Urban 4-H

Remember the pink-cheeked farm kids in 4-H clubs, fussing over prize pinafores and pulchritudinous pigs? Forget it. These days the largest county 4-H program in the U.S. involves 16,000 young people in Indianapolis, the nation's eleventh largest city. More than a third of the participants are poor, black or both, and when they learn sewing they sometimes discuss black history and make African-style dashikis. They may not know a shoat from a gilt, but they do know that when pork gets to a supermarket, sausage is cheaper per serving than spareribs.

Fool's Sold. Thanks to alert leadership in a growing number of states, during the past five years fully one-third of the nation's 4,000,000 4-H members have been signed up in cities; another third now live in "nonfarm" suburban areas. Youngsters producing blue ribbon bread and corn still exist, but their numbers are declining. "We used to put more emphasis on the chicken than on the child," says Indiana State Leader Edward L. Frickey. "Now we put the blue ribbon on the kid, not the cow."

The change is clear these days on the 214-acre Indiana State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis, reports TIME'S Christopher Cory. Three weeks hence, the annual livestock and home-canning competitions begin. But last week 150 inner-city kids assembled there for the final week of a day camp called The Happening. College Freshman Janet Moore led a group of campers along a back alley just outside the fairgrounds; the black handle of a shiv could be seen bristling from the pocket of one 13-year-old. Passing rusting barrels and abandoned refrigerators, the kids picked up beer cans and trash, identified wildflowers common to abandoned lots: Queen Anne's lace, daisies, dandelions. Another group hiked down a little-used railroad spur, starting rock collections with fool's gold and coal. Many brought the younger brothers and sisters for whom they must baby-sit while their parents work. As they told friends about the camp, enrollment swelled by another 100 kids at week's end.

Winter and summer, 4-H programs now take place in housing projects instead of grange halls. They focus livestock study on guppies and puppies, horticulture on window boxes and seeding bald lawns. Rather than driving tractors, youngsters learn to select, finance and insure used cars. Particularly for poor children, the projects teach what often amount to survival skills. Sewing sessions emphasize patterns that do not require sewing machines; in cooking, recipes feature low-cost staples like powdered milk and eggs. Several Indianapolis clubs have collaborated on programs to eradicate rats.

Hand-Me-Down Idea. Unlike the Boy Scouts and other "informal" educational programs, 4-H is chiefly supported by taxes. On the average, half of 4-H funds come from counties, one quarter each from states and the Federal Government. The paid staffers who direct 4-H's volunteer adult leaders are erstwhile agricultural extension agents of land-grant universities, now licensed to work in cities by having their titles changed to "cooperative" extension agents. The Indianapolis program has begun to get particular help from energetic Republican Mayor Richard Lugar, a onetime 4-H member who has become the Nixon Administration's favorite urban official by trying to solve city problems without major new kinds of federal aid.

Militant blacks often are not impressed. They see 4-H as a hand-me-down idea that leaves fundamental social problems unchanged. Indeed, though 4-H hygiene instruction warns against drug abuse, it still shies from regular discussions of teen-age venereal disease and pregnancy. Neighborhood cleanups rarely zero in on landlords' violations of housing codes. Many 4-H members seem to be ambitious kids who need help least. Compared to the Black Power slogan that it imitates, the bucolic Indiana 4-H motto ("Clover Power") seems more lame than with it.

People Blight. Even so, to come this far 4-H has already moved piles of rural conservatism. Agricultural lobbies, including the purebred cattlemen's associations, mistrust urban 4-H programs because they divert extension experts from the agribusiness. The governing board of this year's Indiana State Fair has not provided space for several displays produced by the new urban projects. Although the fair managers plead that the programs are still too insignificant to be represented, to State Leader Frickey the omission is symptomatic. "They'll have an exhibit on corn blight, and that's fine," he says. "But the time is coming when they're going to have to recognize that we also have a people-blight problem." Some already do. When an Indianapolis club went on a traditional 4-H visit to members' houses in a rural, all-white county, one host mother agreed to take a black 4-H-er but threatened to burn the sheets he used after he left. Impressed by the young blacks who came, she now is eager for another exchange.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.