The CHAIRMAN. I have a copy of the letter here. I will read a paragraph from it and ask you about it. He starts off by saying-and I am going to let this letter, after you identify it, be made an exhibit and also identify his reply thereto and then I will ask questions about it. Are those photostatic copies of the letters?

Reverend BRAZIER. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well.

Let the first one from Mr. Berry be made exhibit 219A and the other 219B.

(Documents referred to were marked "Exhibit Nos. 219A and 219B" for reference and may be found in the files of the subcommittee.) The CHAIRMAN. In the letter from Mr. Berry to you on January 25, it says:

Our evaluation of The Woodlawn Organization youth manpower demonstration project has revealed the need for corrective measures to be taken immediately by TWO in order to strengthen the management of the project and to insure the total test of the project design.

The following requirements are being made by the Office of Economic Opportunity regarding this project.

The letter is dated January 25, 1968.

Item No. 3:

T.W.O. must make its enrollment procedures to guarantee that all students meet eligibility requirements. Our investigations disclosed one ineligible student in the program. The student had falsely represented his age to project officials. He was dropped from the program several months ago.

One eligibility requirement is that the enrollee must be out of school at least six months. The professionals associated with the project will be assigned the responsibility of verifying such requirements.

Then item 4 says:

T.W.O. will be held responsible for the conduct and performance (underscored) of all staff and enrollees on training premises and program assignments. This responsibility will not be delegated to nonprofessionals.

Number 5: Bonus or incentive allowances to staff enrollment or enrollees attendance shall be discontinued immediately.

Did I quote this correctly?

Reverend BRAZIER. I think you did, Senator.

The CHAIRMAN. Now I quote from your reply of February 2, Item 4, on page 2, of your reply, you say, and I quote:

T.W.O. will be held responsible for the conduct and performance of all staff and enrollees on training premises and program assignments. This responsibility will not be delegated to the nonprofessionals. T.W.O. will be required to establish and enforce standards and rules of conduct for all the nonprofessionals and enrollees.

Moreover, consistent attendance and training progress shall be a condition of continuing in the program.

Now you say:

This requirement in our opinion does not strengthen the management of the project nor does it ensure the total test of the project design. While T.W.O. recognizes its responsibilities as the grantee, responsibility for conduct and performance of subprofessional staff and enrollees on training premises and program assignments must be delegated to the subprofessionals.

If this kind of responsibility cannot be delegated the program will be so radically altered that it will become nothing more than another standardized youth-serving project.

In that event, T.W.O. will no longer wish to continue to operate the program and would request that we be released from any further fiscal or programmatic responsibility and that the program be transferred to another grantee.

What did you consider unreasonable in the direction given in Mr. Berry's letter?

Reverend BRAZIER. It was not a matter of unreasonableness, Senator. It was a matter of the lack of understanding that Mr. Berry had as it relates to this youth population.

This population is identified very closely with its leadership, for good or for bad. This is not germane at this point. They do identify very closely. There is not a professional that I know of that we could hire who would say that he is at that particular point in time respon sible for the conduct of the youth in the center.

To have center chiefs, to have instructors and say to these instructors and center chiefs, "You have no responsibility, all you have to do is be here," we thought would be a handout program.

We did not want to be associated with a handout program. The idea behind this experimental program was to give these youth responsibility, not just to have them sitting around in centers playing the part of a center chief with a title with no responsibility.

We said to the center chief, "You have a responsibility to see to it that this program work effectively. It is your responsibility to see to it that order is maintained in these centers.

"It is your responsibility to see to it that the instructors are performing their duties.

"It is not the basic education supervisor's responsibility it is the center chief's responsibility to order materials, to requisition ma

terials."

We tried to give them responsibility. Then to say this responsibility cannot be delegated, all you do is sit here and collect your weekly salary, to my mind was injurious to the project or to the entire experimental program and as I said, TWO would then wish to have the funds deobligated and have the whole program transferred to another grantee because the whole program design would have been so altered it would have been a useless venture.

