To the Editor:

In Jervis Anderson’s article [“The Voices of Newark,” October 1967] he states: “When Negroes manage to escape from the Central Ward to the more prosperous South Ward, they exchange ghetto frustrations for open hostility with the middle-class Italians.”

However, Newark’s South Ward has no significant number of middle-class Italians. Known as the Weequahic section, this area, built up approximately forty-five years ago, was from its inception virtually all Jewish. About ten years ago Negroes began moving into the area in large numbers and now the majority of the South Ward is Negro. The rest of the population, however, remains Jewish, not Italian.

Many of the Negroes now moving into the South Ward were originally from the Central Ward; they are moving because their former residences were found to be substandard and were torn down. Instead of replacing these slums with low-cost housing, the city built middle-class apartment houses and is now planning on building a medical school. So for lack of an alternative, landlords and tenants have been forced into the South Ward where real estate and rents are considerably higher than in the Central Ward. Frequently, in order to meet monthly rent payments, several families have been forced to share one apartment, thus causing crowding and giving rise to slums. . . . The forced rapid movement of Negroes into the South Ward has also caused overcrowding of schools, as evidenced by the portable classroom buildings in the playground of the elementary schools of the area.

So the Negroes who have moved from the Central Ward to the South Ward of Newark have merely succeeded in exchanging one ghetto for another.

Joy Schulman
Newark, New Jersey

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Mr. Anderson writes:

I thank Miss Schulman for her correction. The statement she refers to was based on interviews with Negroes living in the Central Ward. I accepted them as credible witnesses since, with varying degrees of accuracy, they can be expected to know something of what happens to other Negroes in their town. The spirit of the statement, in any case, does not rely on a flawless estimate of figures: clearly, my informants considered the need for statistical accuracy, or the fact that other problems exist in the South Ward, secondary to the naming of a grievance they felt strongly about—the hostility that Negroes encounter from middle-class Italians, regardless of their number. This is the main point, and I am glad to see Miss Schulman does not challenge it.

To my mind, at any rate, her correction also indicates that the people with whom I spoke may well have been refreshingly free of a reflex that is somewhat fashionable in many ghetto communities today: that is, they seemed to have made a conscious effort to differentiate and identify the ethnic sources of their displeasure rather than just pinning the whole thing on the Jews.

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