Young Black Men

The Trayvon Martin story is a tragedy justifiably causing outrage among thousands of citizens, including President Obama ("A show of solidarity on 'Hoodie Sunday,'" March 26). Yet on the same day that story appeared there was just a single paragraph about another young man only a few years older than Trayvon who was killed in front of his home in Baltimore ("Man, 18, fatally shot outside home in West Baltimore," March 26). No speeches or condolences from the president were mentioned in that story, and none are likely to be forthcoming because this is an almost daily event in Maryland that draws little attention.

The Trayvon Martin story is a tragedy justifiably causing outrage among thousands of citizens, including President Obama ("A show of solidarity on 'Hoodie Sunday,'" March 26). Yet on the same day that story appeared there was just a single paragraph about another young man only a few years older than Trayvon who was killed in front of his home in Baltimore ("Man, 18, fatally shot outside home in West Baltimore," March 26). No speeches or condolences from the president were mentioned in that story, and none are likely to be forthcoming because this is an almost daily event in Maryland that draws little attention.

Young black men in our communities are falling into a deep hole - a hole filled with crime, unemployment and despair. They are falling so far, and so fast, that extricating many of them might well be impossible. And yet, for their sakes and ours, we must try. Our personal lives and our many years spent as a Circuit Court judge and college professor, respectively, have caused us to question the destiny of the black community - particularly that of the black male. In December 2004 we independently published articles in a book titled The State of Black Baltimore.

Regarding the NAACP's recent rally for Trayvon Martin in Baltimore, I thought one of the goals of the organization was to improve race relations, not worsen them ("'We are Trayvon,' marchers proclaim," March 27). I am as outraged as anyone about the horrible fate that befell Trayvon, but how is the death of this young man any different than the hundreds of other innocent young black men slain every year In this country? The answer is: The race of the murderer. If the NAACP wanted to advance its goals, it would hold a rally every day, not just to shine a spotlight on mixed race-violence when the victim is black.

Black ministers and a county social service agency expect a new program to assist up to 60 young black men in the next year who authorities say need guidance to keep out of trouble.Called Men Equipped to Achieve (META), the program was officially inaugurated Saturday at a prayer breakfast attended by about 50 local and state government officials, judges, county police and program participants."We really needed this a long time ago," said Guilford resident Troy Wise, 25, a participant who sang the "Lord's Prayer" during the breakfast.

The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives is reporting today that well over half of the young black men in this city are entangled in the criminal justice system on any given day.NCIA's study found that 56 percent of Baltimore's black men between 18 and 35 years old were either incarcerated, on probation or parole, awaiting trial or sentencing, or being sought on an arrest warrant.These findings mirror the results of a similar survey NCIA conducted this spring in Washington as well as the findings of a host of national studies dating back to the mid-1960s.

Despite a report showing that 56 percent of young black men in Baltimore were in trouble with the law, the city's top law enforcement official said yesterday that "there are more good ones than bad ones."State's Attorney Stuart O. Simms said the report by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA) included so many minor offenses and charges that it unintentionally supported "the bad stereotype of African-American males ages 18 to 35 today."Del. Elijah E. Cummings, chairman of the Governor's Commission on Black Males, said the report -- which made front-page news Tuesday -- told black male students "on the very day they began school that you're probably not going to make it. That's a hell of a message to send out."

ATLANTA - The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. might be pleasantly surprised by many of the changes in the nation's social fabric since his death. The civil rights movement accomplished an astonishing transformation. But Dr. King would no doubt be quite disappointed in one area of black life that has only deteriorated since his assassination: the percentage of black men in prison. In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30 percent of the nation's prison population, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates alternative sentencing.

FOR THE LOVE of heaven, won't somebody just call this thing what it is? It's racism, pure and simple. And it comes from those folks at the Justice Policy Institute, who apparently believe that more than half of the black men in Baltimore between the ages of 20 and 30 have no control over their actions and shouldn't be held accountable for them. That was, for decades that stretched into centuries, the justification for slavery and Jim Crow, wasn't it? Black folks were simple-minded, childlike creatures who were unable to control their emotions and needed only the civilizing influences of slavery and segregation to bring them to heel.

