Ms. Pam Rooney and the					Bertha Capen Reynolds					KWRU
Graduate School of Social Work			     Society National Conference			   P.O. Box 50678
University of Houston															Philadelphia PA
Houston, TX 77204-4492					cc:  United Nations						19132-9720

June 27, 1998

To all Sponsors and Recipients of the Petition for Economic Human Rights:

As the Founding Director of the Fourth Ward Health and Educational Center for Youth, Inc., I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to share our experiences with your group. On behalf of our 400 or so participants, we applaud the efforts you are making in the area of economic human rights and in reporting violations.

For the past 29 years, our nonprofit group has struggled to provide for the basic human needs of our neighborhood youth and families with little to no help from our local, state, or federal government. In fact, these entities have instead seemingly conspired to shut down and deny us access to all institutions designed to help and serve the public -- our local library, our fire station, our schools, our public housing, community center, Headstart program and daycare facilities, and our county hospital, as well as denying us an equal right to petition our government and to participate in the democratic process and local development decisions directly affecting our community, families, and children.

Funds allocated for anti-poverty measures to help our community have instead been absorbed by other organizations, so that our demographics are used by outside agencies to obtain grants which never reach us -- the people they are designed to help. One community re-investment program had offered some of our low-income residents the loans necessary to become homeowners, only to have the property owners refuse to sell to us, but instead, to turn around and sell their property to outside interests, including the city-funded Houston Renaissance, which then proceeded to strip and demolish historic housing in our neighborhood that we and our youth developed plans to preserve.

Thus, not only do we suffer extreme economic discrimination, but a destruction of our very history and cultural identity as a community -- an invisible genocide happening right here in Houston, right next door to the seat of city and county government which now occupies the land that used to be part of our Freedmen's Town settlement -- the last of its kind left in the entire United States.

Although our volunteer staff and youth participants have repeatedly presented to local officials and to the public our Youth Master Plan, which the Fourth Ward youth put together themselves, this vision of preserving and restoring our neighborhood has been continually overlooked. We, therefore, join you in calling for a review by the United Nations of these economic human rights violations in demanding immediate relief.

Sincerely yours,

Darrell J. Patterson

Darrell J. Patterson

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