Churches focus on plight of black males

COLUMBIA -- It was the first time the three biggest black Methodist denominations convened in 45 years, and they gathered with a transcendent purpose in mind: to address the plight of the black male, who is disproportionately unemployed and incarcerated in the United States.

The "Great Gathering," a three-day convention held in Columbia last week (despite a continuing NAACP boycott of South Carolina), drew at least 2,000 members of the African Episcopal Methodist Church, African Episcopal Methodist Zion Church and Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Organized by the Rev. Staccato Powell, pastor of Grace Church in Raleigh, the event featured speeches by Children's Defense Fund founder and President Marian Wright Edelman and social critic Cornel West.

Edelman said the cradle-to-prison pipeline in which so many black men get caught is sufficient reason to start a new civil rights movement.

West said that academe provides an essential service by generating data and analysis, but that the churches must use that information to mobilize people on the ground.

"We have got to stop the carnage," Powell said during a press conference before the event. "We have heard the call of God."

Though the problem is vast and the three Methodist churches are calling for a large-scale response, many initiatives to reach disadvantaged young people, and particularly black teens and men, have been pursued over the years, nationally and locally, in large and small ways.

What these and other programs have in common, advocates say, is the determination to provide productive alternatives to young people who, statistically, are likely to endure a life of hardship.

And now the black Methodist churches appear to be stepping up their efforts.

'The New Jim Crow'

The social problems have become so dire, conference participants said, that families must wake up and change course, and the churches must work harder to intervene before more young people are lost to the criminal justice system.

Edelman argued in her speech Monday that blacks are experiencing new forms of institutional discrimination that demand a widespread response.

Citing Michelle Alexander's book, "The New Jim Crow," Edelman noted that when Martin Luther King Jr. called for a campaign to end poverty, 11 million children in the U.S. were classified as poor. Today, there are 14 million children living in poverty, 40 percent of them suffering extreme poverty, she said.

Edelman said that 46 percent of black students attend 2,000 high schools labeled "drop-out factories." Among fourth-graders, 88 percent of black boys are not reading at grade level; 84 percent are deficient at math. And she decried the punitive measures taken against students who fail to take school seriously.

"It doesn't make sense to suspend a kid from school for not coming to school," she said. Rather, schools, families, government and churches must provide a "continuum of care" that helps keep children on a path toward success.

"We need to reweave the fabric of family and community, and it needs to start in the church," she said.

Most troublesome, she said, is the prison pipeline that society has constructed. More money is spent on incarceration than on education, she said, and too many nonviolent offenders are caught in a criminal justice system that cripples their chances for rehabilitation and a normal life.

"We've got to get Congress to put babies ahead of bankers," Edelman said. "The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, and no one seems to notice."

In "The New Jim Crow," Alexander writes that the decision in the 1980s to wage a "drug war," along with sentencing changes, has necessarily focused on urban centers and, intentionally or not, resulted in the disproportionate targeting of poor black youths, even though studies show that people of all colors sell and use drugs at least as frequently.

"Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination -- employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service -- are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow."

Crime rates, she notes, are at historical lows, but imprisonment rates have soared, mostly because of the "war on drugs."

Alexander is not the only one to call the drug war a new way to legalize discrimination and inequity, and to maintain a disadvantaged underclass.

American Civil Liberty Union lawyer Graham Boyd wrote an article in 2001 declaring the policy not only a social catastrophe that has targeted black men but a constitutional crisis that compromises the fabric of society and the values expressed in the Bill of Rights.

Last May, Gil Kerlikowske, the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the euphemism "war on drugs" was unhelpful, signaling an intention to shift focus away from incarceration and toward treatment and prevention, according to press reports.

"Regardless of how you try to explain to people it's a 'war on drugs' or a 'war on a product,' people see a war as a war on them," he said at the time. "We're not at war with people in this country."

Some numbers

In 2008, 38 percent of all sentenced prisoners were black; 34 percent were white, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Blacks constitute 12.4 percent of the total U.S. population, but black males were incarcerated at a rate more than six times higher than white males.

In recent years, however, the number of sentenced blacks in state prisons declined from 562,000 in 2000 to 508,700 in 2006.

"More than half of this decline (56 percent) was made up of 29,600 fewer blacks imprisoned for drug offenses," a Bureau of Justice Statistics bulletin states.

Nevertheless, the total prison population in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the past three decades, from a little under 500,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million in 2008, representing 754 inmates per 100,000 residents, the highest incarceration rate in the world.

"In 2008, over 7.3 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at year-end, 3.2 percent of all U.S. adult residents or 1 in every 31 adults," the Bureau of Justice Statistics states. Approximately half of the total prison population consists of nonviolent offenders.

During the press conference Monday, AME Senior Bishop John R. Bryant said the problems encountered by black males extend to everyone in the family.

