Care for Needy Before Building Playgrounds, Says Editor, March 23, 1921

The Goodfellows Club of this city is an unusual organization, as has often been pointed out, engaged in a most praiseworthy sort of effort, but what even this great band of business and professional men is doing for the alleviation of distress and need in this community his hardly more than scratching the surface. Moreover, what the Associated Charities is doing, an organization that gives itself exclusively to these ministrations of mercy, is only touching the situation in its peak places. There is opportunity, there is an insistent demand, for a greater attention to the cases of need and poverty and sickness among the poorer and more unfortunate classes of the people of this community.

Charlotte has no more than its proportion of this sort of people, perhaps less, but it does have them and it has a duty to render to them. “The poor we have with us always” has become a classic of complacency. We accept the fact of poverty in our midst as foreordained, as conclusive and as beyond our power to remove. It is nothing of the sort. It has rather been placed here as a challenge to the great constructive forces of this community, as a test of their public spirit, as a means for displaying their charity and good-will.

Just at this time the poor are being emphasized in their needs. Owing to somewhat general unemployment, there has developed a growing demand upon public charity. Husbands and fathers who have been employed are now unable to find work with which to support their wives and children. There are scores of such instances where the father and wage-earner is sick and unable physically to work. The outcome of these unfortunate conditions is that there are hundreds of cases where a little money would bring not only good cheer and better spirits, but it would bring the actual necessities of life, the things that the body requires for its sustenance.

The Associated Charities is doing a wonderful work. We sometimes wish it would change its name so that a lot of indifference now being manifested toward it might be removed and much of the prosaic unconcern for its great constructive work might be taken away. It is reaching every day hundreds of homes in Charlotte, taking bread and meat to them and clothing and facilities for getting along along comfortably, but its lack of revenue prevents it from taking up many a case that is altogether worthy.

The city gives the organization $1,500 for this work. It ought to give five or ten times that much. If government is for anything at all, it is to get in touch with the people and to bring them benefactions. Government is not merely a series of prohibitions, or a squad of policemen and firemen, or paved and well-lighted streets and a well-kept set of books. Those who constitute the government are just as much the guardians of the public welfare as they are the custodians of the public’s taxes. We wish we could get away from that old, worn-out conception of government as being something that provides material advantages only, totally apart from the better materials out of which comforts and happiness and a contended citizenship are fashioned.

Here in Charlotte we have an administration giving $1,500 a year to relieve the suffering and distress among the poor and the deprives, $5,000 a year for the maintence of the public library and then hundreds of thousands for other departments that are protecting life and property or building streets.

And to make the case more startling in contrast, we are proposing to raise a fund of $25,000 to enable the children of the city to have adequate parks and playgrounds, a worthy cause and a movement for which the community deserves credit, but so long as there are hundreds of people, including among them a lot of little children, who need proper nourishment and medical care and attention, it looks to be a strange economy to spend all this money for play purposes. Let’s get things back in line and mete out our alms and our taxes in keeping with the actual, fundamental needs that exist.

From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Wednesday afternoon, March 23, 1921