The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities

by Soledad O'Brien;Rose Marie Arce

  I hear about this anger from so many of the young black men I interview. The anger crosses the lines of class and education; it is shaped by fear as much as temper. It has the potential to lance even the most solid lives. I hear it most often when black men talk about their interactions with the police. The feeling is reflected in statistics that show 75 percent of black men feel they are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system. I hear it from the TV comic D. L. Hughley when he recounts how he coaches his son on handling any interaction with the police.

  “When you’re black, your skin color is always in the equation,” D.L. tells him. “He already knows, and he has learned from the time he was twelve years old how to speak to the police, what to say, what not to say, to view the police differently than everybody else.”

  His son, Kyle, recites his father’s advice without hesitation. “If they ask me a question that I’m uncomfortable answering, I say, ‘Officer, I respect your job, but I would appreciate it if you would just call my parents and I’m not saying anything else.’”

  I hear the same story from Professor Ronald Mincy of Columbia University, who has made his career studying African-Americans as a renowned sociologist. He says he has taught his sons to fear encounters with the police. “If a police officer approached you, you cower,” he says with a hint of emotion in his voice. “You cower.”

  Ellis Cose, whose books on race have become primers for black folk looking to understand the strains on our culture, says these experiences cannot be divorced from the negative social messages they get about education.

  “Young black men are much more likely to get a million messages directed at them that tell them you can’t succeed in school; you’re not supposed to be in school; that’s not what young black people do,” he said. Those messages sabotage their self-esteem and stunt their future.

  “It comes from all of this concentrated poverty, all of these people who don’t have models of people who are doing well, who are getting a college education.... And you also just have, in a thousand ways, from rap music, to television, to just what people see in the streets, these messages that get sent that education is not really a black thing.”

  Which gets me back to Braylon Smith, who dreads his return to Little Rock Central High, an institution desegregated by his own family. He fears walking the halls his grandfather, Duck, walked to the delight of a string of girlfriends in 1968.

  Tina hated going to school there, too. She remembers just being tagged as another of Duck’s loser children. She walked away from it to a solid career. When her first husband left her to raise her eldest, Brandon, she tried to create a stable family with her new husband, Calvin. They had Braylon together, and Calvin was a responsible and loving father to both her kids. Then Braylon mixed it up with a police officer and she suddenly felt her son slipping away.

  Braylon says being in rehabilitation was maddening. He is not a big talker and every day he had to talk about his anger. But the institution eventually felt comforting. Returning to school is like stepping into a pressure cooker. He finds Little Rock Central High overcrowded and uninspiring, with temptations to get in trouble around every corner. He feels like he’ll return carting around this albatross of having gotten in trouble with the law. Teachers will view him differently. No guidance counselor will track him for college. They will be watching him intensely to see if he screws up. We follow him the day he goes back to class and he couldn’t be walking more slowly.

  “What I believe has happened is generational, because it’s been passed down,” says Tina with her eyes full of tears. “This is what my parents grew up with. This is how I raised my children. And it’s just being passed down from one generation to the next.”

  That Sunday she takes her boys to church, where she sings in the choir. The boys’ shirts are pressed and she is wearing a spectacular red suit with a sharp hat. They walk in with a pride and enthusiasm that is absent from the way they walk in the rest of the world. The Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life did studies of American religion that show how central historically black churches are to black family life. Congregations are concentrated in the South, serving mostly working-class people of all ages. The people who usually don’t get more than a high school education and are less likely to marry. They report that their religion is central to their lives, that they want bigger government and more services. Most pray every day, regardless of whether their prayers are answered.

  Whatever is going on in Tina’s house, in this house she walks in with a high head, accompanied by her sharply dressed young men into a place of pride and stature. She ascends the altar in shiny black heels and leans over the microphone with a booming voice as her sons kneel down to pray. Calvin is a preacher at the church, when he isn’t at his day job as a school custodian. She feels that her sons have been affected by the lack of male role models in their lives, even though her husband is present. It is hard for any one man to make up for a legion of men who make poor models—Tina’s father, brothers, so many of the men on her own block.

  Professor Mincy says the damage done to families when a father goes absent lasts many generations and is not easy to repair. He also says that it has done harm to the entire African-American community because having children outside marriages has become the norm.

  “These men don’t marry their babies’ mothers. And those mothers have found a way to live without them. We have figured out a myriad of ways to enable young women to raise children in the absence of fathers. And I think that’s a huge problem,” he says.

  “History has a lot to do with it. Slavery did do major damage to gender relationships in the African-American community, and, in addition to that, shock. We have had renewed shocks over time.”

  Professor Mincy charts a progression of social and economic ills that have beset black men from slavery onward, obstacles that have made it very difficult for them to raise families. He points to high rates of school dropout, unemployment, and incarceration.

