Excerpt: 'Come on People'

What's Going On with Black Men?

For the last generation or two, as our communities dissolved and our parenting skills broke down, no one has suffered more than our young black men.

Your authors have been around long enough, and traveled widely enough, to think we understand something about the problem. And we're hopeful enough — or desperate enough — to think that with all of us working together we might find our way to a solution. Let's start with one very basic fact. Back in 1950, before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, when Rosa Parks was still sitting in the back of her Montgomery bus, when the NBA was just about all white, back in those troubled times, black boys were born into a different world than they are today.

Obviously, many civil rights leaders had hoped that with the demise in the 1960s of officially sanctioned forms of segregation and discrimination, black males would have greater access to the mainstream of American society. They had fully expected that these young men would be in a better position in every way — financially, psychologically, legally — to sustain viable marriages and families. Instead, the overall situation has continued to go downhill among the poor who are mostly shut out from the mainstream of success.

How is that possible?

There is one statistic that captures the bleakness. In 1950, five out of every six black children were born into a two-parent home. Today, that number is less than two out of six. In poor communities, that number is lower still. There are whole blocks with scarcely a married couple, whole blocks without responsible males to watch out for wayward boys, whole neighborhoods in which little girls and boys come of age without seeing up close a committed partnership and perhaps never having attended a wedding.

Build on Our Legacy

In 1950, we still feared our parents and respected them. We know that for a fact because we were both in our early teens that year and were both testing our limits. We and the others in our generation weren't saints. We'll be the first to admit that. We were filled with piss and vinegar like many teenage boys-white, black, and otherwise. If we saw something we wanted and didn't have any money-and trust us, few of us ever had money-we thought about taking it, sure. But something called "parenting," something that had wormed its way into our heads from the time we were still in the womb, said to us, If you get caught stealing it, you're going to embarrass your mother. The voice didn't say, You're going to get your butt kicked. We knew that and expected that from experience. No, that inner voice said, You're going to embarrass your mother. You're going to embarrass your family.

As we became older and grew more interested in girls, our hormones raged just as boys' hormones rage today. The Internet may be new. Cell phones may be new. But sex, we don't need to tell you, has been around since Adam and Eve. So has shame. We knew that if one of us got a girl pregnant, not only would she have to go visit that famous "aunt in South Carolina," but young Romeo would have to go too, not to South Carolina maybe, but somewhere. It would be too embarrassing for Romeo's family for him to just sit around in the neighborhood with a fat Cheshire cat smile on his face. And there was something else we understood: that girl likely had a daddy in the home. And he'd be prepared to wipe that grin off Romeo's face permanently. This was what parenting was about. It wasn't always pretty, but it could be pretty effective. Parenting works best when both a mother and a father participate.

Some mothers can do it on their own, but they need help. A house without a father is a challenge. A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe, and that's just about what we have today. Can we fix this? Can we change it? We don't have a choice. We have to take our neighborhoods back. We have to go in there and do it ourselves. We saw what happened in New Orleans when people waited for the government to help. "Governments" are things. Governments don't care. People care, and no people care like parents do-well, except maybe grandparents and other caregivers, and thank God for them.

Richard Rowe, in Baltimore, reported on one path to change:

Twenty years ago in this city we started the "Rites of Passage." Nobody else was doing it on the East Coast. We started looking at how the African-American male was going downhill. Twenty years from now, I hope we will not be having this same type of conversation. The purpose of our program is to nurture young men who can maintain, protect, and provide for a family and a community.