TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081291/0812108.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.7 KB | 168 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 30

URBAN CRISIS

Beating the Mean Streets


With a little help from his friends, James Jacobs proves that
ghetto blacks are not doomed to failure

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    By the bleak arithmetic of the inner city, James Jacobs
should be dead. Or in jail. Or strung out on drugs. Or selling
them.

    Instead, on a pleasantly cool Monday night in June, the
soft-spoken 19-year-old, who grew up in the public-housing
projects in Bridgeport, Conn., proudly marched into the local
civic auditorium with 128 other green-and-white-robed members
of the Bassick High School graduating class of 1991. He didn't
sit on the podium with the class leaders, nor was he one of the
nine students who wore a blue satin collar symbolizing
membership in the National Honor Society. But for James, his
family, his neighborhood and even for this country, the mere
fact that he got a diploma was something to be proud of.

    "We from the projects, we from the drug-ridden
neighborhoods have beaten the statistics," declared class
valedictorian Efrain Colon Jr. "This is no stepping-stone. This
is a milestone. We have made it."

    Making it today can be more challenging than ever for
young men who are poor, black or Hispanic. Although recent
reports suggest that the number of black students completing
high school is growing, thousands continue to fall by the
wayside. Nearly one-third of the youngsters in James' class
dropped out before graduation. In the Bridgeport area, the
unemployment rate for black and Hispanic males between ages 16
and 19 is 38.5%, more than five times the rate for the general
population. Idleness often leads to illicit activity. Local
police arrested 1,914 juveniles in 1989; 158 of them were
charged with violent crimes, 14 of those with murder. Yet every
day young people like James beat the odds, resist the
temptations and begin productive lives. Too often their success
requires a heroic effort: by themselves, family members,
dedicated teachers, social workers and concerned volunteers. A
youngster who is not exceptional in some way -- or just plain
lucky -- can fall through the cracks.

    James was gifted -- and fortunate. "I been tempted," he
says of the fast money that street life promises. "But people
always put me on the right track, or something bad always
happens every time I get tempted, and it turns me the other
way."

    The seventh of George Fitch's 10 children, James is the
first to graduate from high school. His mother Patricia Jacobs,
38, made it to senior year but dropped out when she became
pregnant with the first of the four sons she had with Fitch. The
couple were never legally married, but stayed together for 17
years. Fitch, a carpenter, now disabled, and Jacobs, a nurse's
aide, provided their boys with a stable and protective home
environment. "We kept them in the house for a long time,"
Patricia Jacobs recalls. "But they say you got to let them go
sometime."

    The P.T. Barnum Houses, 21 squat buildings marooned on the
western edge of the city, are not an easy place to raise
children, especially boys. The eldest son Gerrod, 20, fell first
-- dropping out of school, smoking marijuana, then using cocaine
-- and is serving a five-year sentence in North Carolina for
breaking and entering. "I was out in the streets, hanging with
the wrong crowd," he says. The third brother Jeremy began
selling drugs. "Jeremy wanted things," says his mother. "It's
that fast money. They want Michael Jordan sneakers and all that
stuff they see." Jeremy was shot to death last year. He was 16.

    James stumbled too. At 14 he was arrested for riding in a
stolen car and given nine months probation. Rough handling by
the police and being detained in a cell with "all these big men"
frightened him, and he vowed never to be locked up again.
Thousands of youngsters have made similar vows. But other
factors, in addition to his personal fortitude, helped James
keep his.

    "One of the things that saved James was sports," says his
sixth-grade teacher John Tavella. The youth played point guard
on the Bassick High School team, which ranked eighth in the U.S.
during James' sophomore year. Basketball gave him the kind of
attention that all youngsters crave. It also gave him something
constructive to do with his time.

    But athletic prowess alone didn't keep James on the right
track. Relatives, friends and others took the time to show
interest in him. "Mr. Tavella didn't just teach and let you go
home," he says of his former teacher. "He talked to you. He knew
things was going on out here. He was advising me not to be out
there doing them."

    In 1985 James got involved with the Bridgeport chapter of
a national program called Youth at Risk, which took youngsters
to the Catskill Mountains for 10 summer days of arduous
physical exercise and intense rap sessions designed to help them
develop skills to cope with the pressures back on the street.
Gerrod, who was also selected to go, left after just six days,
but James stayed on and completed a follow-up program during the
school year.

    "That's what James' success is all about," says Don
Thomas, a graphics teacher at Bassick High School and one of the
volunteer counselors that summer, "knowing that there is support
and reaching out for it." Still, there were times when James
strayed. He dropped out of school for two months in protest when
his mother sent him to North Carolina to stay with her parents.
"Any crowd out here has one or two who are known drug dealers,
and if you're hanging with the crowd and they're picked up, 9
times out of 10, you'll be picked up too," Patricia Jacobs says,
explaining her desire to get her son away.

    But even when his parents gave in and brought James home,
his grades at Bassick fluctuated. "You start listening to other
people, and they get to your head," he says. "Say the math is
getting hard, and one of my friends just goes to sleep, and I
figure, `Hey, I can go to sleep too.' "

    Persistent prodding from his mother, his coach, his
guidance counselor and his teachers kept pulling him back in the
right direction. But the final turnaround came last year, when
Jeremy was killed. ``Before that, I'd be out in the street, but
when my brother got shot, that was it," he says. "That
completely turned me off."

    James stayed in the house more. He studied harder, making
the honor roll for the first time. Friends of his brothers'
encouraged him to keep at it. "Even though they don't go to
school, they'd be telling me to go to school," he says. "I guess
with what happened to my brother, nobody really wanted to see
me do bad."

    Later this month, James will enroll at Central Connecticut
State University in New Britain. A combination of grants, loans
and work-study programs will pay for his education. "I think
the hard part is coming up," he says. "From what I hear,
college has its own things to get over, and it'll be harder
cause I'll be on my own." Nevertheless, motivated in part by a
desire to set a positive role model for his youngest brother
Effredge, now 10, James is determined to give it a try, perhaps
majoring in pre-law.

    Meanwhile, James has been thinking about what would help
other youngsters from neighborhoods like his to succeed. "You
need a community center or something they could get into, that
could occupy their time, that could let them know what they're
good at," he says. "And you need somebody that has made it out
of here who would come back and talk to them. It probably won't
get all of them, but it will get to some of them." Until such
efforts are vastly expanded, success stories like James' will be
the exception, not the rule.