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The Plight of the Black Male Editorial | Change policy and lives "Is there some kind of conspiracy to get the black male?" That question, asked by Philadelphia Urban League president Patricia A. Coulter in an Inquirer article Sunday, has been thought, if not spoken, by others. Genocide has even been used to describe what is happening to black men. They die younger and faster than most U.S. demographics, often as a result of violence. Yet the lack of public policies to specifically address the problems of black men nationally raises another question: Who cares? Has the rest of America...

The Media's Bias Against Black Men in America Armstrong Williams Friday, March 31, 2006 Last week the New York Times published an article about the plight of American black men. The article was another example of major media outlets using negative statistics to consistently cast black men as the scourge of this country. It is not surprising that editors and journalists pursue and use these stories. Gloom and doom sells. But there is a deeper truth beyond the headlines, and it is this truth that we must understand in order to appreciate the full story of black men in America....

To the [NYT] Editor: As a married, hard-working black man who is a devoted father of two, I feel obligated to comment on the problems of black men described in your article. Why should we continue to study the self-inflicted decline in the socioeconomic status of black men? Opportunities for black men have never been greater. It is incumbent upon all of us, regardless of racial background, to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, thousands of our black men have failed at this and subsequently descend into being absent fathers, poorly educated, poorly trained and unproductive workers. Contrary to what many...

BALTIMORE — Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics,... Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men. ...These were among the recent findings: ¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly...dropouts.... ¶Incarceration rates climbed in...

Sounding like a born-again social conservative, president Lyndon B. Johnson stepped to the podium and made this stirring pronouncement: “When the family collapses, it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale, the community itself is crippled.” And with his usual modesty, LBJ later hailed that 1965 Howard University commencement address as his “greatest civil rights speech.” A few months later the Moynihan Report came out. Despite its commonsense focus on strengthening the Black family, civil rights leaders raised a stink that Mr. Moynihan was trying to “blame the victim.” Floyd McKissick, director of...

Watching Simon Jackson in class is like watching a man who is conflicted about being in college. For long stretches, he huddles silently in the back corner, his head sunk into his bulky jacket. But every so often he strides to the front of the room to chat with the professor or to write on the chalkboard, self-assured to the point of cockiness. A 10th-grade dropout who earned a high school equivalency diploma, Mr. Jackson, 21, is now a freshman at Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, eager, he says, to get a college degree. "I was in school...