Bedford-Stuyvesant New York's Bedford-Stuyvesant is in many way worse off than Harlem. Although it is bigger it has received far less attention than the "glamor ghetto" to the north. But it has a friend in Bobby Kennedy. Some think this means Befford-Stuyvesant has a future.

THE BEARDED young militants who staff the Brooklyn office of the Congress of Racial Equality call themselves CORE's "Mau Maus." Mau Mau, in ghettoese, has long been synonymous with riot, but that's not what the angry young advocates of black power have in mind. Explains one, "We want a social and economic Mau Mau." They will get it, at least in part.

Their neighborhood--predominantly Negro Bedford-Stuyvesant--is to be the staging area for a comprehensive and costly experiment in community renovation. The idea is for government and private enterprise to sit down with the community to help solve the problem that residents want solved. The prospects: massive housing rehabilitation, more jobs, more hospitals, more parks, and more local autonomy in overseeing city services from schools to sanitation. Some enthusiasts have the neighborhood beginning to glitter and smile inside of five years.

It is a huge undertaking. Bedford-Stuyvesant houses something like 350,000 people in its 464 city blocks. That's a population the size of Rochester's, an area equivalent to downtown Boston from the waterfront to Back Bay. The neighborhood supports few businesses that are not owned by whites who live elsewhere, and few lucrative businesses of any type. A third of Bedford-Stuyvesant's household are headed by women; on warm days, their children clog the sidewalks and whatever part space there is. Unemployment is high, especially among youths who drop out of school. "At my school," one girl said recently, "they tell everyone 'If you get disinterested, as soon as you're 16, just go on downstairs, sign yourself out, and leave.'" Many do.

One indication of the crime rate: At night, as residents are quick to point out, it is virtually impossible to find a regular taxi. Drivers flee to safer sides of town, often decline--despite stiff penalties for turning down passengers--to take anyone into the area. The void is filled by scores of unmetered and unlicensed "gypsy cabs," identified by a little orange light in the right-hand corner of the windshield. Fares depend pretty much on the mood of the driver.

In many ways, Bedford-Stuyvesant is worse of than Harlem. It is bigger, yet it has received from public and private do-good agencies for a less attention than -- as one planning paper terms it--the "glamour ghetto" to the north. Until the Bedford-Stuyvesant riots, the city's Council Against Poverty was funneling into Harlem five times as much money as Bedford-Stuyvesant was getting.

But Bedford-Stuyvesant has one tremendous advantage over Harlem: it does not have the same huge, unsalvagable tenements. There is a vast number of decrepit apartment houses, especially on commercial streets where the ground floor is given over to liquor or grocery stores. But block after block is lined with two and three-family brownstones--housing which was, and in many cases still is, very fine indeed. That's what makes residents and planners sure that rehabilitation programs can work. Enthuses one lawyer who lives in the area, "Man, there are some beautiful homes here."

Residents--or at least, the older and better heeled among them--have long pushed for some sort of program. There is a highly stable core of old-times (the rate of home ownership is ten times that in central Harlem), and they have a strong sense of community. They have set up dozens organizations -- the area is dotted with signs reading "Support Your Block Club"--and welded them, together with an array of civic-action and church groups, into the powerful Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council.

CBCC has in its eight years served as an articulate spokesman for the neighborhood, putting demands to various city agencies and often getting what it wants--a near-by community college, a new narcotics-addiction treatment center. Three years ago, a CBCC committee was designated to run the community's poverty program.

But amid proliferating acronyms--and especially since the announcement of the new super-program last December -- CBCC has simply ceased to be the loud, clear voice of the community. The prospect of ever-increasing sums of money has prompted local skirmishes, as power enclaves are guarded and political fortunes pondered.

The newest and most insistent declarations are from young men in their early twenties. They want a hand in running the programs. Some of the older leaders of the community refer to them as "radicals," but they dismiss the term. They are not the self-appointed spokesmen for the poor, they report. "We are the poor," says one. "Maximum feasible participation' means me, baby." They have demanded at least some power; they already have it.

II.

SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY '48 formally announced the huge Bedford-Stuyvesant program at a mass meeting in P.S. 305. It was a gala occasion, featuring Senator Jacob Javits, Rep. Emanuel Celler, Mayor John Lindsay, Boston's Redevelopment Administrator Edward J.Logue, and a host of other speakers who rambled on long after much of the audience had left.

The key feature of the plan was the creation of two corporations:

* the Renewal and Rehabilitation Corporation (R & R), made up of 19 residents of the community, to contract for housing programs, see that people in the area know about loans and jobs that will become available, and generally pave the way for businesses or agencies that want to try something new.