portion of the research that has led
to the development of Mobility Program techniques. Its president, William
Gorham, recently described the agency as a HUD “testing laboratory.” It is
theoretically dominated by the likes of the quasi-military strategists that
dominated the Kerner Commission, especially one John Goodman, the
Institute’s major “mobility” specialist.
In terms of the types of experiments the Institute has conducted over its
short history and the highly-sensitive nature of its research work, it ranks
on a par with the CIA itself. Goodman, for instance, heading a team of
strategists, developed, between 1975 and 1979, a series of experiments to
determine the best way to induce inner-city Blacks and other minorities to
leave the cities. A favorite ploy they developed was housing allowances and
the so-called housing “subsidy” progress, whereby low-income families are
supported in their rent payments, or paid cash grants, if they first agree
to move out. Heavy experimentation was also conducted by the Institute on
tactics that could be used to shape the Section 8 Program into a
counterinsurgency tool against minorities.
In 1970, Downs wrote a little known book called Urban Problems & Prospects,
in which he more graphically detailed the theory of spatial deconcentration.
He developed a bizarre concept in the book entitled “the theory of
middle-class dominance.” According to him, the dispersal of the inner-city
populations to the suburbs could not be successfully completed unless and
until a model of dispersal was developed whereby the artificially-induced
outflow of minorities from the inner-cities would be controlled and directed
to the point that they would not be permitted to naturally reconcentrate
themselves in the suburbs.
This was the heart of the government theory which was later to become the
theory of “integration maintenance.” This type of control had to be
exercised, according to Downs, because white suburbanites would not remain
stable in their bungalows if they were led to suspect that the incoming
Blacks and other minorities were gaining power through their sheer numbers
in the suburbs. The consistent theme of Down’s Problems, Chapters 16 & 17 of
the Kerner Commission Report, and Goodman’s works at the Institute, was that
of control.
The line of thinking about control found reinforcement in another book Downs
wrote in 1973, entitled Opening Up the Suburbs: An Urban Strategy for
America. Down’s theories from the Kerner Commission Report crystalized,
taking as their cue his arguments laid down in Urban Problems. The theory of
white “dominance” was carefully discussed in Suburbs. Included here were
ideas for “. . . a broader strategy,” where “. . .a workable mechanism
ensuring that whites will remain in the majority . . .” were produced. But
Chapter 12 of Suburbs carefully laid down a mechanism which could transform
the theories of his former works into practical application.
The chapter was called “Principles of a Strategy of Dispersing Economic
Integration,” and laid down five basic concepts: 1 — establishing a
“favorable” political climate for the strategy; 2 — creating “economic
incentives” for the strategy; 3 — “preserving suburban middle-class
dominance; 4 — rebuilding inner-cities; 5 — developing a further
“comprehensive strategy.” In outline format, he analyzed each one. He noted
that experiments should be conducted before the strategy was effectuated and
that “. . . more effective means of withdrawing economic support . . . ”
should be developed for the inner-cities to clear the way for landbanking
inner-city neighborhoods.
To the amazement of the inner-city housing leaders across the country,
Down’s theory of “dispersed economic integration” was exactly reproduced in
HUD’s Regional Housing Mobility Program Guidebook, issued six years after
Suburbs, in 1979.
Also by 1977, a mysterious “fair housing” group in Chicago, the Leadership
Council for Open Metropolitan Communities, was contracted by HUD to begin
mobility programming experiments on Black high-rise public housing tenants
in the Southside and Westside. It was called “The Gautreaux Demonstration
Program” and achieved in two years the removal to the far suburbs of 400
families. Materials from HUD’s 1979 review of the Gatreaux experiment are
included in this anthology.
By 1974, the Congress had enacted the Community Development Act. The
legislation fused together the Urban Renewal programs of the Johnson era and
the Revenue Sharing programs of the Nixon Administration. The title to the
Act laid-out its theory: 1 — reduce the geographic isolation of various
economic groups; 2 — promote spatial deconcentration; 3 — revitalize
inner-city neighborhoods for middle and upper-income groups.
It wasn’t until 1975 that point four of Down’s theory in Suburbs, rebuilding
the inner-cities, was fully analyzed. It was done in the form of the
“triage” report, completed under HUD contract while he was still president
of the Real Estate Research Corporation in Chicago; a firm founded by his
father, James, some twenty years before. In this report, Downs made it clear
that he wasn’t projecting the inner-cities being rebuilt for its present
residents — the minorities — but for the white middle-class; the so-called
urban gentry; a theory completely compatible with the Community Development
Act of the previous year, Weissbourd’s 1968 writings, and the Kerner
Commission findings. Under point four in Suburbs, Downs wrote that “. . .
new means of comprehensively ‘managing’ entire inner-city neighborhoods
should be developed to provide more effective means of withdrawing economic
support from housing units that ought to be demolished.”