As Leslie Ireland approaches the end of high school, he doesn't know what the future holds.Contemplating his class reunion 10 years from now, the Annapolis High senior says, "I may not even be around in 10 years."Ireland's gloomy assessment is not mere teen angst. While others their age may talk about succeeding in life, young men such as Ireland are more concerned about surviving.Ireland is a young black male.*The statistics are staggering.Black males are twice as likely as are white males to die before age 45. A black male has an 18 percent probability of being incarcerated sometime in his life.

Do you think it gives Clarence Thomas a warm, fuzzy feeling to know he is one of Ann Coulter's blacks? That is how Coulter put it on Fox "News" while defending Herman Cain against sexual harassment charges that threatened to engulf his campaign last week. "Liberals," she said, detest black conservatives, but the truth is, "our blacks are so much better than their blacks. " "Our" blacks? Really? Social conservative pundits tend to be astonishingly obtuse when discussing race (see Exhibit A, above)

According to Leonard Pitts Jr., the tea party is racist ("The black self-loathing of Herman Cain," Oct. 16). If you're intrigued by Herman Cain (who hates the fact that he's black), you're a racist. If you disagree with President Barack Obama on a policy issue or you didn't vote for him (he's black, you know), you're a racist. If you admire Condoleezza Rice (who is too "white"), you're a racist because she would never condemn the racists who surrounded her. These are the claims Mr. Pitts makes in his column about why he loathes Mr. Cain and why racists love him. If only Mr. Cain shared the liberal, self-serving view (it's kept liberals in power for decades)

This is for those who keep asking what I think of Herman Cain. In particular, it's for those who want to know what the tea party's embrace of this black businessman turned presidential candidate says about my claim that the tea party is racist. I might eat the plate of crow those folks proffer if I'd ever actually made that claim. What I have said, fairly consistently, is something more nuanced: Racial animus is an element of tea party ideology, but not its entirety. As I once noted in this space, the tea party probably would not exist if Condoleezza Rice were president.

"No greater obligation faces the government than to justify the faith of its young people in the fundamental rightness of our democratic institutions. " Franklin Roosevelt spoke those words in 1936 as he signed the extension of one of the New Deal's most innovative initiatives, the National Youth Administration (NYA). Part of the Works Progress Administration and lobbied for by Eleanor Roosevelt, the NYA was a response to the catastrophic levels of unemployment and poverty faced by young people during the Great Depression.

At a small gathering of local merchants at a restaurant on Greenmount Avenue, Patricia C. Jessamy was among friends who nodded in agreement as Baltimore's state's attorney spoke not only of locking up criminals, but of understanding "underlying factors" that lead to crime and of keeping police in check. All but one of the dozen merchants at the meeting were black, as is Jessamy. When talk turned to her Democratic primary challenger, attorney Gregg Bernstein, who is white, the group agreed that he seems interested in "prosecuting everybody," even though he has never said those words.

Here's something you won't hear much about in the coming Maryland gubernatorial election: The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate and a de facto racial caste system that discriminates against hundreds of thousands of black men in the way Jim Crow laws once did. You won't hear anything close to that from Martin O'Malley, the Democrat and present governor, nor from Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the Republican and wannabe-governor-again who,...

THE MURDER rate among young African-American men is so high that little notice has been given the dramatic increase in suicide among the same group. But it makes sense. Young black men are growing up in environments, urban and suburban, where mass culture exhorts them to be either star athletes or the ill-educated caricatures of the poster children for violence, drug abuse and risky sexual behavior they see in music videos and hip-hop magazines. Unable to be "all that," many become alienated and depressed.

The young man is tapping the name on the concrete wall of 2510 E. Biddle St., tapping it insistently, emphatically, as he makes his point. This name, spray-painted here and across the street and around the corner, these words, "1 Love Dre 1975-1999," were not left randomly to disrespect property and community. "Don't disrespect this by calling it graffiti," he says. "This is a piece of my heart right here." His name is Troy, and pieces of his heart are all around East Biddle Street and Milton Avenue: "RIP Dre The good die young.

In several speeches, Sen. Barack Obama has used an easy, if imprecise, formulation to express his despair over the high incarceration rate of young black men. "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college," he said at a rally last year, repeating, more or less, a line used frequently by critics of the criminal justice system. But it's not accurate. There are far more young black men in college (about 530,000, ages 18 to 24)

To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assumption of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next."