Black, Hispanic Male Crisis Focus Of Higher Ed Summit
By David Pluviose

TAMPA, Fla.

For Dr. James H. Ammons, the crisis confronting Black and Hispanic males is obvious, but so is the solution.

“We, as leaders, have to step to the plate. [Black male] enrollment in prison cannot continue to supersede enrollment in higher education,” the chancellor of North Carolina Central University told his higher education colleagues during a recent summit aimed at finding solutions to the situation.

The conference, “Black, Brown, & College Bound: A Summit on African-American & Hispanic Males Meeting the Challenge of Higher Education,” concluded early this month. Sponsored by Hillsborough Community College, the summit addressed the alarming increase of Black male incarceration and the convergent decline in the numbers of Black men entering and graduating from college.

In his speech, Ammons elicited alternating gasps of shock and nods of agreement as he laid out a series of grim statistics concerning the plight of Black and Hispanic men.

In the past 40 years, the U.S. prison population has shifted from 70 percent White to 70 percent Black and Hispanic, he said. Additionally, one in three Black males is currently involved in the penal system. By 2020, if current trends hold, that figure will rise to more than 65 percent for Black men between the ages of 20 and 29.

“We will have more African-American men in prison than we did in slavery,” Ammons said, citing data from the book Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization? by Rutgers University Professor Byron Price.

To stem the tide, educators need to forge personal relationships with young Black students, he continued. “It’s not enough for us to work with them on the weekend in a setting on our campuses and never visit their homes and never talk to their family or their friends,” he said, adding that educators should “try to see the world as a young man does.”