"When the black male is out of position, the family is in trouble, society itself is in trouble," he said.

The three churches, connected by theology and sharing a similar polity, should have been working together for years, he admitted, "but we have been distant." It is past time to address the problems collectively, he said.

CME Bishop Thomas Hoyt Jr. said "unity and mission belong together," called incarceration "another form of slavery" and criticized the privatization of prisons.

"When we see people investing in the prison system to make a profit, it's time to take action, to help our people," he said.

AME Zion Senior Bishop George W.C. Walker said the economy and the incarceration problem go hand in hand.

"Unemployment is directly related to much of the criminal activity involving many of our young men, and now young women," he said.

Drug use and trafficking, high drop-out rates and other social ills are, in part, a consequence of a restricted job market, he said.

Nationally, "blacks had the highest unemployment rate in 2008, at 10.1 percent, compared with 7.6 percent for Hispanics, 5.2 percent for whites and 4.0 percent for Asians," according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Historically, the jobless rate for blacks generally has been at least twice that for whites."

The Department of Labor notes that teenagers are especially vulnerable to joblessness. "In 2008, black teenagers had the highest unemployment rate among the major race and ethnicity groups at 31.2 percent."

What's more, unemployed blacks have been jobless for longer periods than unemployed workers in other groups, and black men are more likely than others to be out of the labor force.

Edelman said poor education is a contributing factor, but even good students often cannot afford to attend quality colleges and universities. The education system in the U.S. is as much part of the problem as part of the solution, she said.

'Sleepwalking' no more

In an interview before his speech, West said the first step toward a solution is to show young people that there are people who care, and to reiterate the message constantly.

"We must make the plight more visible," he said. "It's been invisible too long."

He faulted the mainstream media for "highlighting pathologies and not the resilience of the black community" and called on that community to pursue a multipronged approach: Churches can empower families, and organizations and individuals can pressure government to change public policy.

What's needed desperately from Congress is a huge jobs bill, West said. And President Barack Obama ought to target the black community.

"Black people targeted him 96 percent, put him in office," he said.

In his speech, he prodded the churches. "For too long, too many of our churches have been sleepwalking," he said.

Those attending the conference were the fortunate ones, but "we've got too many young brothers who are unprotected, disrespected and uncorrected," he declared, striking a theme he would develop during his talk.

He spoke of the black agenda, calling it "the best America has" because it overflows to include everyone subjected to injustice.

"If 50 percent of white brothers, 15-30 percent, were unemployed, we wouldn't need a conference like this," he said.

The Rev. Randolf Miller, pastor of Nichols Chapel AME Church in Charleston, attended the Great Gathering. He said it was not meant to be a one-time event but, rather, an opportunity to discuss the issues, find ways to collaborate and decide a course of action.

"The issues we're talking about didn't just spring up overnight," he said. They require an ongoing engagement. "It's going to take some work."

Local efforts

In the Charleston area, the Rev. Lee Bines, minister of Wesley United Methodist Church in Moncks Corner, organized the third annual Young Brothers to Men Summit last weekend.

The summit included workshops on money, anger and grief management, teen pregnancy and more, and drew more than 100 middle school and high school students, as well as school officials, including state Superintendent Jim Rex, Bines said.

The Rev. Sidney Charles Frazier, pastor of Full Faith Ministries, heads the Boys to Men of the Greater Sea Islands of South Carolina, a mentoring program that provides support to young people as they navigate the choppy waters of adolescence.

The program's participants are partnering with Sea Island Habitat for Humanity on March 20 for a day of landscaping at a newly built home.

Michael Rucker, 12, is a student at Haut Gap Middle School on Johns Island and a participant in the newly created Boys to Men program. He excels at social studies, gets his homework checked daily by his mother and thinks about his future.

Perhaps he will be a pilot, he said. Perhaps a pharmacist. Perhaps he will join the Air Force.

He is getting A's and B's, he said. He is taking advanced placement courses. Perhaps math is his weakest subject. But he doesn't let it slide.

"I talk with friends about what we need to do, and how to do it," he said. "We help each other in subjects."

Michael assists others with social studies; he gets a little tutoring in math.

The mentoring program will train Michael to be a community leader who helps others, Frazier said. Teambuilding is emphasized, and the initiative is meant to intervene in young lives before trouble takes hold, instilling confidence and a sense of self-worth.

Michael said he has wanted to volunteer for Sea Island Habitat for Humanity for a while, but school has kept him busy. His aunt lives in a Habitat home, he said.

Boys to Men has given him his chance: He will participate in the March 20 landscaping project, helping to prepare a new home for occupancy. He said it will be one of many contributions he makes -- to his community, to his future.

Reach Adam Parker at aparker@postandcourier.com.