Atlanta Daily World

Harlem Again In The News
We have not heard or read much about Harlem since Lady Astor made a broadside against its morals some 8 or 10 weeks ago. But this week, Ralph Martin, writing in the New Republic, gives a graphic description of a great missionary effort in social service through the patient genius and love of one Dr. Frederic Wortman. who, despite discouragement from his profession and the cold indifference of the New State Department of Social Welfare. has succeeded in organizing the Lafargue Clinic.
Before this clinic was born in New York about two months ago, the writer points out. there was nothing and nobody for the mentally sick Negro. It all started 15 years ago as a dream, he says, a dream based on an idea that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are not the private property of the rich but the common property of the people.
Distressed by the extreme scarcity of a suitable and available location, it remained for Dr. Wortman to appeal to Rev. Shelton Hale Bishop at St. Phillip's Episcopal Church, who permitted the use of two small rooms, free of course.
Patients began to crowd in before they washed the windows or swept the floors. The news spread fast and every Tuesday and Friday evenings. the people were waiting.
One paragraph will suffice:
"They were just people with troubles. all kinds of troubles,real,practical troubles piled on top of psychotic ones. People who were frustrated because they lived in the rotten tenements of a dirty. filthy iron bound ghetto: because they went to war to fight for a democracy they didn't have: because their kids had no place to play and were forming gangs; because their skin was black.
"They were people pressed down into a feeling of miserable helplessness. pressed down so far that they were physically and mentally sick and tired of living."