(Akiit.com) “How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look? Some say it’s just a part of it, we’ve got to fulfill the book.” –Bob Marley

*My column evokes starkly divergent emotions from person to person.

For people who are the target of my chastisements, the emotional response is typically anger, because there is no truthful reply available.

For people who still think for themselves and are still open to critical thinking, the response is to search for higher truth, even if they disagree with what I wrote.

Someone emailed me the other day to ask why there are so few Black men and women who speak the truth with conviction and stand against apathy and the attacks of the ignorant.

My response was sad, but true: The Black Activist is a Dying Breed.

My name is Darryl James and I am a Black activist.

I’ve known it since I was in the first grade and my teacher asked me for my favorite color. It was Black. Not just because I knew it was the strongest color in the box, but because it was the color of my people, and I loved them immensely even then.

I wore the pick with the fist when I had hair. I’ve been flashing a fist over my heart since I was a child, and I’ve been in the streets putting in work since I was a teenager. I’ve marched, organized enlightened, empowered, hired and inspired more brothers and sisters than I can recall.

I’ve taken the weight even when it cost me more money than many people ever see in a lifetime. There were times when I really thought it was going to cost me my life.

I am a revolutionary and I know why we are a dying breed.

Quite simply, it’s because we already know coming into it that we will be attacked and possibly even killed. Sadly, we will often be attacked and killed by our very own.

Blacks want anyone who stands for anything to stand for everything we need. We are still looking for a hero, but won’t support him when he flies to the rescue. Many Blacks see a shining Black Superman and are quick to bring him Kryptonite (and, no, white women are not the Black man’s Kryptonite.)
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(Akiit.com) Racial integration has failed because it has barely been tried. - John Hope Franklin, black historian and author

The screams of hatred and the horrific stares encountered in her walk to the front door of Little Rock’s Central High is a scene that Elizabeth Eckford will never forget.

To imagine that America once fought so desperately to deny African Americans the right for better education, employment or even decent living arrangements may be hard for today’s young to believe but it isn’t for those who have lived it.

The marches, the threats of violence yet the pride that black America felt when it came to requesting their right to be included in America’s world also meant melting into the white man’s world. A world that for too long had been secluded only for those who sported European features and have views of white supremacy.

Integration, the answer some African Americans thought would lead them to the “promise land”, has in turn led black America into a world of further separation and confusion.
The very effort to be included in white America’s world was suppose to mean black America had finally arrived and would finally get their piece “of the pie” that was owed them.
But we all know, not.

Decades of fighting for inclusion in a segregated world has done some good for black America. The historic 1954 Brown v. Topeka, Kas., Board of Education decision gave black Americans and others ethnicities the chance to attend public schools and universities of their choice. The 1965 Civil Rights Act was intended to cease discrimination in voting, education and the use of public facilities. The Voting Rights Act of 1968 was geared toward communities, particularly in the deep South, that made voting a deadly affair for determined blacks.

Laws governing the opportunity to own homes in neighborhoods once forbidden for black people were on the books. Affirmative action, as good as many believed, was suppose to send thousands more to the top of corporate America. Now, the clock is turning back, and affirmative action, even with the eye of conservative black U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is all but becoming a dead issue for those whites who never wanted it in the first place.

Inclusion Or Not

Integration, as good as it was intended, has not fully been realized and the reason is simple as many state: white America isn’t ready to include you in everything.

Tamar Jacoby, author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration, clearly stated as a white female herself why the idea of integration, although good and successful in many ways, has become a backward spiral of hopelessness for those who desire to be included in the process:

“Only a tiny minority, black or white, have repudiated integration outright, but increasingly on both sides there is a new contrary mood. Some whites, tired of the issue and the emotion that comes with it, have grown indifferent to blacks’ problems. Others, black and white, think of integration as a sentimental notion, more or less irrelevant to the real problems of race in America — black poverty, black joblessness, black advancement.”
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(Akiit.com) Drug use and the resulting risky behavior are the biggest factors in the spread of HIV/AIDS in the United States, and Hispanic and black men are more likely to be infected this way than others, an AIDS expert told a national AIDS conference in Miami Beach on Monday.

”Drugs, whether you inject them, inhale them or take them orally, alter your judgment and put you at risk for HIV,” Dr. Rhonda Hagler, medical director of Proceed Inc., an Elizabeth, N.J., AIDS clinic, told the 2007 National Conference on Latinos and AIDS, meeting here through today.

Contracting AIDS through injected drug use is particularly prevalent in the Hispanic and black communities, because Hispanic and black men are nearly three times as likely as white non-Hispanic men and nearly twice as likely as Asians to contract AIDS through shared needles, according to a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey in 2004.

Also, Hispanic teens are using drugs — from cocaine to heroin — at somewhat higher rates than blacks or white non-Hispanics.

Hispanic and black women, on the other hand, were less likely to contract AIDS through drug use than white non-Hispanic and Asian women.
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(Akiit.com) “I sure hope Timothy doesn’t come to school today.”

It was when that thought came to mind, says Frederica Wilson, surveying the faces at the conference table in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools headquarters, that she knew she had a problem. After all, she was a school principal, a black woman. And Timothy was a student, a black boy. But Timothy was also a terror and as she drove to school, she found herself hoping he wouldn’t be there.

The thought shocked her. If she dreaded Timothy, she says, how must her Hispanic and white teachers have felt about him? And why was it every time she held a disciplinary conference, it was for a black boy? Why were they the ones who always seemed to be in trouble?

So she started meeting with them, “trying to find out why they were so angry and why they were so disruptive and why they wanted to fight all the time.” Then she started calling men in to help her.

Fourteen years and more than 15,000 boys later, Wilson is a Florida state senator and the mentoring effort she started has become the 5000 Role Models of Excellence. It operates in 91 Miami-area schools and claims better than 95 percent success at keeping its boys out of trouble with school officials and the law.

Full disclosure: Years ago, I spoke at a Role Models assembly. I think it’s a fine example of What Works. As in, my series of columns profiling programs that improve the odds for black kids. Wilson and some of the Role Model men are joined at the conference table by graphic evidence that their program works: boys who became men under its guidance.
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(Akiit.com) Black men are in big trouble. And if black men are in trouble, the black family and the whole black community are also in trouble.

America has already lost one whole generation of black boys to poor education, chronic unemployment and underemployment, hyper-incarceration, and senseless violence.
Many black men seem to be in a self- destruct mode.

Bad numbers

Consider these numbers:

• In Indianapolis, the Schott Foundation for Public Education reports that only 21 percent of black males graduate from high school.
• In Indiana, the Joint Economic Committee reports that 42 percent of black men are not working.
• Nationally, of the few black men who graduate from high school and enter college, only 22 percent graduate from college after six years.
• More than 1 million black men are in jails and prisons in America.
A dismal future

The statistics point to a future disaster in the black community.

Can the black community be viable if the black man is not viable? Absolutely not. Without strong, vibrant black males as anchors to our families, there cannot be strong black communities.
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