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Black Men in America
Providing Role Models for Young African-Americans
 Listen to Part 1 of Commentator Ellis Cose's special report
Listen to Part 2
Listen to Part 3
Listen to Part 4
March 24, 2002 -- "I want to know the consequences and advantages of every move I make," says Kingsley Joseph, 15. He's talking about chess, but if Maurice Ashley has his way, Kingsley will apply that principle to his whole life.
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Learning the moves.
Photo: Courtesy Harlem Chess Center |
Ashley hopes the same thing for every one of his young charges at the Harlem Chess Center, of which he is the director.
"I've been playing for about two years," says Kingsley. "To be honest, I didn't know who Maurice Ashley was when I first came here." But now, "I want the opportunity to learn from a master like Maurice Ashley…I want to learn from the best in order to be the best."
As Ellis Cose reports for Weekend Edition Sunday, Ashley, the first black man to become a Grand Master in chess, is providing something that's sorely lacking in the African-American community: guidance to young boys from a positive male role model.
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Checking out the Project 2000 library.
Photo: Wilma Consul, NPR |
In his book Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America, Cose writes that black men are "a nightmare, a fantasy, an American original -- feared, emulated shunned, desired…" While many black men are respected and admired, others --- the non-famous, mainly -- are feared and hated. "We occupy a tenuous place on this Earth…cradled in America's ambivalence," he writes.
If trends continue, a quarter of all black men will spend some time in prison. Violence is the leading cause of death among young, black men. And even as some black males thrive -- heading giant institutions like American Express and Fannie Mae, for instance -- the lot of the majority just gets worse, and the black class gap continues to widen.
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Ellis Cose
Photo: Courtesy Washington University |
For Cose, some hope can be found in people like Maurice Ashley and institutions like the Harlem Chess Center, the Omega Boys Club in San Francisco, and Project 2000 in Washington, D.C. At each of these places, older black men are working to help younger black men and boys avoid the cycle of despair.
The Omega Boys Club
Not really a boys club at all -- it's a multi-faceted organization that provides classes, group discussions, help with college tuition, role models and mentors for young people -- boys and girls. "There are four concepts that I deal with that are absolutely crucial," says Joseph Marshall, co-founder and executive director of the Omega Boys Club. "Life, friendship, respect and change."
Marshall says things are actually worse today for black youths than they were when he was young. For one thing, there are fewer of what he calls "small jobs" -- jobs that provide young people with a little money and lessen the temptation to deal in drugs and violence. But worse, he says, is the scourge of crack cocaine. Although crack use has leveled off since the 1980s, Marshall says the effects are still being profoundly felt in the black community, especially on families.
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Joseph Marshall
Photo: Courtesy Omega Boys Club |
Marshall's job is to try to salvage the lives of young men by confronting their anger, fear and pain, and to try to counter the popular culture's insistence on making violent thugs the model for young black men to emulate.
Project 2000
On the other side of the continent, in a walk-up office a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol, educational psychologist Spencer Holland works with poor kids in Anacostia, one of the country's most desperate neighborhoods. Project 2000 grew out of his experiences in the 1980s as an administrator in Washington's public schools. He would visit elementary school classrooms where he saw the effects of the lack of a male role model on the lives of young boys. Many of them, unsure of what was proper male behavior, decided that working hard in school wasn't manly, and things like singing "The Alphabet Song" were for sissies.
Holland's challenge at Project 2000 is to show the payoff of listening and learning how to become a man.
Additional Resources
 The Harlem Chess Center
Project 2000
Omega Boys Club
About Ellis Cose and his new book
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