At the Corner of Progress and Peril

For all the diversity within their numbers -- as in this group gathered at Bunker Hill Elementary School in Northeast Washington -- black men in the United States often feel a connection to, and responsibility for, one another. For the stories of the men pictured, see interactive feature. (Michel du Cille and Marvin Joseph -- The Washington Post)

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hosted a 1985 panel discussion that called young black men "an endangered species," a label that stuck even as some black men were making strides toward the middle class and a new level of social acceptance.

In 1995, the Million Man March, spearheaded by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, drew hundreds of thousands of black men to the Mall in an unrivaled show of unity and concern for one another. The gathering seemed to signal a watershed moment of self-reflection.

Since the march, black men have met in thousands of groups to address their problems, reinforce their progress and understand their lives with greater clarity. Perhaps the latest, most dramatic evidence of this involvement is "The Covenant," a book charting a plan for black self-improvement that was an outgrowth of commentator Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union forums. The book has been a No. 1 seller on the New York Times nonfiction paperback list.

"What we have seen in the last 10 years is increasing concern among successful black men in terms of trying to help other African American men succeed," observed Courtland Lee, a University of Maryland professor and former editor of the Journal of African American Men. "Even successful black men are victims of this crisis. They know they walk around with a target on their backs."

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For black men, being poor has grown more perilous with time -- especially for the young. The 1960s sociological classic "Tally's Corner" charted the lives of what it called "Negro streetcorner men" in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest Washington, painting a portrait of a group hobbled by weak education, dead-end jobs and fracturing families. Over four decades, wages and opportunities for uneducated workers have diminished, while the ranks of men disconnected from much of society have grown.

The path to the corner is set early for some black men. While school achievement has been a growing concern for boys of most every ethnicity, the problem is most acute among black boys, who are far more likely to be left back, be assigned to special education, score poorly on standardized tests, be suspended from school or eventually drop out than any other demographic group, numerous studies show.

Once they leave school, nearly three-quarters of black men in their twenties are jobless or incarcerated, an unemployment rate much higher than that of similarly situated white and Hispanic youth, according to a report from the Urban Institute.

"There has been a big change in what is thought of as normal in poor black communities," says John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, which is hosting a conference on black men this month. "Back in the old days, there were always black men who were not interested in working. They were called corner men. But years ago, if you were a black man and you didn't work, it was a shame. Now, the shame is gone."

A black man is more than six times as likely as a white man to be slain. The trend is most stark among black men 14 to 24 years old: They were implicated in a quarter of the nation's homicides and accounted for 15 percent of the homicide victims in 2002, although they were just 1.2 percent of the population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Also, black men are nine times as likely as white men to die from AIDS, and life expectancy for black men is 69.2 years -- more than six years shorter than that of white men.

Trying to reverse these trends through a broad public policy strategy is at the heart of the Dellums Commission, named after former congressman Ronald Dellums (D-Calif.). The commission will issue its report later this year. "This is beyond a crisis," says Gail Christopher, a vice president at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who is overseeing the commission's study of the problems affecting young men of color. "It is a catastrophe."