In his “triage” report, he wrote that Community Development funds should be
withheld from inner-city neighborhoods so as to allow “. . . a long-run
strategy of emptying out the most deteriorated areas. . .” A city’s basic
strategy, he wrote, ” . . . would be to accelerate their abandonment . .. .”
The land having been “banked,” it could be redeveloped for the gentry. He
argued that instead of being given increased services, minority
neighborhoods should be infused with major demolition projects.
When Patricia Harris became Secretary of HUD two years after the enactment
of the Community Development Act and one year after the Section 8 Program
replaced the Section 235 and 236 housing subsidy programs, the General
Accounting Office, under the direction of Henry Eschwege, issued a stinging
review of the Department’s policies. Noting that the Section 8 Program was
the “. . . principal federal program for housing lower-income persons . . .”
the 1978 report suggested, in threatening language, that “HUD needs to
develop an implementation plan for deconcentration . . .” The report argued
that “. . . freedom of choice . . .” was supposed to be the Department’s
“primary intent,” but that top HUD officials were confused about the policy.
HUD, the GAO insisted, was continuing to offer “revitalization” projects in
the inner-cities, which was concentrating poverty in the cities. This
policy, it stressed, was “incompatible” with spatial deconcentration.
In 1979, on the heels of the GAO report came HUD’s Regional Housing Mobility
Program. The introduction of the program was itself bizarre, let alone the
program. The emergence of the program was kept so quiet that virtually no
grassroots community organizations in the country knew of its existence. The
activists in Philadelphia had not even been aware of its existence until
August of that year. It still wasn’t until November that grassroots leaders
encountered an advisory council member to one of the planning agencies —
and that was in St. Louis — who openly admitted that the program’s success
depended on its “invisibility.”
On August 3, 1979, the planning commission directors of 22 pre-selected
regions in the country were asked by HUD to gather in Washington to be
schooled on the mechanics of the program. They were given Guidebooks and
asked to return to their respective jurisdictions and prepare $75,000 to
$150,000 applications for the program. The Guidebook made it clear that
these regions had been specially selected because of their heavy
concentration of inner-city minorities. They were instructed to contact
major civil rights organizations and gain their “input” into the program. It
was not coincidental that the National Urban League was one of the very few
Black organizations that knew of the program’s existence. After all, Vernon
Jordan, its president, sits on the board of trustees of the Urban Institute.
The Guidebook smacks of computer technology and is prepared with
mind-control phrases, such as establishing “beachheads” in “alien”
communities; initiating “. . . a long-term promotion of deconcentration;”
identifying “. . . homeseeker traits which operate . . . on a process of
suppression not selection;” and banking on the “. . . promotion of target
areas” that “. . . will require that natural inclinations be altered.” True
to the Down’s model established in Suburbs and Urban Problems, the Guidebook
carefully analyzes the financial inducements to be used by the government to
force minorities out of the cities and to force uncooperative suburban
landlords to accept the program.
The Guidebook makes it clear that the program is intended for major
expansion by 1982, when its funding base will be switched from
HUD-Washington to an assortment of agencies, interestingly including the
Community Development Block Grant funds, CETA, an the Ford, Rockerfeller and
Alcoa Foundations. The CETA job component clearly traced its theoretical
roots not only to Downs, but also to Weissbourd. The Guidebook also
carefully lays out the use of the Section 8 Program as a primary base for
mobility operations.
Once it became clear to inner-city housing leaders that the Mobility Program
was nothing more than the first in a set of mechanisms the government
intended to use to effectuate the ideas discussed in the Kerner Commission
Report, it was easy to organize concerned people around the issue. It was
actually a relief to some activists that proof had finally emerged of a real
master plan, and not merely another fictionalized account of some remote
possibility.
Less than one month after the Philadelphia leaders had made their final
contacts in Chicago and New York City, a five-city conference was organized
in Washington. Called the Grassroots Unity Conference, and held in January,
1980, it focussed on driving the message home to the government, through
HUD, that the masterplan had been exposed and efforts were being organized
in key regions of the country to stop it.
An almost violent meeting was held between top HUD officials and activists
from Washington, Chicago, St. Louis, New York and Philadelphia during the
two-day conference. A busload of inner-city residents literally invaded the
Urban Institute offices and persuaded its staff to hand over dozens of
documents that further reinforced community leader’s arguments that a
masterplan existed, and that the Mobility Program was merely the first step
in a new series of programs designed to systematically empty the
inner-cities of their minority residents.
