From Birth, hardships begin assault (Alabama)

ORRVILLE -- None of the young men and women gathered outside the dusty old house off Dallas County 33 is paying much attention to the toddler on the porch, even though the child has dumped Chee-tos next to a bag of fire ant killers, has begun to eat off the floor.

"It's all right, let him alone," a large woman says before turning her back and slouching through an open front door into darkness. "It ain't nothin'."

Will Webb is not watching. The 19-year-old Orrville man is talking about responsibility.

"A man who don't work can't eat," he says, though he doesn't have a job. "The truth will set you free," he continues in his litany of truisms. "You can't go to church just for the women. You've got to go for the Lord."

He is interrupted with a question about the toddler, who is now bouncing on the knee of Kim Butler, a friend of Webb's who sits on a wooden bench on the sagging porch. Whose child is this?

Nowhere in Alabama do children and families face more hardship than in the 12 counties that make up Alabama's Black Belt. Children in towns such as Orrville in Dallas County begin life at such a disadvantage that they seldom catch up.

Across the Black Belt in Boligee, and in Selmont, Mosses and Uniontown generations of joblessness, poor schools and racial exploitation have undermined the traditional concept of family. More children are born to single women and girls than to married couples.

The 3,400 children born there each year are more than twice as likely as children in the rest of the state to be born and reared in poverty. They are more likely to live with grandparents because they are more likely to have teen mothers who are unemployed and can't feed them, more likely to have fathers who aren't there to give love, discipline or grocery money.

And they are more likely even expected to grow up to repeat the lives of pregnancy and hopelessness their families have known for generations.

"A child has a child and the cycle begins again," said Susan Keith, who as community justice coordinator for the Dallas County district attorney's office deals with children and young mothers across a five-county Black Belt district. "She'll get on public assistance and begin a life of poverty."

It's a life that threatens the health of babies and their mothers, trapping grandparents in a seemingly endless loop of child rearing, she said.

It is a life that will make those children more likely to do poorly in school and eventually drop out, according to national studies that say the greatest risk to a child's development comes from being raised in poverty with no active father figure. It will make them more likely to fall into drugs and crime, less likely to have health insurance, support themselves and their children, and pay taxes.

More than 6,100 babies born in the Black Belt went home with unmarried mothers from 1998 through 2000. That's 60 percent of the region's newborns, according to a Birmingham News analysis of data from the Alabama Department of Public Health. Among black mothers, the figures are even more numbing. Of the more than 7,500 black children born in the region during that time period, three out of every four a total of more than 5,675 had unmarried mothers. Overall in Alabama, less than a third of children are born to unwed mothers.

And teens account for nearly a third of all births in the Black Belt 3,209 children between 1998 and 2000. Teens birthed about a quarter of all children in the rest of the state.

Social service and education workers say there is little societal pressure in the Black Belt to follow traditional paths of marriage, family and career. In fact, they say, the pressure for many teenage girls is to have babies, stay home and, in some cases, collect food stamps.

Each day, 38-year-old Yvonne Robinson walks out of her home in Union in Greene County and passes whispering women and gawking men on her way to work at a community store in nearby Snoddy. Her neighbors find it strange that she chooses to work, she said.

"People don't want anything," said the divorced mother of four children, ages 9 to 17. "They sit and watch me go to work."

Many of her neighbors don't work because they fear the pay would jeopardize their food stamps, she said.

It's little wonder some choose not to work. The average wage paid is lower in the Black Belt than in the rest of the state. Few available jobs in the region pay a living wage, or offer benefits that allow workers to care for their families. A job making the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, hardly a living for a family, pays less than many parents can receive in government aid.

But much of the aid runs out after awhile. A family with a child can receive about $160 a month in Temporary Aid for Needy Families or welfare. But there is a five-year lifetime limit on that aid, and many of the recipients must work or receive job training.

When it is gone, some are left trying to live on food stamps, which are worth an average of $79 a month. They may try to get disability or some other aid, but they're not trying to get rich on government checks, advocates for the poor say. They know no other way to survive.

And the meager economies in many small Black Belt communities rely on government aid as much as the recipients.

It's especially true in Orrville, a crossroads town of 230 people about 20 miles southwest of Selma. Little is left of the town but a few stores, a few blocks of once-stately homes downtown and, on the outskirts, strings of shanties lining red-dirt roads.

