Modern urban challenge: bringing up black males

By Timothy Pratt

Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007 | 7:15 a.m.

Justin Cook, now 15, recalls a police officer stopping him and his grandmother a few years ago on their way to Mario's Market on the West Side.

"They asked (her), 'Is your son Big House?' " the soft-spoken, bespectacled teen said. "I didn't like that too much. To me, he's my Uncle Kevin."

To local and federal law enforcement officials, however, his uncle was a gangster who got a 15-year prison sentence on racketeering charges in late 2005. For Justin, that meant the loss of the main man involved in his upbringing, six years after he lost his father, then divorced from his mother, to a stray bullet.

His mother, Lillie, is acutely aware of the difficulties of raising two black males - Justin and his 19-year-old brother, Stephen. A middle school teacher and native Las Vegan, she has "moved on up" from the low-income, high-crime area where she grew up, but still sees bringing up her boys as a constant challenge.

The lack of a father, the pull of gangs, society's racism, unwanted attention from police, not enough sports and academic programs, bad role models from rappers and athletes - these and other issues form daily obstacles through which she tries to safely maneuver her sons.

The Rev. Robert Fowler of the Victory Missionary Baptist Church addressed many of the same topics in November in a talk called "The Conspiracy Against African-American Males," which drew about 1,100 people.

Determined to keep the issue at the forefront of the dialogue inside the valley's black community, Fowler and others intend to highlight the challenges and discuss possible solutions at various events throughout the year.

On Jan. 31 a coalition of the church and the Southern Nevada Community Gang Task Force - which includes local law enforcement - announced "Operation Lasting Peace," an effort to curb gang violence in West Las Vegas, which primarily affects young black males.

Rainier Spencer, director of the African-American studies program at UNLV, called the situation facing black males a "crisis ... (and a) problem that seems like it has no end."

Fowler said that crisis can be measured in statistics: One in four men in Nevada's prisons are black, despite the fact that blacks comprise only 9.5 percent of the state's population. In Clark County, 56 percent of black children under 18 are raised by single mothers. And there are nearly as many black men in prison statewide - 2,873 - as there are in college or graduate school - 3,632.

The pastor believes that the family is the main hope for any solution to the cascading obstacles facing young black men in the Las Vegas Valley and across the country.

When talking about raising their sons, families interviewed often voiced a combination of hope and fear.

"Basically, there's a great number of black men that are lost," said Brenda Banks, a 50-year-old mother of three, two of whom are males. A day later, a young black man was killed in a drive-by shooting several blocks away from their West Adams Avenue home.

Since her older son, Jeremiah, was born 19 years ago, Banks has devoted much of her energy to warding off what she sees as the wrong influences. A dispatcher at Cox Communications and a churchgoing woman, she has spent most of that time away from the West Side, but found herself back in the 'hood last fall when her uncle became sick and needed care. So the family of four moved into his house.

One side of the wall behind a couch displayed photos of kin stretching back to her great-great-grandfather in Mississippi. The other side had pictures of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Presidents Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy.

Banks also proudly showed off a 2004 photo of Jeremiah standing next to Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., in Washington while participating in the National Young Leaders Conference.

"I taught Jeremiah every day what's real and what's not real," she said. "Education is real. You can't do anything without it. That's missing with a lot of parents."

Jeremiah now is studying mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California.

"He wants to own his own company and would love to bring in kids who don't have opportunities," she beamed.

But then she returned to the task still before her, raising her youngest, Katriel, who's 8. She recently requested permission to move her son to a new school after a child punched him in the face at a nearby elementary school, then threatened to shoot him.

Charles Salter, a retired administrative analyst for New Jersey who, together with his wife, has raised two girls and a boy, said that schools are where lowered expectations get drummed into black children, particularly boys, from a young age.

Schools, he said, "do not give equal play to African-Americans. They're told they can't achieve anything,"

Salter, who spends part of the year in Henderson's Sun City Anthem, said this was an example of how "institutionalized racism still exists and affects how well we're able to do."

