To the Editor:

I read with interest the Guest View by Dr. Arthur Garrison in the March 4 edition of the East Penn Press.

The 1965 Moynihan Report he referenced had a lot to say about the disenfranchisement of our black population.

At the end of slavery, Jim Crow Laws came to personify the system of government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation in the United States.

Within a decade of these laws, the white supremacy campaign had erased the image or viability of a black middle class. Terrorism against blacks such as lynchings, rape, and arson ran unchecked during Jim Crow. These laws were eventually overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet the struggle for equality in education, job opportunity and the right to vote continues in many parts of the U.S. The black middle class remains elusive for many.

Editor Deb Palmieri responded to Dr. Garrison's article and the Moynihan Report with a certain naivete'. She said we need survivors, not victims. People who pull themselves up by the bootstraps to succeed in American society. She went on to describe the hardships of the Irish and Italian American immigrants who worked their way out of the ghetto to become contributing members of society. The Irish and the Italians were not black; they had not been enslaved in the U.S. for two centuries; nor were they subjugated to a Jim Crow-type law. There's little equivalence to the black experience.

A black child born today is indeed less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.

The most recent disintegration of the African American family is due, in large part, to the mass imprisonment of black fathers, mostly for minor drug offenses. These men are part of a growing undercaste, not class, caste permanently relegated, by law, to second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

At this current rate, fewer black families will ever achieve middle class status.

Jane Aylor Fretz

Lower Macungie Township