  “It is very difficult in this society for a man to marry, to sustain a family, to sustain a relationship with a woman, children, etcetera, if he can’t fulfill the provider roles,” says Professor Mincy. The lack of male role models has led to low expectations for black men throughout the community. A lot of women, says Mincy, have usurped the power to make decisions about whether to have a family. Many move ahead with families with no expectation that men will play a role and every expectation that their community will support them. The stigma of the single mom has all but vanished in much of black society, says Mincy, and, while well intentioned, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

  Brandon, Tina’s older son, scoots around the church that morning, handsome and well spoken. He has no relationship with his father, although he is friendly with Calvin, his stepfather. He has a child with his ex-girlfriend Sherita and another with his most recent girlfriend. He dropped out of school to become a security guard. He says he is trying to contribute to his ex-girlfriend so she can raise their daughter, Salia. But he is detached and overwhelmed and his new girlfriend wants help with his son, Jaden. Tina finds the responsibilities he has heaped on himself dizzying, but she is trying to help him in any way she can, including setting up a first birthday party for Salia with all the trimmings.

  When the day arrives, the house where Salia lives with her mother is a flotilla of balloons and relatives. Tina and her husband and Braylon arrive early, all smiles and presents and helping hands. Then Tina begins a solid hour of waiting for Brandon to arrive. A stream of children surrounds Salia and games begin. Tina stands at the doorway checking and rechecking her watch and mumbling that this is his daughter’s first birthday and he should have been early. Brandon’s stepfather fumes on the front lawn. Even Braylon expresses his anger and calls his older brother’s cell phone numerous times. Salia is restless and her mother is saying out loud that Brandon always disappoints.

  Brandon walks in just after Salia has blown out her candles. She cries when he picks her up. H
e mumbles something about having the wrong address. I ask him if he isn’t abandoning his daughter the way his father abandoned him. He vows to break four generations of fathers abandoning children. “I’m going to change it up,” he promises. “Traditions are always willing to be broken.”

  Yet four months go by and Brandon doesn’t visit Salia. Just as I’m wrapping up shooting on Black in America I decide to visit Brandon. His story is so depressing. I don’t just want to put it out there with a downpour of sociologists’ excuses on top. I take him to see Salia and her mother, thinking maybe I can interview them together. We arrive to a surprise. Sherita is pregnant again, this time with twins and by another boyfriend. The animosity and anger between her and Brandon is obvious. I end up feeling like one of those television marriage counselors.

  “Could you contribute more?” I ask Brandon. “Yes.”

  “Would you let him do more?” I ask Sherita.

  “Yes. I mean, I don’t stop him from doing it now. I mean, I look at it as a—I mean, I know there’s times when I have an attitude problem, but I have a reason to, because of what all I have done by myself with Salia,” she replies.

  “Can he be a good father, if he tried? Can he be a good father?” I ask her. She stares at Brandon almost as if she’s about to re-ask my question. “I think he could. But the thing is, will he?”

  “Will you?” I ask. “Yes. You know, it’s—yes.”

  These two people are not yet twenty-one and between them they are about to have four children, a tangle of animosities, and minimum-wage jobs. Brandon has obtained his GED. Sherita says finding work is nearly impossible but she will continue trying after the twins are born. She fully expects her boyfriend will marry her. I leave the two of them chatting amicably but don’t know really what profound things to draw out of their story. These young people live on the dark side of that statistic on African-American men creating babies they feel little obligation to raise. Sherita lives there, too, boosting her self-esteem by making babies, creating a job for herself where there is none.

  I struggle to tell this story. It feels like it’s the story we hear about African-Americans every day, and I wanted to say something more profound, something different. So I rely on Professor Mincy to give me context. But I also sweat the fact that I’ve managed to heap onto the overall image of black America yet another anecdote of our struggle and shame.

  Professor Mincy urges me to take a look at the other half of the statistic, “then you will see my theory play out,” he says. The black American family is fractured. The reason black children are being raised without their fathers is because the fathers have detached from their responsibility to women and family life. That commitment is what lives on the other side of the dividing line.

  Which brings me to Kenneth Talley, another graduate of the class of ’68.

  Kenneth Talley remembers Duck and the stress of Little Rock Central High. Where Duck remembers being a player, Kenneth was about hitting the books and fearing the overall stress of desegregation would upend his plans for success. His family made all the difference.

  “I have been fortunate enough to have been raised in a middle-class home with a father who was a positive role model. A lot of these men didn’t have that privilege. You know, they came from homes where the father was absent. Some of the fathers are drug addicts. Some are in jail. And, so, they didn’t have a good example. They didn’t know what it was to be a father, because they didn’t have a father,” Kenneth said of his classmates.

  Today his father mentors kids in Little Rock and Kenneth works in the black community through his church. He faced every single obstacle life could throw at a young black man, yet kept his head above water. After high school, Kenneth joined the marines and went to college for a few years until he could no longer afford to pay. He got a job with the Department of Commerce and worked there for about five years. And then he lost everything after he was the victim of a layoff.