Across town, in a condominium on a part of Russell Road so new that it dead-ends a block west of her house, Julie Ryser, a 31-year-old single mother of four sons, has a unique perspective on raising black males: She's white.

She says that her sons, ages 4 to 13, are multiracial but because society tends to sees things in, well, black and white, their dark complexion makes them black.

To underscore her point, she tells a story about how a boy in school repeatedly called 11-year-old Elijah Jones a racial epithet, a fact she discovered only when Elijah got fed up and punched the name-caller.

Ryser, who went to Fowler's event and has attended the mostly black church since shortly after moving to the area in 2001 from Victorville, Calif., said her sons constantly take in negative images of black men from the media.

"You see a lot of crime on TV and a lot of them are black males ... and then there's the rap music, with the idea of doing whatever you have to do to get the money," she said. "With the music influence and the TV influence, it makes things a little bit harder."

Ryser said her oldest son, Joseph Jones, was lucky to have a math teacher who's a black man - the first male teacher he has had in his schooling.

Joseph, sitting on the floor nearby and playing Xbox football with Elijah, said his teacher was "cool," adding, "I can relate to him."

The single mother also was thankful for two anchors in bringing up her boys: church and sports.

The church offers a counterbalance to the absence of positive black male role models in the lives of her sons, she said. And sports is "something to keep them off the streets."

She said she wishes there were more low-cost or free athletic programs for the children of single working mothers like herself.

All the families interviewed said that lessons on relationships with the police are part of the basics they teach their black sons.

"I tell them, you have to use your manners (with police)," Ryser said. "If they see you with your pants sagging and hats backward, they're going to stop you." For that reason, she controls what they wear.

"He wanted to wear a red bandanna," she said, pointing to Joseph. "But I told him I didn't want him to be shot for that."

At the same time, she said she tries to counterbalance those messages so that her sons don't grow up fearing an entire group of people - such as white cops.

"I try to get them to love everybody," Ryser said.

Lillie Williams' older son, Stephen, was stopped by himself one day and questioned about his Uncle Kevin and what he knew about neighborhood gangs. Her godson, whom she described as "a straight-A student," also was stopped and asked about what he knew about local gangs.

"I tell Stephen all the time, 'You can't drive a car with black males and not get stopped,' " she said.

Salter said the relationship between black males and law enforcement points to "a system that makes a point of manufacturing criminals out of African-Americans, disadvantaged Americans and indigent Americans."

Salter, 63, raised three children with his wife, Carrie, including his son, John-Charles, now 37 and a salesman.

"It's difficult to live under this pressure," Salter said.

As for the specter of gangs, some of the families interviewed linked the pull they have on boys to the absence of fathers.

"Gangs are not your family," Williams said. "That's the thing we have yet to address. We say it's bad but we haven't given them anything to replace it."

None of the sons in the families interviewed has ever told his parents about being pressured to join gangs.

Justin Cook, Lillie Williams' son, said he prays at night that they'll leave him alone. He sings in a choir at the Las Vegas Arts Academy, which he said helps keep him away "from all the bad stuff."

In the future, he said, "I see myself as being successful, going to college, not making bad choices and if I go out at night, I don't want to drink. I don't want to think I'm invincible."

Fowler wants to work with public and private agencies to help boys like Justin, who are on the right track, as well as those who have gotten into trouble. Among other things, he is pushing for an alternative sentencing program for boys who have been arrested for nonviolent offenses.

He also is self-critical and says the church, as well as the government, has failed black boys and men.

Spencer called such efforts "necessary, but not sufficient."

"There's got to be a sea change in parenting," he said, including stopping teens from becoming parents. He also said that single parenting may not be the top challenge, but rather a lack of what he called "parenting resources" in general - with parents being too busy working, too young or not interested enough to raise their boys with values, self-esteem and other qualities needed to succeed in life.

"If parents could see the crisis they're in, maybe then they would take it seriously," he said.

Whether it takes changes in "the system" or changes in households to improve the situation facing black males - or both - Fowler said one thing is certain: "They're hurting. They're crying in the darkness, (and) they want someone to know."