Even
more serious throughout the whole country than the care of the
infants whose mothers are at work is the protection of the school
age child, the "door key children" who roam the streets
by day and by night without parental supervision.
Mothers
will make some sort of provision for the baby, however inadequate,
but the fate of the school child was summed up for me by a woman
taxi driver, "I have five children under 14 years of age.
My mother takes care of the youngest, but the older ones go
to school, so they have to take care of themselves:"
.
. . [T]he schools at Inkster, Wayne, and other small villages
already have two or three sessions daily of three hours each.
InYpsilanti, although there are no double sessions, there is
overcrowding of 170 per cent. A new school of six rooms was
constructed in the township which was immediately filled with
over 400 pupils. Even with the best teaching, education under
such conditions is a farce. In Inkster the stove in the colored
school was defective. This school had to be closed during cold
weather. The truancy rate in some districts has gone up 300
per cent….
Zoot
suiters can be found in most of the larger American cities .
. . but they seem to be most numerous and most annoying to the
authorities in Los Angeles and Detroit. The movement is not
new. It has developed out of groups whose main objective was
enjoyment of expressional orgies in the fitter bug dance, and
for a large number of participants it still retains this meaning.
In
some places this orgiastic tendency increased in vehemence and
intensity. The original enjoyment of the dance was replaced
by an interest in tough guy behavior, in alcoholic excesses,
in uninhibited and ostentatious sex behavior.