At M&M Grocery in Orrville, 40 percent of the business is paid with food stamps. The woman buying a single can of beer at 10 a.m. on a Friday has to pay cash.

If the social fabric is torn in the Black Belt, few can conceive of ways to mend it. Residents face so many problems chronic unemployment and poverty, poor education, few good jobs, ill health, a history of racism that many people simply accept life as it is, said Dallas County's Keith.

Expectations and aspirations are low, and those who want to break free often must spend time in other places to see that it is possible, said Dana Thomas, a 32-year-old teacher at Choctaw County High School who was born and reared in York in Sumter County. They must see that the whole world is not like this 12-county stretch.

Thomas found a role model at Alabama A&M University in Huntsville. He returned home after graduation, hoping to inspire others, he said. Like many in the region, he doesn't condemn single-mother families. But fathers, married or not, must take on a larger role.

"There have to be fathers that don't want to just sit around," he said. "You need a man around if you want to raise boys. It's hard to get kids to work now, to do anything. I find more people sitting around talking stuff that doesn't make sense."

In a region where so many women are left to fend for themselves and their families, unemployment among females is high. The figure reached 12.6 percent in 2000, much higher than the male rate of 8.9 percent. Nationally, unemployment rates for women and men were nearly the same.

Disability: Almost a third of residents aged 21 to 64 in the Black Belt claim a disability, according to the Census. About a fifth of people in the rest of the state and nation claim such disabilities. Fewer of the Black Belt's disabled residents have jobs compared with the rest of the state or nation.

Single-mother cities: While rates of single-mother households tend to be high in poor, largely black areas throughout Alabama, the trend is exaggerated in the Black Belt. Twenty-one of the 30 Alabama towns with the highest percentage of single mothers are there. The rate of single-mom families in the Black Belt towns of Boligee, Uniontown and Mosses is twice that of Birmingham and its poorest suburbs. No Birmingham-area city ranked in the top 30.

Living conditions: Black Belt residents are twice as likely to lack a car or phone as those elsewhere in the state, and almost twice as likely to live in a mobile home.

Poverty: Of all households in the Black Belt, 37 percent, or more than double the U.S. rate, earn less than $15,000 a year. Of families with an income, 28 percent of those in the Black Belt earn less than $15,000, double the 14 percent in the rest of the state. Four of every 10 children live in poverty.

Children at risk: Over the last five years, Black Belt counties were the worst in the state to raise a child, according to the Kids Count data book, compiled by the advocacy group Voices for Alabama's Children. Wilcox, Dallas and Bullock ranked last, followed by Greene, Perry, Macon and Lowndes.

Crime is a large part of life in some areas of the Black Belt. In Dallas County, for example, the crime rate was higher in 2001 than anywhere in the state, according to data from the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center.

Dallas County reported 109 crimes for every 1,000 residents in 2001. That's more than twice the state average and a quarter higher than that of the city of Birmingham. Dallas led all counties in assaults, burglaries, larcenies and car thefts. It was second in rapes, third in robberies.

Overall, the Black Belt, despite its rural nature, led the rest of the state in per capita homicides, robberies, assaults and burglaries.

Nowatski Rice, 17, spends his summer days sitting beneath a tree in Greene County, watching cars go by and hoping none of the drivers is a gunman.

Not long ago he was a menace, selling drugs and shooting people, he says. Now he has decided that such a life will only lead to death. Rice lives with his mother and grandmother in Mantua, a postcard, picket-fence town just across the Naomi Goodson Bridge from Union. He says some parts of Greene County are more dangerous than the worst neighborhoods Birmingham can claim.

Child support evasion lacks the glaring brutality of drug crimes, but it causes serious harm to children. A higher percentage of parents owe child support in the Black Belt than anywhere else in the state.

For every 100 children living in the Black Belt counties, there are 44 court cases asking for child support. Some of the parents pay regularly. Others won't, or can't.

At times, the mothers show up at Margaret Anne Cross' cramped office and sob. They've seen their ex-boyfriends driving new cars, but the men won't pay child support.

As Hale County's child support enforcement supervisor, Cross and her staff of one try to enforce nearly 2,000 cases of court-ordered support, primarily for poor children in a county that has only 4,650 families.

The story is the same throughout the region. Nine of the 10 heaviest child-support caseloads in the state, per capita, are in Black Belt counties.

