The Week

Equal time for Mary Jo.

Mayor Richard Hatcher, the great black hope of Gary, Indiana, has some strange buddies: the city’s youth gang leaders. Or so says City Councilman Dozier T. Allen Jr., chairman of a committee investigating the gangs, who charges that gang leaders attended a meeting in Hatcher’s home at which each person present was asked to pledge $100 for the Mayor’s re-election campaign next year. Allen says the city had three street gangs when Hatcher was elected and now has twenty. The attack on Hatcher is hardly a honky plot: Allen’s committee was set up at the urging of the NAACP, and just two weeks ago an NAACP youth leader who had charged Hatcher with being soft on gangs was severely beaten in a parking lot.

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Equal time for Mary Jo.

Mayor Richard Hatcher, the great black hope of Gary, Indiana, has some strange buddies: the city’s youth gang leaders. Or so says City Councilman Dozier T. Allen Jr., chairman of a committee investigating the gangs, who charges that gang leaders attended a meeting in Hatcher’s home at which each person present was asked to pledge $100 for the Mayor’s re-election campaign next year. Allen says the city had three street gangs when Hatcher was elected and now has twenty. The attack on Hatcher is hardly a honky plot: Allen’s committee was set up at the urging of the NAACP, and just two weeks ago an NAACP youth leader who had charged Hatcher with being soft on gangs was severely beaten in a parking lot.