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The path from victims to victors
STRIVE TO SUCCEED
As history has shown, we are a resilient people. We overcome. In the face of all of the obstacles that even the most challenged of our children face, we continually come across stories that give us cause to smile and to hope.
What these stories have in common are two things: kids with the will to survive and succeed and adults who have taken the time to help these kids along. In the story that follows, we add a third element: the power of friendship.
One night, while a freshman at Putnam Vocational Technical High School in Springfield, Massachusetts, Loren Wilder went roller-skating.
When he returned home, he found his whole world turned upside down. The police had raided the apartment and arrested his mother for drug dealing. She would spend the next several years in prison. Wilder finished the ninth grade at his uncle’s house and started the tenth at his sister’s.
When she left for Puerto Rico, he was on his own. Wilder’s buddy, Jimmy Hester, wasn’t faring much better. After years of moving from place to place with his desperately unsettled mother,
Hester broke off their tumultuous relationship and left home. He was fifteen years old and determined to drop out of school altogether. A phone call from Wilder convinced him to come back to Putnam, where they both played football. “If it wasn’t for Loren, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” said Hester.
At Putnam, their coaches kept a close eye on the boys, who would soon rent an apartment together. The school’s guidance counselor also kept an eye on them. The parents of their friend Wesley White watched over them as well.
The Springfield Republican ran an article on the three boys, then seniors, about how they clipped coupons and hunted for bargains to help save money for college. As of this writing, with a little help from adults who read the article, the young men are doing just fine. All three of them are juniors in college in good standing. When possible, they come back to Putnam to help mentor those in situations like their own.
GIVE FATHERHOOD A SECOND CHANCE
Many black men, including the poor, have been struggling with the challenges of a new model of fatherhood, one in which they play a greater role in the child-rearing experience. Black men benefit from feeling the pleasures and satisfactions of being involved with their little ones. Many complain, however, that the mothers shut them out.
How do we change that? If the father has been cruel or indifferent to the mother or to the child, how can we ask the mother to give the man a second chance? It’s never easy for anyone involved. Still, if a mother has a difficult—but not violent—relationship with the baby’s father, it is important to get counseling to help them work through their issues for the sake of the child. Parents should not use the children to manipulate each other. There are counselors in churches, health centers, and community agencies who can help parents learn to work together.
If the father is physically abusive and refuses to change, the mother has no choice but to shut him out. And the father should honor any legal restraining orders until he gets his act together and convinces the authorities that he has. In the meantime, for her children’s sake, the mother should try to find “substitute” fathers among relatives, mentors, and community organizations.
The fact that a black father is unemployed or underemployed should not disqualify him as a parent in the mother’s eyes. These men can play an important role in the household. If fathers take on more child-care and household responsibilities, it lessens the burden on the mother. By participating in the life of the family, men can help relieve the stress that is frequently found in low-income households, as well as strengthen their children’s development.
Children who spend time with their fathers will develop closer family connections and will benefit from the individual attention as they share in day-to-day activities. There are committed fathers out there. We all know the story of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, who are both worldclass tennis players. Twenty years ago, their father, Richard Williams, told his little girls they were going to be tennis champions. With the strong support of both their parents, they started on a tennis court in Compton, California, and went on to play on international courts. Mr. Williams believed his daughters would win, and win they did. Dream dreams for your children. They don’t need to become international superstars, but they do need you to lift them up so they can succeed in life.
Dr. Willie Barber, of Baltimore, shared his thoughts: I talk to fathers who want to see their children, but the mom will not allow it, or the in-laws will say, “No, he’s not coming around here.” So there are a lot of barriers.
Sometimes it is tough to forgive people for what they have done. We have to help women deal with that. We have to educate them about the important role that fathers can and should play in their children’s lives.
In recent decades, there have been many programs developed to meet the special needs of black men and their roles as fathers.
Fatherhood training programs now exist in many communities around the country. If you do not have one in your community, contact a social service agency, church, or health clinic to urge them to set up such a program. Fatherhood programs are also a way of encouraging young black men to bond with each other for mutual support.
Finding ways to enable black fathers to connect with their kids is crucial to the kids’ well-being. As should be obvious by now, black men often have to overcome some very real hurdles to connect with their children.
