Urban Crisis: Beating the Mean Streets

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.