At Baker Funeral Home, Andre Chin, case manager for Don’t Fall Down in the Hood, lifts a sheet to view a body in the morgue. Watching are program participants (from left) Chris Reed, Dereek Leavingston, Lamar Johnson. Charlene Wilson is afraid for young black men.

The South Philadelphia funeral director has buried many of them. She’s watched their mothers cry. “I’d like to see you guys live, but some of you won’t make it,” Wilson recently told a group of mostly black teenage boys — first-time offenders in a court-sanctioned program called Don’t Fall Down in the Hood.

“I’m just tired of burying young boys,” she continued. “I need you all to make a conscious decision that you’re going to live.”

For certain, hundreds of thousands of young black men are advancing through high school and college and into the middle class, but there is growing concern that far too many others are dropping out of school, going to jail — and killing each other on urban streets.

Some speak of a spiraling crisis in which growing numbers of young boys are raised in fatherless homes, without other positive male role models, then fall prey to a street culture in which quick cash and hip clothes are valued over good grades and careers.

“It is a national social problem that we’re under-preparing our black boys for life,” said Archye Leacock, executive director of the Institute for the Development of African American Youth in Philadelphia, which runs five non-profits, including Don’t Fall Down in the Hood.

“I have 16- and 17-year-old boys whose best activity is sex; they already have children; they can’t read. What’s going on is a national scandal.”

Talk of young black men in crisis has been going on for years. It prompted the Million Man March a decade ago. But an uptick in urban homicides after many years of decline and the sudden national exposure of New Orleans’ underbelly of poverty have helped prompt a new wave of books, academic conferences and national reports.

Hurricane Katrina “raised the whole issue of poverty,” said Ronald Walters, professor at the University of Maryland and director of the African-American Leadership Institute, “and key aspects of it had to do with the black male.”

In many arenas, young black men are being left behind:

* Only 9 percent of black eighth grade boys scored at grade level or better in reading, according to the nation’s report card, compared with 33 percent of white boys.

* Although growing numbers of black men go to college, only 35 percent graduate, compared with 46 percent of black women and 62 percent of all white students. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education blamed financial problems as well as “wholly inadequate academic credentials, ambition, and study habits.”

* Among black 16- to 19-year olds who are no longer in school and are from low-income homes, only 29 percent had jobs in 2004, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. For comparable whites, employment was 47 percent.

* In 2003, one in every 20 black men was incarcerated in state or federal prisons — six times the rate of white men.

* In Philadelphia, black males ages 15 to 29 made up 4 percent of the city’s population last year, but 50 percent of all shooting victims.

Some criticize the federal government for inadequate school funding and immigration and trade policies that have taken away many entry-level jobs once filled by blacks. Tougher federal sentencing guidelines in the mid-1980's contributed to a quadrupling of the number of black male prisoners to 586,300 in 2003 — about the population of Boston.

“That’s a big part of the problem — the criminalization of black males,” said Bilal Qayyum, cofounder of Men United for a Better Philadelphia. “Now it has gone to another stage. When they come out of jail, they can’t find jobs, they go back to selling drugs and hustling, and the cycle starts again.”

The prison numbers “seem almost unreal,” said Patricia A. Coulter, president and chief executive officer of the Urban League of Philadelphia. “Is there some kind of conspiracy to get rid of the black male?”

While welfare reform policies put many African American women into the workforce, men were largely left out. “The policy for men is incarceration,” said George Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who cowrote Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

But others, including Bill Cosby, fault some black parents. “Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal,” Cosby told the NAACP in 2004. “In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on.”

Whatever the reasons, Elijah Anderson, a University of Pennsylvania social scientist who has long studied inner-city youth culture, deems the status of poor and poorly educated black men “critical,” with serious implications for all black men and the nation’s racial divide.

In response, he is organizing a conference, “Poor, Young, Black and Male: A Cause for National Action,” on April 20 and 21 at Penn. Speakers include noted scholars William Julius Wilson of Harvard and Cornel West of Princeton.

“The young men we’re talking about have been affected by all kinds of sources including historical racism, increasing changes in the economy from manufacturing to high technology, jobs going overseas, immigration,” Anderson said.

Also to blame, Anderson and others say, is the resulting tough-guy “cool pose” culture that can put young black men at even further odds with the wider society. This portrayal of manhood is defined by fancy cars, expensive brand-name clothing, drugs, cash, and sexual conquests.

In their 1992 book, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America, Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson called “cool pose” a coping strategy. They also called it a “mask” that contributes to “dropping out of school, getting into trouble, sliding into drug and alcohol abuse, and being sucked into delinquent or criminal street gangs.”

Still, such young men are often “just dying for someone to show some interest in them,” said Mister Mann Frisby, a Philadelphia track coach and author who will speak May 13 at Arcadia University. That symposium — “Holla Back … But Listen First” — is named for Frisby’s 2005 book aimed at black male youths.

The symposium’s list of speakers also includes Hill Harper, the CSI:NY actor whose book, Letters to a Young Brother: MANifest Your Destiny, to be released this month, is a motivational tome for young minority men. The books, seminars, and changes in government policies and public schools are all needed, said Leacock, the founder of Don’t Fall Down, but significant change won’t come until black men at all levels reach out to younger men.

Leacock, 50, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Temple University, launched Don’t Fall Down in 1997, six years after he and another graduate student, started an impromptu college-prep program. Wanting to do something for the teens he saw hanging around the Temple campus, Leacock invited seven of them to a few weeks of college-prep sessions. He asked them to return in the fall with at least one new student each. Two hundred showed up.

So far, about 400 teenage boys, mostly violators of gun or drug laws, have passed through the Don’t Fall Down program, funded by the city’s Department of Human Services. They go after school, for four to six months, depending on their court order. Only 68 have gotten into trouble afterward, Leacock said.

The youths, ages 14 to 18, have traveled outside their usual environments to places such as the Poconos. They have visited funeral parlors to see the deadly effects of a gunshot (see audio below). They have Temple students as mentors.

Most significantly, they must improve their grades. A parent (usually the mother) must attend a monthly parent night for the after-school program’s four-to-six-month duration. Director Greg Thompson said the program worked because “we bring everybody together —mother, teachers, counselors, probation officer.”

“For the first time in these kids’ lives, they have everybody focused on their achievement.” And that is changing young men’s lives. “I’ve learned there are many black people who are doing positive things,” Jerone Leggett, 18, said. “We can do that, too. Sometimes we just have to make different decisions.”

More information: For more details or to register for the Arcadia University conference May 13 on young Black men, go to www.blackmaledevelopment.com or call 215-517-2539. The April 20-21 Penn conference is full.

Contact staff writer Dwayne Campbell at 215-854-5315 or dcampbell@phillynews.com.

More articles related to the topic Urban Culture can be found here.

More articles related to the topic Support can be found here.