I'll add to Chris and say that substantively, midnight basketball always struck me as a very good idea. Not only would it keep scary black kids off the street, which white people like, but it would also make for better basketball players, which white people also like. And hell, it was even one of George H.W Bush's "thousand points of light."
if I had to guess, I'd assume the problem was a mixture of distorted costs and racism. I really don't know what the program was priced at, but let's say it was $40 million. First remember the old adage that all numbers ending in "illion" sound the same -- and $40 million sounds like a whole boatload of cash to folks thinking about sums on the scale of their monthly mortgage payments. Then remember that when political emphasis is placed on a program, Americans tend to wildly overestimate its cost, as in when they thought we spent a fifth of our budget on foreign aid, or judged that food stamps were a larger expenditure than Medicare. And this was all in a period in which white people were rather negatively disposed to spending large sums of money on black people.