Joblessness and lack of industry are the main obstacles to collecting child-support, officials say. You can't garnishee pay from a man who makes his living cutting grass.

Drug-dealing fathers are another aggravation, say officials in Hale and Greene counties. With no proof, and no way to measure illicit income, the judges base child support on minimum wage, or about $173 per month. Even at that, the fathers often fail to pay.

"These are the mothers who call the most because they know the guy has money," said Gloria Mobley, child support supervisor in Greene County. "They come in and say he's got this vehicle, he got this, he got that ... Then he may have two or three children by her, two or three children by another lady, and they come to court and each child may get $10."

In March, the most recent month available, the average support payment in the Black Belt was $8.11 per child.

While drugs wreak havoc on families and communities, government has invested little to treat the Black Belt's addicted.

Several Black Belt counties have no public treatment facilities for drug and alcohol abuse. No clinics, no inpatient hospitals, no group therapy, according to the Alabama Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. Patients who live there are sent to centers in neighboring counties.

At the fleeting moment when an addict realizes he or she wants help, it takes extra effort in the Black Belt. The harder it is to find services, the fewer addicts are helped, said Kent Hunt, director of substance abuse services for the state.

Consider this: Outside the Black Belt, in rural Pike and Elmore counties where the state offers intensive outpatient services, 449 people received drug treatment in 1999-2000, according to Mental Health statistics. That's an amount equal to five treatments for every thousand residents in the counties.

The Black Belt's Macon, Bullock and Lowndes counties offer no treatment within county lines. As a result, only 93 people, or two for every thousand residents, got help.

"No matter which social service you look at," Hunt said, "It doesn't take very long to decide that deprived areas are deprived in social services as well."

In Perry County's Uniontown, Glen White, 67, has started the city's first chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, a group that draws six or seven residents a session. It needs to grow, he said. "With the alcoholics and addicts we've got here, we should have a full house every night."

Uniontown wasn't consumed by drink and drugs when people had jobs. When the canning and steel fabrication plants closed, and the public housing projects brought the rural poor into town, the city began to slide, White said.

White said younger blacks lack the work ethic of his generation. "You can't hire anybody to cut the grass in your yard," he said. "They just ride, ride around town."

Few people in the Black Belt question their sorry station in life, said Thomas, the teacher from York. They are a product of generations of history, from slavery through the civil rights movement, when white landowners kicked black sharecroppers off their land if they had the gall to register to vote.

A "keep'em ignorant" strategy has been employed through the years, said Thomas, who is black. And it didn't end when blacks seized political control of the region.

When he got his first teaching job a few years ago, he was given advice that horrified him.

"I was told, `Don't teach them anything if you want to be a success,'" he said. "`The less they know, the better you are.'"

That attitude forms an important link in the chain that binds the Black Belt, restraining families, futures and hopes, he said. The troubles are so overwhelming that few political or business leaders know where to start.

"I'll come back to take care of my family, but I've got to go," he said. "There aren't any jobs."

Besides, he said, "People are crazy down here." News staff writers Carla Crowder and Marie A. Jones contributed to this report.

Few available jobs in the region pay a living wage, or offer benefits that allow workers to care for their families. A job making the minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, hardly a living for a family, pays less than many parents can receive in government aid.

If illegal immigrants went home, fewer workers would cause salaries to rise, and we could end most poverty in America.

And without the glut of immigrant labor, salaries would likely rise above current minimum wage, thereby nullifying any need for minimum wage laws and the use of our tax money to pay for the government beauracracy behind it.

We'd also seriously reduce the need to use our tax money for welfare, because most citizens would earn a living wage.

I wish black people would wise up and start demonsrating against immigration.

any thoughts

Well its hard, but the government should help, but seriously help these people, throwing food stamps and rewarding single mothers with aid for children only adds to the problem.

People get settled into a way of life, living from cheque to cheque, then manage to get by on the minimum, or getting deeper into poverty, by having more children or borrowing from local money lenders.

A type of National Service (minimum 3 years) could teach the young people discipline, and could also be set up to give them an education and a trade which will help them when they get out of the poverty trap and give them some self esteem.

This of course would have to be compulsary unless you had a permanent job or were in Full time education already.