These include child-support difficulties, incarceration, lack of education, and unemployment. In some of the harder cases, the men avoid their children for no other reason than that they see themselves as bad role models. What they need to understand, though, is that from the moment they commit themselves to that child, and as long as they honor that commitment, they can still be a good role model. Our kids, thank God, don’t ask for a résumé or for references. They don’t need to see our bank accounts. They just want us in their lives.
Constructive programs, especially for ex-inmates, are sprouting up in some communities, and we need many more of them. It is in these areas that we need policy changes and a criminal justice system that will support such programs. This is where black people’s historic role as activists comes in.
The Dellums Commission in Washington DC on which Dr. Poussaint served as honorary vice chair, issued a 2006 report that recommended, among other initiatives, the repeal of mandatory sentencing, an increase in the minimum wage, and a restriction of zero-tolerance policies in schools.
We must listen to these voices of wisdom and fight for state and local governments to help us salvage as many black men—and women—as possible. This includes financial support for programs providing counseling, education, and job-training skills. Men need a good steady job that gives them a chance in life; otherwise, they end up back in jail or on the streets. Such men can become permanently alienated from the world, which can be hell on the community and heartbreaking for the children.
When all is said and done, the black child is our future. It’s time for us men to think of the future, to straighten out our acts, to say to ourselves, I am more interested in raising my child than any issue I had before.
I’m going to behave or get help, but it’s about the child. No matter how useless or hopeless a father may think he is, his role issimply to be there. If he makes that commitment, he is a much better man than he thought he was.
ROLE MODELS, PLEASE APPLY
For many black males, chances for success seem slim in many fields because they lack role models. They don’t have a clue as to what’s out there. How many kids in even the smartest Crips set in South Central have parents who have decent jobs? How many of them have available dads at all? How many have moms who are doing something more than just getting by?
Without working parents in the home, or in their lives, how do these boys learn about work skills? From the get-go, respectable careers in the trades are all shut off to them. Unlike their grandparents, they don’t have to worry about segregated unions. But they do have to worry about developing their own skills, and that’s a greater worry still.
Some thoughts from Dr. Curtis Adams Jr. in Baltimore: In order to be a full-grown man, you must see one in action. It’s not just what that man says but what he does. The little things done day in and day out demonstrate what makes a man. And when a boy does not see this, he is deprived, and he feels it. Having said that, girls need to see a good man as well. A woman will not know how to pick a good man if she has not seen one.
Despite the obvious gains that people of color have made in most jobs and occupations, many poor young black males still believe that important upper-level occupations exclude them because they are black. You can tell them this is a new day all you want, but they are still stuck on yesterday. It’s much more comfortable to have someone to blame other than ourselves. That’s just human nature. We must reach out to black youth, particularly black boys, to show them all of the opportunities that are available. But more than show them, we’ve got to lead them, and that takes mentoring and tutoring and coaching.
These kids see all the bad role models you can imagine—drug dealers, pimps, you name it. But positive role models do exist. We’re talking about ordinary black men doing an honest day’s work as cab drivers, counselors, bus drivers, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, and coming home at night to the mother or caregiver of their children.
When Benjamin O. Davis Jr. entered West Point in 1932, there were many of his fellow classmates who rather wished he weren’t there. To discourage Davis from staying, his fellow cadets would not eat with him or room with him and barely spoke to him except when they had to.
Benjamin O. Davis Jr., though, had something going for him that his classmates did not count on. That would be Benjamin O.
Davis Sr. The senior Davis had enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private and served with the legendary Buffalo soldiers. By the time his son entered West Point, Davis had worked his way up to colonel and understood full well the opportunity that West Point presented.
When the son talked of quitting, the father steeled his son’s resolve.
The son persevered and in the process taught his fellow cadets a life lesson, as memorialized in the 1936 yearbook entry on Davis:
The courage, tenacity, and intelligence with which he conquered a problem incomparably more difficult than plebe year won for him the sincere admiration of his classmates, and his single-minded determination to continue in his chosen career cannot fail to inspire respect wherever fortune may lead him.
It was not good luck or white guilt that led Davis to command the famed Tuskegee Airmen in Word War II or to become the first African-American general in the United States Air Force. It was a combination of personal grit and paternal steel.
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