The CHAIRMAN. That means that for the conduct of the supervision of the instruction, for the conduct of the centers, the behavior and so forth that went on in these centers, that responsibility for supervising was to be delegated to the subprofessionals?

Reverend BRAZIER. They were to assume a certain amount of that responsibility, definitely.

The CHAIRMAN. Now who were the subprofessionals?

Reverend BRAZIER. The subprofessionals were the youth leaders. The CHAIRMAN. These people up here on the chart were subprofessionals.

Reverend BRAZIER. Yes, that is correct. One or two are not up I don't know some of those people.

there.

The CHAIRMAN. In other words, this was to be a program controlled and run, supervised primarily by leaders of these two youth gangs? Reverend BRAZIER. Definitely not, Senator. This was not a program controlled and run by these leaders. What we are saying is that the Woodlawn Organization controlled this program, it controlled the fiscal management of the program, it controlled the programmatic features of the program.

But we did give responsibility to these youth when we hired them. What was the use of hiring them, Senator, if we were not to give them responsibility?

The CHAIRMAN. I don't know. That is what we are trying to find out. If this is a project such as you say, what you do is go out and hire people who are heads of gangs and who are given to violence and indulge in violence as you know these gangs do. That is one of your problems. If we are going to hire them and put them in charge of these things and pay them Federal funds and delegate to them the authority to control it

Reverend BRAZIER. Not complete delegation.

The CHAIRMAN. That is what he says.

Reverend BRAZIER. No, that letter meant that no authority-
The CHAIRMAN. He says-

Responsible for the conduct and performance of all staff, for the conduct and performance of all staff and enrollees on training premises and program assign

ments.

Reverend BRAZIER. If he had stopped there, Senator McClellan, that would have been great. We would have assumed that responsibility. But when he said, "You cannot delegate any of this responsibility"

The CHAIRMAN. That is right. He says

T.WO. will be held responsible for the conduct and performance of all staff and enrollees on training premises and program assignments

Then he says

This responsibility will not be delegated to the nonprofessionals.

Reverend BRAZIER. We objected to that.

The CHAIRMAN. That is right.

T.W.O. will be required to establish and enforce standards and rules of conduct for the nonprofessionals and enrollees.

Reverend BRAZIER. We went along with that.

The CHAIRMAN.

Moreover, consistent attendance and training progress shall be a condition of continuing in the program.

Reverend BRAZIER. We went along with that.

The CHAIRMAN. Let us see what your reply was. This is what you said

This requirement

Reading from your letter

This requirement in our opinion

You quoted No. 4 just ahead of it-you said then

This requirement in our opinion does not strengthen the management of the project nor does it ensure the total test of the project design.

While T.W.O. recognizes its responsibility as the grantee, responsibility for conduct and performance of subprofessional staff and enrollees on training premises and program assignments must be delegated to the subprofessional. Reverend BRAZIER. Senator, that is a good statement.

The CHAIRMAN. I am taking it from your point of view.

That means that while you had the overall responsibility for the actual present supervision, control and management was to be delegated to these subprofessionals, is that right?

Reverend BRAZIER. Yes. But let me explain this. You have a center chief, Senator.

The CHAIRMAN. I know you do.

Reverend BRAZIER. All right. Let me go into a factory. You have a factory manager

The CHAIRMAN. I am sorry, I have to run down and vote in another committee.

(Members present at the taking of a brief recess: Senators McClellan, Muskie and Curtis.)

(Members present at the time of reconvening after a brief recess: Senators McClellan and Muskie.)

Reverend BRAZIER. I was trying to illustrate, Senator, that if you have a factory manager who is responsible for production and conduct in this plant, certain kinds of authority that he delegates to his foreman and his subforemen.

Now what the Woodlawn Organization was saying in my response was that we recognized our responsibility as the grantee.

