Urban Marshall Plan
In the early 1980s, Jacob helped develop a plan for urban recovery similar to the 1947 Marshall Plan initiated to assist European nations after World War II. Aid was sought from private sectors to facilitate entry-level job training programs, and Jacob proposed the League give direct assistance from its own resources to poverty-stricken minorities and whites, including housing and job placement. In addition, he recommended the federal government institute full employment through substantial public works and job training programs, and along with other civil rights groups, supported economic pressure in the corporate world to develop markets and jobs for minorities.
The son of a Baptist minister, Jacob was also an adherent of self-help. He promoted SAT tutoring, comprehensive teenage pregnancy prevention, and a male responsibility program for fatherhood, to address issues contributing to the cycle of poverty in the African-American community. Jacob added voter registration, education, and drug control to the League's agenda of priorities.
In contrast to Reagan, George H.W. Bush was initially receptive to Jacob's domestic Marshall Plan proposal, and Jacob welcomed dialogue with the new administration. But Bush's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990 soured the relationship. The early 1990s also saw new court decisions and conservative political pressure against affirmative action policies the Urban League supported.
Read more about this topic: John Edward Jacob
Famous quotes containing the words urban, marshall and/or plan:
“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there.... Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)
“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)