  “So, that was what started my descent into the ranks of the working poor. Let me just say this. It was the lowest point of my life,” he recalls.

  Just like Tina, Kenneth turned to his church. His church helped him find work as a freelance photographer. He soon married his girlfriend, Pamela. They both continued their education and got solid jobs; Kenneth is now an editor in the Bureau of National Affairs in Washington, D.C. They threatened to cut his job at one point and he accepted a demotion to keep working. He and Pamela planned their family. Sakia and Xander attend religious schools. Xander is autistic and needs special education, so Pamela concentrates on him while her husband works long hours to make sure they have a stable financial life.

  To look around their home is to see what struggle has built. Not a shoe is out of place, pictures of family events line the mantel, and food and toys are plentiful. Kenneth and Pamela are all teamwork, one of them feeding Xander, whose many challenges require boundless energy, while the other helps Sakia with her homework.

  “When I see what has happened with children in the underclass, and the pain and suffering that they’re going through, and think of my children having that same fate, it inspires me to make every sacrifice,” Kenneth says.

  His home is a place where hope thrives. Kenneth is warm-hearted and nonjudgmental. He missed his high school reunion this year because he had to work. He wishes he had seen Duck but doesn’t really care what happened to him after high school. He laments that someone with such a quick tongue and easy charm didn’t use it for something better. His strategy is just to push forward. Not let anger pull him down, and draw deeply from the repository of love he felt as a boy growing up in Little Rock, where his father never missed a school event no matter how insignificant. Desegregation didn’t just mean mixing with the white folks; it meant grabbing the opportunity to achieve right alongside them.

  Kenneth Talley’s mother taught the white kids at the school and remembers the painful divide she fought to erase. She wanted Kenneth at Little Rock because she thought the academics were superior. To this day she laments having risked his self-esteem. He has few fond memories of walking those hallways and also wonders if his life would have been better if he had stayed in the black school. But today the Talleys live in mixed-race Prince Georges County, Maryland, in a nice home surrounded by playgrounds and friendly neighbors of all colors. Kenneth is certain his parents’ insistence that he stick with Little Rock Central High School taught him that education is valuable enough to fight for, no matter how many times it feels out of reach. His resume lists every single time he tried to go to college and was thwarted by a lack of money. He kept going until he was able to afford to complete his degrees. It also gave him an opportunity to remake the American landscape for his children.

  Kenneth is a serious guy, a shy man. But his face lights up when he talks of his own little girl, who never speaks of race and attends school with a rainbow of children.

  “Sakia, she does not see the color of skin. She just does not,” he says.

  It is hard when reporting on America’s racial and ethnic minorities to not see life as a fistfight. Every person of color who has achieved something seems to have fought for it. I never thought of myself as much of a fighter, but I see a lot of fight in me. I am my mother’s daughter and she was born a woman of battle. Fighting for opportunities. Fighting to learn. Fighting to marry, to raise her kids in an unwelcoming suburb. Fighting to preserve opportunities.

  When we speak now it’s often by phone. There are expectations but she doesn’t cast too many judgments. But her questions are full of advice. What did you eat today? Are you tired? Did you enjoy that? Some people’s lives are formed by their family dramas. People get sick, they die, they divorce, things fall apart, great things happen, then un-happen. My family is remarkable for how average we are. Our sanity is reassuring. Everyone loves each other. We study hard, succeed; then we make new families of our own. Some families pass around problems; mine distributes solutions.

  I never realized how important my fami
ly was to me until I became a reporter. I meet people raised without that family tie. I realize my family makes me what I am. My mother’s perseverance and my father’s steadiness lift us. Together we are unstoppable. We walk around with a firm set of values and concrete sense of identity and purpose. It is appalling that not every child in our country gets that, doubly troubling that our country makes it harder. There are so many families that succumb to the turmoil around them, whose scant resources are not enough to get them through tough times. The fewer resources you have in this country, the fewer chances you have to get ahead. Life shouldn’t be like a sporting event, winner takes all. You shouldn’t have to be the first in your class to get a shot at college, especially when an entire family depends on your success. There needs to be room in this land of opportunities to try and fail and try again.

  Black in America airs to record numbers of viewers. Students at Morehouse and Spellman and Howard gather together to watch, churches host viewing parties, politicians send out alerts urging people to tune in. Social networks are formed to celebrate the launch. Critics rave about the show in the newspapers. At screenings across the country, middle-class black folks tell me it is a call to arms, an alarming reminder that our community is being divided into those who have pushed forward and those left behind. I am lauded at historically black colleges and showered with invitations to speak on race and racism. The program even draws high viewership when it airs a second time. There are critics who say we shouldn’t be airing our dirty laundry in public. Other people keep telling me they wish I’d included even more stories—gay blacks, Caribbean blacks, AIDS, affluence, health care, an endless list. Everywhere I go, people ask me when I’m going to do the next one.