Carter Decries ‘2 Americas,’ Urges Vast Inner-City Effort

Claiming that the United States has degenerated into “two Americas,” former President Jimmy Carter made an emotional bid in Los Angeles Tuesday to launch a nationwide effort, which he calls Project America, to dispel the “hopelessness” he believes Americans feel about inner cities.

Carter said he and Rebuild L.A. Co-Chairman Peter Ueberroth will be meeting with President-elect Bill Clinton and key cabinet members to suggest new approaches to inner-city problems that call for vast new government coordination alongside private volunteer efforts--but little public expenditure. He said he expects the meeting to take place as soon as Clinton names his Cabinet.

Speaking without notes in strong, plain language, Carter reached out to a dozen groups--ranging from conservative bankers and corporate heads to movie stars and ghetto parents--to inspire them to get directly involved in improving inner cities. His message, blunt but hopeful, reached across partisan lines during his two-day trip here.

“I think it might be good that the disturbances or riots took place in Los Angeles,” he said to a burst of surprised applause at an elementary school in Watts Tuesday. “It woke up America to the fact that there are two Americas. . . . We have slowly but surely built two New Yorks, two Washingtons, two Los Angeleses, two Atlantas. And quite often, they don’t even know each other.”

On one side, he said, are rich people who don’t know their maids’ last names until they write their paychecks--let alone invite their children to join theirs for a trip to the beach. On the other side, he said, are people who have lived in poverty so long they are unaccustomed to being asked even to give opinions about programs designed for their benefit.

Rich people, he said, are no longer just people “with large bank accounts.” Instead, he said, the wealthy in America can be redefined as people who own a home, or have a job--people who believe “the police are on their side.”

As he spoke, Arco Chairman Lodwrick M. Cook sat behind him on a wooden stage at the 112th Street Elementary School. Cook, a staunch Republican, is chairman of the board of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He said he came to know Carter last year after helping finance his trip to Los Angeles to attend the opening of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Cook also helped finance Carter’s trip here.

“I hope this is not just another program,” said Cook, who was visibly moved by Carter’s appeal. “After Watts, I got involved and what we did kind of petered out. . . . This time, we’ve got to get you involved-- you involved--one on one. If not, there’s going to be a breakdown of society which none of us wants.”

Project America, introduced by Carter in a brief news conference Tuesday with little fanfare and no news releases, was described afterward by an aide as a “movement” Carter hopes to inspire.

The project is an outgrowth of his Project Atlanta, a program developed a year ago to “prove that somewhere in God’s world, we could successfully address the problems of the inner cities,” as Carter put it.

Under the program, individual corporations have adopted an inner-city “cluster community.” Over 100,000 volunteers are being assigned concrete, manageable tasks.

“We tell them what to worry about and, just as important, what not to worry about,” Carter said.

He admitted that he and other public officials often have felt a “hopelessness” when signing new laws designed to ameliorate drug abuse, teen pregnancy, welfare dependency and other difficulties afflicting urban areas. He said that while he has traveled extensively since leaving office in 1980 in the name of improving conditions worldwide, he lost touch with conditions in America’s inner cities.

For example, he said he thought tuberculosis and measles epidemics had been eradicated--until epidemics broke out close to home. He thought he understood teen pregnancy--until an Atlanta social worker told him that sixth graders were getting pregnant. He thought Social Security was every man’s right--until a girl told him her grandfather couldn’t get checks because he had no address.

“I’ve learned a lot about my neighbors, who I thought I was serving in the past,” he said. As for the future, he said, “our goal is to let the people who live in those communities run them instead of having a bunch of rich white folks and black folks going down there and saying, ‘We know what you need, we’re going to open you another health clinic.’ ”

Carter said he hopes to convince Clinton and Congress of the need for legislation to allow a handful of American cities to be used for experimental programs to do such things as cut back 40-page Medicare forms and allow volunteers to rehabilitate abandoned federal housing.

Carter pointed, for example, to prohibitions stemming from conflicts between church and state that make it impossible for volunteer church groups to refurbish deteriorated public housing units in Atlanta that stand empty because they are uninhabitable.

He also challenged universities, hospitals, media and religious congregations to get involved directly in their communities.

Carter, who leaves Los Angeles today, met at former MCA executive Lew Wasserman’s home with a group of the city’s power elite ranging from bank executives to movie stars, among them politically liberal Barbra Streisand and politically conservative Tom Selleck.

Said one Hollywood figure who attended a Carter event Monday: “He has the potential to ignite something here. And he is doing it basically by giving a speech about class. It’s pretty amazing.”

His message resonated strongly with Rebuild L.A., which was stung last week by revelations that a quarter of the companies Ueberroth announced as planning to make major investments in Los Angeles had no such plans.

Carter reportedly noted in the closed-door meeting with Rebuild L.A. that the Los Angeles organization and, to a lesser degree his own Atlanta Project, have been criticized for not making change happen faster. He stressed that change will happen slowly--”in five, 10 or 20 years.”

Ueberroth said after the closed session that Carter “wanted to form a permanent link” between the Atlanta Project and Rebuild L.A., and that Rebuild L.A. agreed.

“What we did was forge a commitment to each other,” he said.

Said Carter: “My belief is that the leaders of the Atlanta Project and the leaders of Rebuild L.A. will join forces on a bipartisan basis or nonpartisan basis and take what we know, what we fear and what we hope to the new Administration in Washington and try to shape government policies.”