The only part that we dealt with was that as a responsible grantee we were being asked not to delegate responsibility to people we were paying to assume responsibility.

were paying these people $6,500 a year to assume

Now we responsibility.

The CHAIRMAN. Were you not paying people who had demonstrated complete irresponsibility?

Reverend BRAZIER. We took into this program people who had demonstrated they had difficulty in adjusting to our society and problems with the law.

There is no doubt about it, Senator.

The CHAIRMAN. Let me ask you this in all fairness

Reverend BRAZIER. I would like to point out that the Woodlawn Organization was not saying we were abdicating our responsibility. We were saying it was not possible for us to function in this program if people whom we hired to assume responsibility, that we would have to say to them, "Now you have no more responsibility." It doesn't make

sense.

The CHAIRMAN. Let me ask you this. I know the theory you are proceeding under. Now we take gang leaders like this. I think you know that in gang operations-we don't have to go into detail about the nature of the operations; you know what they are as well as I do-in these operations we have a project where the Federal Government is spending money to take them and put them in a place of responsibility to control a program of this character.

Reverend BRAZIER. No, sir. You used the wrong word.

The CHAIRMAN. What is your word for it?

Reverend BRAZIER. I am saying that we gave them limited responsibility. We did not give them control of this program nor did we give them control of the centers.

The CHAIRMAN. When I say control, maybe that is not the right word, but what does it mean when you say you delegated to them the responsibility for the conduct of the program? What did that mean?

Reverend BRAZIER. This meant that if our center was going to be disrupted by fighting, if our center was going to be disrupted by activity that was not conducive to what our programmatic designs were and that center chief was not able to control his center, then it was our opinion that that center chief should be removed.

The CHAIRMAN. You had the full responsibility then?
Reverend BRAZIER. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. You were refusing to accept it in this letter.

Reverend BRAZIER. I am accepting the full responsibility. What I am trying to say is that as the organization who had the programmatic responsibility we did delegate some responsibility to others. Like the Woodlawn Organization delegated responsibility to the project director. It delegated responsibility to its basic education people, we also had to delegate some responsibility to the youth we had.

It would not make sense to hire people and put them in the program and tell them you have no responsibility, this all rests on the Woodlawn Organization's back. We would not have had a program.

It would have been chaos.

The CHAIRMAN. You take the position that you would not want Woodlawn to be held responsible if they failed?

Reverend BRAZIER. I am saying that if we could not delegate certain responsibility to the youth whom we hire, what is the use of having a program?

The CHAIRMAN. Listen to his letter. He says here in item 6:

We reaffirm our earlier warning that T.W.O. is responsible for enforcing the requirement that alcoholic beverages, drugs, violence, or dangerous weapons on the training premises will not be tolerated. Violators will be dismissed immediately.

Then here is your answer.

T.W.O. will comply with requirement 6. However, we comply with requirement 6 with the understanding that the best control

That is your word.

Reverend BRAZIER. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. I had been using it, you said it was the wrong word

best control for enforcing this requirement is delegation of the responsibility for enforcement to the subprofessional center chiefs.

Reverend BRAZIER. I maintain that to be correct, Senator. I maintain that if you get a good center chief and he means to do a job, the best control to keep weapons out of those centers is for that center chief to tell his boys, "Don't you bring any guns in here."

If he tells them that, they won't bring any in.
The CHAIRMAN. "I will beat your heads off?"

Reverend BRAZIER. I don't go so far as to say he will beat their heads off. I am saying this is beyond the experience of many members of this committee, it is beyond my own experience. The fantastic amount of control that the leaders of these youth have over their members, and it is not necessarily, as far as I have been able to see, just sheer force, because some of the leaders who have tremendous followings look to be rather small in stature.

It does not seem that they are leaders because of their fistic ability. It is just something about their ability to lead that these people are following.

The CHAIRMAN. Following them in what direction?

Reverend BRAZIER. Before this program, I am saying that the direction they were taking was not the right direction. We understand that. The CHAIRMAN. Since the program?