GIVE A DAMN
During the school year in 1968, my cousin Tom Horan bemoaned the fact that he couldn't collect much in the way of charitable donations from friends and neighbors for a school club campaign. He was tasked to raise funds for the New York Urban Coalition, who were promoting an intensive campaign to improve life in the New York City "ghettoes". I no longer hear that term used, but that's not because there aren't areas of New York that couldn't use help. Even though the term was largely thought to refer to areas where Black and Brown people abided, it didn't mean there weren't people of all colors and origins who were living in poverty.
I offered to go door-to-door with Tom, throughout our neighborhood. We practiced what we would say when each door opened, and I taught Tom to stick his foot in the door the moment we were able! It probably seemed strange to those who answered the door to see two very white, comfortably suburban kids collecting funds to build a playground in the "inner city" (as it was colloquially known), but Syosset High School promoted activism in many ways (I will always remember the sit-in outside the doors of the school cafeteria to boycott the school's purchase of non-union lettuce and grapes. Cesar Chavez had made an impact), and we were just a small contributor to that energy.
The Give a Damn campaign began in the spring of 1968 after a discussion among Mayor John V. Lindsay, the city's Summer Task Force, the New York Urban Coalition and the iconic ad agency Young & Rubicam. This was pro bono work for Y&R. The key was getting this initiative begun almost immediately--before the summer months. As reported in the New York Times that May:
The TV spot opens with a simple print message. "Send your kid to a ghetto for the summer." Then Negro actor Lincoln Kilpatrick appears with Harlem youngsters playing in a Harlem guttter behind him. "There are all kinds of facilities here," he says as if he were a camp director making a pitch. The pools, he points out on his tour, are the gutters when the hydrants are open, the ball fields are the teeming streets, and field trips, picnics and nature studies are in trash-strewn lots. Even when the busy day is over, he says, the kid has plenty of company, three or four to a bed. "You don't want your kids to play here this summer?” he asks, then adds stingingly, "Then don't expect ours to.”
On the screen flashes, "Give jobs. Give money. Give a damn."
Below are two of the TV spots. The first is a later effort from 1969, that copped the CLIO Award for Best Public Service spot in 1970. The second was the one I most remember. It was simply called "Landlord". One of the spots contained the line: “Hear kitty kitty, hear kitty kitty...how would you feel if your kid mistook a rat for a cat?” The PSAs were very powerful visual indictments that couldn't help lay on a guilt trip.
Posters promoting the campaign soon appeared almost everywhere. The first below was probably the most ubiquitous. You'd see it when you took the A train or virtually any subway ride. I removed the full second poster from the Syosset Railroad Station's bulletin board one day, and it soon bedecked my bedroom wall amid the pantheon of rock stars and athletes. I brought it to my college dorm and I even think it made it to my early classrooms when I started teaching. Eventually, it just got too raggedy to keep.
Odetta and Spanky & Our Gang both recorded songs to promote the social initiative:
My cousin, Tom, was delighted that we raised more money than our expectations allowed. And, though it is nearly 60 years later, I proudly still have my pin:
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