The government would save money, as it would limit the number of single parent families, thereby saving the child aid and would also limit the crime, saving the local goverment on crime prevention and prison costs.

Less crime on the streets would give new confidance to the local people, and possibly inspire them to start small businesses.

The children going to school would not have the young men who hang on street coners huselling, as role models, but rather, hard working people and brothers and sisters in the National Service, who would tell them stories of there travels and education, hopefully starting a new wave of inspiration in the young.

We have to start somewhere, and not doing any thing is unforgivable. If we take a moment to look around the world at what happens when poverty is ignored (Afghanistan, Somalia, Palistine, South Africa, Phillipines) we would and should take a more serious view, no matter what colour, ethnic backround or religion we are.

I agree with the comment on Sharpton and Jessie,it seems "Talk is Cheap", and money is what it is all about, but you also find this double standard in other religions, for example some religious organisations are the largest land owners in certain countries and own billions of $$ in companies, but then tell you to give generously.

I also would consider that a percentage of lottery profits should be given to help re-energize the inner city areas, and pay for the start up of the National Service, after all, they are our inner cities.

"It's time we forgot the "ME" for the "WE"

If illegal immigrants went home, fewer workers would cause salaries to rise, and we could end most poverty in America. And without the glut of immigrant labor, salaries would likely rise above current minimum wage, thereby nullifying any need for minimum wage laws and the use of our tax money to pay for the government beauracracy behind it.

This is unquestionably true. I've said it myself. But there is one thing we're forgetting: most of these illegal immigrants are willing to work, and work hard. They know how lucky they are to be in this country on any terms. I'm sorry to say that these poor black people are not in the same situation. Witness the lady in the article, who is regarded by her neighbors as distinctly odd because she chooses to work. Many Spanish immigrants are quite contemptuous of blacks because they perceive poor blacks as being lazy.

Of course government is partially to blame by providing so much assistance--and by extension, liberals are partially to blame for urging such stupid policies upon the government. These problems have always existed for blacks, ever since the end of the War Between the States. They have certainly intensified horrifically since 1964, however.

Saying that the government is to blame absolves the real culprits of their responsibility. I blame the women who spread their legs for these worthless "men," knowing that their boyfriends won't marry them and can't help support the inevitable children. We may blame government, or the liberals who foisted their stupid social-engineering experiments on government, but this implies that people aren't responsible for their own actions. And they are.

Once again...you look for the government to answer the problem with a program. When you are dealing with people who don't have the gumption to get out of bed before noon...what the hell can you do for them if they are satisfied with their lot in life? I honestly don't have an answer...all i can do is smugly shoot down anything someone's suggests.....no fathers in the household is the biggest problem i see....but then again, with generations of deadbeat no-shows...who sets the example? the so called black leaders of America??? Well that's funny....Jessie's already got a kid he won't spend much time with. It's probably good thing that he doesn't influence this child come to think of it.

unquestionably true . . . . But there is one thing we're forgetting: most of these illegal immigrants are willing to work, and work hard.

Then let them go back and work hard at straightening out their own country.

If citizens are still "lazy" after labor rates rise, that's then a separate problem for which something should be done.

But fixing one problem by creating different, bigger problems, is not fixing anything.

And by the way, it's not just poor blacks who are lazy. There's plenty of degreed white professionals who are lazy too (like many here who spend time posting whiile their employers are paying them to work).

As for energetic immigrants, I've noticed that college educated white collar legal immigrant kids were getting the same snotty work attitude as native born American kids during the late 1990's.

I suspect laziness can be caused by prosperity as much as laziness can cause poverty.

Well it is easier to critise than agree with someones, point of view.

It seems you ask for suggestions, then shoot them down, very typical of today's society.

The government will help, but they will be the ones paying the money indefinately if they do not, and the crime will increase and everyone will be effected (White and Black)

Yes, these people have had no father figure role models to look up to for generations. but then who's fault is that?

The government of the US stated slavery was OK.

As a slave you did not have a personal identity, and the slave masters would put the fittiest men with the women,(not to let them have pleasure, but to increase the slave stock of the master), there were no marriages, and no education.

So if you do this for a few hundred years, can we really expect them to know any different, without educating them properly? (I am not a racist, just trying to make a point).

The only way to help, is to forceably start the National Service (We are not sending them off to fight wars, it would not be an army, as such) and as I said, to do nothing is unforgiveable.

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