Too many promising young black men are either in jail, dead or will be dead soon.

That's no rumor.

It's a cold, hard fact that young blacks are dying at an astoundingly fast rate before their 20th birthdays.
And those that aren't dead yet have over-flowed the country's jail system to the point that new institutions to hold them all can't be built soon enough.

If the rest of America thinks this is just a problem in the black community, it had better think again.

There are only so many suburbs for people ... black and white ... to flee to in hope of escaping the crimes either done by desperate young men or is an off-shoot of something perpetrated by them.

Sadly, so many of these wannabe thugs are young, black and ... here's the really sad part ... uneducated.

Too many young black men who decided a long time ago that school wasn't the place for them have lost their lives or their freedom by chasing the dream of fast money and even faster living.
 
It's time for America to take its collective head out of the sand and fix the problem.

How do we do it?

By saving the next generations of young black men and steer them in a direction that will stop the extinction of the male species of their race.

It's time to show these young boys that it's cool to be smart.

"The tragedy starts when African-American toddlers are rarely read to or intellectually stimulated, and positive male parental figures are absent," says Michael Johnson, Director of Strategy and Business Development for McKesson Provider Technologies in Atlanta and founder of The Prodigy Project ... a grassroots community-based program designed to secure successful futures for young black men.
 
Johnson hopes to accomplish this feat by having compassionate, African American men help young black boys discover the power of reading, information and knowledge.

Say what?
Just read to a black kid and it'll change all this crap their generation is going through?

Amazing.
Something so simple.

I was curious. So I called Johnson to find out more.

What I found out is that he is just as sick and tired as a lot of us are of seeing our young men dress like "prisoners" with their pants sagging at the ass.
He's tired of hearing young brothers refer to women ... ALL women ... as "bitches."

And he's tired of hearing allegedly educated, successful black men like former Detroit Piston, and now New York Knicks Head Coach, Isiah Thomas say it's (quote) "okay to call a black woman a bitch, as long as it's a black man doing the talking."

You have to know Isiah to know how truly serious he is about what he said, even though he says he was "misquoted."

Don't think a lot of young black teens and pre-teens didn't take that to heart ... a lot of 'em who still look up to Isiah from his days as a Pistons "Bad Boy."

But I was so impressed with what Johnson's group is attempting to accomplish that I offered the services of my company to help him.

As a result, WriteStuf will now provide The Prodigy Project with literary consulting services and become its Midwest link, drumming up support for his efforts and organizing committed men who'd like to read to youthful black boys ages 5 to 9.

To contact Johnson directly and for more information about the Prodigy Project go to www.prodigyproject.com.

Of course, to contact WriteStuf for more information about our efforts with the project go to www.writestuf.com and click on the Contact Us page to request information on volunteering.


(Darron Patterson is an award-winning journalist based in Detroit and President of WriteStuf Communications, LLC)