Young Black Men

When Michelle Goldsborough returns to St. Michaels from her New Jersey home, it's usually to visit her relatives in the Talbot County tourist spot. Or sometimes she just might check into a room at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort and Conference Center to be alone. But last weekend when Goldsborough visited the resort - where she worked when she lived in St. Michaels - she had plenty of company. And that's just the way she wanted it. About a dozen youngsters - most of them black boys between the ages of 11 and 17 - were with Goldsborough.

IT TOOK SUN "Perspective" editor Mike Adams to point out a glaring error in my column on Willie Lynch, the apocryphal Jamaican slave owner who supposedly made an early 18th century speech about controlling slaves by using "fear, envy and distrust." It was an error of omission, not commission.In the column, I made reference to Adams' February article on the Willie Lynch syndrome. Adams did an excellent job in proving that there is no documented proof that Lynch existed, but, as he made clear, that was not his main point.

Let's see if I get this straight. Latrell "Throat Boy" Sprewell is now a victim. Two lawyers with dollar signs where their X and Y chromosomes should be filed a $30 million lawsuit for lost wages and damages on his behalf.Sprewell and his lawyers continue to argue that he was punished "too harshly." Exactly what punishment Sprewell feels is warranted for choking his coach is not clear, but I suspect he figures being sent to his room without supper would have been too harsh. Deep down, Sprewell feels he did nothing wrong.

PICTURE THIS: two men in their mid- to late 40s, squaring off in the ring to have a boxing match for charity. Doesn't it conjure up horrible images? Doesn't it smack of a bad idea, right up there with drive-through prostate exams?C. Miles, that irascible, curmudgeonly but never boring afternoon talk show host on WOLB radio came up with the idea Sept. 10. He challenged me, over the airwaves, to a boxing match, with the proceeds going to charity. Gee, do you think it could have been something I wrote?

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of the O.J. Simpson verdict, the Million Man March and endless consternation over escalating violence and incarceration rates among black youths, Darrell Dawsey's ''Living to Tell About It: Young Black Men in America Speak Their Piece'' comes right on time.While much has been written, spoken and agonized about the condition of young black men in the post-'60s era, we hear too little from the young males who are the subjects of all the talk.In one recent, particularly telling episode, Kweisi Mfume, president-elect of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, observed near the end of a day-long conference in Washington on youth troubles that the conferees had heard from just about everyone of note but the members of the generation that was being discussed.

About 3 o'clock every morning, Anna Roberts awakes in her West Baltimore rowhouse to face the darkness and her despair.It has happened, she says, without fail since March 4. That was the night her only son, Antwon, 18, hanged himself.Antwon's death came seemingly without warning. His mother knew he was distressed over the deaths of two Job Corps friends in a Silver Spring train wreck Feb. 16 that killed 11. She never imagined that distress would lead to suicide."I don't know what was in his mind, why he couldn't come to me," Roberts says now. "We blame ourselves.

"Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice," by David M. Oshinsky. The Free Press. 297 pages. $25. Even with its horrific details of black convicts being tortured and lynched in the segregated South after the Civil War, the most disturbing aspect of this scholarly work by historian David M. Oshinsky isn't what it says about old times there.Most striking is what Oshinsky's book indirectly says about today. It describes prison populations 75 and 100 years ago that included grossly disproportionate numbers of African-Americans, many of whom never would have been incarcerated were it not for the color of their skin.

MIAMI -- Trust me, you only ''think'' you've heard this story before.It involves a well-to-do enclave near Washington and some black kids from the poor neighborhoods in town. No basketball courts where they live, so they descend upon suburbia's court in droves. Reports of break-ins and vandalism multiply until finally, suburbia has had enough. It declares its basketball court off-limits to outsiders and hires guards to enforce the rule. The guards are soon accused of indiscriminately harassing young black men, and the community searches its soul and wonders if it is guilty of separatism and elitism.

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.

LIKE JESUS, Robert Eades wept. Standing before a crowd Sunday at First Baptist Church in Annapolis, Eades addressed several of those assembled individually and begged their forgiveness."

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."