The friction slowly being generated between the government and the
inner-city communities over this programming and its exposure has the
potential of producing a major domestic crisis in the U.S. Housing and
community activists have for years been confused about the nature of the
deterioration of the inner-cities. The confusion often led to
disillusionment and bitter dissension that sometimes created malevolent
situations within the inner circles of community leaders and groups. Many
community leaders knew that the government was not an innocent party to the
problems of the cities, but few imagined the close association between it
and private market forces in systematically driving the poor and the Black
out of the cities.
Fewer still realized that the government had helped organize the “control”
strategy from its inception. Now that the masterplan is being slowly
uncovered by the persistent efforts of grassroots leaders and the confusion
within community groups is evaporating, it may not be possible to vent their
anger in non-destructive ways when the tale is finally told.
Some elements of the Black community, for instance, have argued for years
that the government had declared a “secret war” on Blacks in America. Now
evidence exists which makes the point difficult, if not impossible, to
defeat. At least, an innocent observer must ask the question: “What kind of
a government would allow these types of strategies to develop and thrive?”
Even more to the point, one must ask: “How stable can a government be with
such information emerging?” It now seems evident that the Constitution,
which the Kerner Commissioners and the Johnson Administration feared was in
need of special protections, does not apply to all people in America, but
only the white middle class. The only way the government can now disprove
this argument is to abolish all types of mobility programming and the
“thinktanks” that shaped it.
Researchers in all parts of the country who believe the government is
traveling a lethal path are now uncovering major pieces of evidence to show
the elaborate workings of the masterplan. Some of their arguments are
enclosed in Part III of this book, under the title, “The Minority Response.”
Other technical data are enclosed in Part IV and V. Of particular interest
in Part V are the listings offered by the Urban Institute under housing
allowance programs. Section 8 experimentation takes up a good portion of the
available listings. A cursory examination of some of these papers — and in
some instances a mere reading of the project titles — plainly shows the
determination of the government to manipulate the Section 8 Program as a key
instrument to force inner-city residents to move into the suburbs through
the Mobility Program.
It aptly explains why these same researchers created the Section 8 Programs
in the first place. Included in Part IV are lists of Boards of Trustees of
the Brookings and Urban Institutes in Washington D.C. Attempts were made, in
preparation for this edition to include a listing of the Rockerfeller and
Ford Foundation’s Boards of Trustees. These corporations, however, refused
to release their Annual Reports.
The exposure of the Mobility Program’s real intentions will hopefully change
the direction of the government. If not, then the worse can be assumed for
the future of the U.S. because no righteous people on the face of the earth
would or should permit the existence of such policy, even if its
dismemberment means inevitable confrontation or conflagration.
Several aspects of this mobility programming have deliberately been avoided
at this time. Cyrus Vance, for instance, was Deputy Secretary of Defense at
the time of the Detroit riot of 1967 and the initiation of the Kerner
Commission Report. By 1980, Vance was Secretary of State, directly
responsible for at least one organization named in the Report, the Agency
for International Development (AID), widely reputed for its CIA ties. He was
also a trustee of the Urban Institute along with Robert NcNamara, chairman
of the World Bank and former Secretary of Defense under Johnson.
A reasonable question emerges at this point: Why is the military so closely
attached to this mobility programming? Or, worse: What does the military
intend to do in the event that this mobility-type programming fails, and the
Blacks and other minorities remain in large part in the cities into the turn
of the century, and riots create greater so-called threats to Constitutional
safeguards? After all, Downs, himself, stated in Suburbs that he believed
the mobility programming would fail. Is a repeat of the recent history of
Greece or Chile the logical answer to these questions? Did the military, in
1967, issue an ultimatum to the government to remove the Blacks and other
inner-city minorities to Black suburban “townships” in kid-glove fashion,
with the option, in case of failure, being the iron fist? Furthermore, how
could it have been possible for the surgical demolition operations in the
minority neighborhoods of the cities to be so identical in all major
American cities? Could any organization other than the Pentagon have done
this?
These questions have been left unexplored because the weight of available
documentation and the speed with which it is being collected and digested
has been burdensome on anti-mobility forces. Further, this discussion about
the military must be carefully explored by itself because of its obvious
sensitivity. Also left for “Book II” is the discussion concerning the
companion programs of the Mobility Program. Their successful exploration and
revelation may make Watergate look pale by comparison.
