Urban Crisis: Beating the Mean Streets

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.