Is the Black community in a battle to save the souls of our young people?

"Our children are our greatest asset." "They are our future." We hear some variation of those comments often in our community. What is the evidence of their value to us?

I believe, I know, many of us are in pain over the headlines, news reports, unreported violence and abusive environment that some of our children experience each day. I am in pain over it.

Three of our best and brightest young people--college students--were shot and killed execution style in New Jersey a few weeks ago. Another of the group survived her wounds and helped police to identify the assailants. These hopeful young people had survived growing up in the Newark streets and were in the process of gaining access to education and opportunity until the moment they were attacked. The gunmen included teenagers, younger than the victims, and an alleged adult illegal immigrant and convicted criminal.

The stories of teenage murders in particular seem unending and unreal.


I do not relate to the extreme conditions I hear that our children grow up in today. I did experience a breakdown in the primary family, my parents separated for a time when I was a child, but the extended family (living with my grandparents) was a shelter and hedge against the encroachment of poverty and any challenge to moral values and a standard of behavior that my parents had instilled in me. This added protection from the extended family was firmly in place for a lot of my friends and our generation that grew up in the social revolution of the Sixties.

But it is clearly dismantled or at least severly weakened in present day families and communities. As a result, children are catching (or dodging in desparation) the full frontal impact of the the family breakdown--absent or unenforced standards of moral behavior, drug abuse, sexual abuse, poverty. The fruits of evil prevail in the absence of family social values, economic support and community intervention.

In addition to the family and extended family, the public schools were a strong enforcer of moral values that I learned at home. I despair the erosion of the high standards that teachers held themselves and my friends and I to beginning in my elementary school education.

Even though stories proliferate about the social malaise that has infected many poor Black communities, I have not had such a clear and powerful window to the entrenchment of this perverse social order until I read Cindy Brown Austin's novel, By the Rivers of Babylon (2007).

My reading is light in the urban fiction trend, and even less have I encountered the Christian thriller, which Rivers might be viewed as. But what Austin showed me more than any other text I've read is how our young Black boys are systematically reared into the criminal culture on a wide scale, and how a poor community (trapped in an expansive project complex) is occupied by a dominant drug culture as overtly as the U.S. military invades foreign territories, or the way I recall the National Guard occupied my neighborhood in Baltimore in the wake of riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By the Rivers of Babylon showed me that there is a force of evil that has set up a recruitment of our greatest assets, our future, our children. Through the interaction with Gabriella Sinclaire, a talented Christian journalist/love interest, Austin takes the reader along the narrative to peer into the mind and heart (such as it is) of the main character, Lincoln Duvall, one of the most notorious drug lords of a poor community, based loosely on the one Austin hails from in her native Hartford, Connecticut.

Lincoln Duvall is a menace, a terror. However, he also has a background that show him victimized by his parents volatile relationship and weakened moral foundation that left him exposed to the lure of acceptance, power and money in criminal life.

But what I caught sight of, hovering in the background of the outrageous criminal exploits of Lincoln Duvall and his flank of teen rogues, was the tedium of life that everday people were living, trapped as they were in a housing complex where the police were in partnership with the criminals, if only by complicity through their absence.

What I caught sight of was the despairing result when community breaks down, when the stronger more stable segments of the community are cut off, or cut themselves off, from the segments that are vulnerable to poverty, poor education, lack of exposure to opportunity and the access to society's rewards. What I saw was my own complicity defined by my lack of interaction with our young people.

Although the conditions have existed for more than a few generations, the novel is an eye-opener for me, another call to action that I am increasingly answering.
In the inagural issue of Devotion Journal we asked, "How are we telling our children who God is?" I believe that we must answer this question--how and even if we are telling our children who God is--as a means to reinstate a moral center for the family and the greater community.

Dialogues, community organization, increased mentoring, youth activites, public school revitalization, promoting marriage and extended family, and moral values--all of these responses are being discussed and planned by concerned community partners who have been affected by Austin's book, and most importantly, who have been answering the call to rescue our young people. There is more to come.

Knowing who God is is irretrievable from knowing our history as Black Americans. Our forbearers told us of the link between our history in America and our Christian heritage when they sang "I look back and wonder how I got ovah."

By the Rivers of Babylon poses its story as an underlying battle of good against evil, and that is accurate. In reaity, we are in a battle of good against evil, a battle to save the souls of our young people from the fruits of evil. By entering the battle we will be saving our own souls as well.