Ypsilanti's Slum Children of 1939

Note: The photos illustrating this 1939 Ypsilanti Daily Press story are of Depression- era children, but not Ypsilanti children.

Slum Conditions Seen in Homes of Nursery Group

It is difficult to realize the need of such an institution as the Nursery School here in Ypsilanti. On the surface there seems to be little dire poverty but a very little investigation will prove this a misapprehension. A trip with Mrs. Charles Lamb, director of the project, into the homes from which the children come shows than in Ypsilanti there are people living in housing and general economic conditions which it would be hard to find surpassed in a large city.

The average rent that a family living on WPA wages can pay is about $12 a month, it has been estimated, and for that amount it is almost impossible to find good living quarters here. There are many instances of family groups consisting of ten to 12 members living in one or two rooms, often above stores so that children have no place to play except the streets. Others are living in shacks without adequate heating facilities, without proper sanitation and without a means of obtaining adequate fresh water. This latter condition is especially true of a subdivision east of the city just off Ecorse Rd. where there are a hundred or so people, all of whom must go more than half a mile to a gas station to obtain water which they carry home in pails and which, before the day is over, becomes very stale and unfit to drink.

There are people in Ypsilanti also who are living on an absolute minimum of food, according to welfare authorities--an amount and quality upon which adults are able to subsist but which is not adequate for growing children. One case in point is that of a tiny child at the nursery school who after eating all she could hold at dinner at school sighed happily and said, "This is so good. I won't even be hungry when I get home." Upon questioning she told that her father would not allow her anything to eat at home because there were older children who were not in the nursery school and who had to be fed their one meal a day from the family income, which would not cover the child in nursery school.

While the children are playing happily together or scrapping healthily it is very difficult to realize the conditions from which some of them come. No one would guess what one little four year old with the big brown eyes, soft dark hair and angelic pale face was almost starving only a few months ago when her father deserted her, her mother and two sisters and left them in a one room tar paper shack in a subdivision near Ypsilanti without means or support.

It seems almost impossible that a sprightly boy, just three and full of mischief enough for twice his years, comes from a tumble-down unpainted two room shed in the northeast section of town where he exists in absolute poverty with his parents and numerous brothers and sisters, without furniture or bedding, except a few rags, and without seeing the slightest attempt at beauty of cleanliness until he gets to school.
And then there is a fragile little three-year-old girl with enormous eyes in a pinched, two-old face. She hasn't been at the school long enough to forget the too-soon-learned tragedy of her home environment--her young mother has a fatal disease which has doomed her to death in a short time.

Perhaps one of the most amazing personalities among the children is a sparkling four-year-old girl with round black face, mischievous eyes and irrepressible pig tails sticking up all about her well shaped little skull. She is the only child of a family of several who is still left with her mother who is considered an incorrigible moral delinquent. The older children have been taken from their mother by social agencies and this one may be very soon as the environment in the home is considered absolutely degenerate. Fortunately the child is still too young to realize the conditions in which she lives--she still chuckles and beams, plays puckish pranks and thinks the world is a fine place and nursery school just made for her. She loves to "dress up" in "party dresses" and big hats from the cardboard box of old costumes with which the children play. When she dresses up she puts on a song and dance show for the other children and they love it. She is only one of the many underprivileged children in the first ward.

Among the saddest stories are those of the children above the stores in the business section of town. One from which one of the nursery school babies comes consists of two rooms reached after a long, hazardous trek up a dirty stairway, through a dark, loose-boarded hall past several store rooms. The father works a few days a week but he likes to drink too well. He seems to like drink better than he does this boy or his two brothers or his baby sister who is making what looks like a losing fight to recuperate from pneumonia. There is practically no furniture in these two rooms and no bedding on the dirty mattress-covered beds.

Story after story could be told, for nearly every one of these children playing so contentedly together in their clean, bright basement rooms at Woodruff School comes from a home environment similar if not worse then those of the cases cited.

--April 6, 1939 Ypsilanti Daily Press


Photos:

"The Children of Erskine Place" by F. Oswald Barnett
Uncredited, but I believe this is a photo by Walker Evans
Uncredited photo labeled "Rirl and mother"
Uncredited photo labeled "The Malone children; five children, teen boy with teen girl and young girls at the edge of a corn field; barefoot and coveralls"
Uncredited photo labeled "depression"