Open Letter to Benjamin Todd Jealous, president-elect of the NAACP: Dear Mr. Jealous: It has now been 19 days since the NAACP announced that you would be the new leader of the nation's oldest civil rights organization. I find your selection a wise one, and NAACP board Chairman Julian Bond's praise of you on point. Don't take this lightly, Mr. Jealous; Bond and I might never agree on anything again. On a whim, I went to the NAACP Web site early yesterday morning hoping to get some more news about you. Instead, staring me in the face was the organization's "state of emergency" news release of several months ago. I'm sure you know the one I'm referring to - the one using Selwanda Riley's "brutalization" at the hands of a cop as evidence that there is widespread police and prosecutorial abuse of young blacks throughout the land.

Anna Sowers is the wife of Zach Sowers, the Baltimore man who was beaten nearly to death and robbed last June. He remains in a coma; his prognosis, Anna Sowers said, remains bleak. "We're still hoping for that miracle" of his recovery, Sowers told me yesterday. Here's something else Sowers is hoping for that falls into the category of a miracle: getting a couple of dozen black leaders in this city to publicly condemn the "stop snitching" virus sweeping Baltimore and the nation. "We had an idea to identify 25 black Baltimore leaders in politics, business, sports, entertainment, etc. to collectively stand up and publicly condemn the stop snitching culture," Sowers said in an e-mail sent Jan. 24. A week later, nearly 100 people gathered at New Life United Methodist Church to hear several black panelists discuss this stop-snitching foolishness.

If the calendar on your wall says it's Dec. 29 - and it should - then that doesn't just mean it's my 56th birthday. It means it's time for my annual Chutzpah Awards, given at the end of each year to those whose audacity and gall would consistently register a 20 if measured on a scale of 1 to 10. Without any ado whatsoever, I'll get right to it. 10th place: The Baltimore Orioles, for having the nerve to pretend they're a major league baseball team....

When Michelle Goldsborough returns to St. Michaels from her New Jersey home, it's usually to visit her relatives in the Talbot County tourist spot. Or sometimes she just might check into a room at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort and Conference Center to be alone. But last weekend when Goldsborough visited the resort - where she worked when she lived in St. Michaels - she had plenty of company. And that's just the way she wanted it. About a dozen youngsters - most of them black boys between the ages of 11 and 17 - were with Goldsborough.

On Saturday, Dr. Ashanti Woods, Dr. Taisha Williams and Dr. Darrell Gray II shared the podium as the commencement speakers at Polytechnic Institute's graduation ceremony. This month, all three are slated to start their careers as physicians. They graduated from Howard University College of Medicine on May 12. All are Poly alumni: Woods graduated in 1998 and Williams and Gray in 1999. Two years ago Woods, Williams and Gray were students in Howard University College of Medicine's Class of 2007 when I wrote about them in a column.

Murder is taking heartbreaking toll Dan Rodricks' column "Life is too precious. Don't toss it away" (Jan. 4) went right to the heart of the matter. Many of our city's young black men do not believe that they will live to the ripe old age of 25. They do not believe that they can rise above what life has shown them thus far. It breaks my heart every time I hear on the news or read in the paper that another young black male has been killed. I pray for the families of the victims and of those who did the killings.

Faith is inspiration for charity, peace It has become fashionable to try to blame belief in God for most human conflict ("Faith: Something worth fighting for," Dec 31). But in fact just the opposite is the case. If belief in God was truly the prime motivator in human conflict, one might expect its opposite, atheism, to produce a harvest of peace and concord. Yet the only officially atheistic system of government ever implemented, Communism, resulted in a toll of human death and misery unparalleled in the history of mankind.

The 800-pound gorilla is back, and as usual folks are pretending the critter ain't in the room. We'll call this particular 800-pound gorilla Joey, in tribute to that 1940s film about the giant ape called Mighty Joe Young. I think it's time Joey got his props. I think it's time we acknowledge Joey. Joey, meet the guys. Guys, shake hands with Joey. "The guys" in this case are those Baltimoreans who, for the past week, have expressed angst and dismay about the appalling way some young black men in this city, addicted to the thug life, dispatch each other with such chilling ease.