Home from college during the summer of 1970, I sat backwards on a bench facing the basketball court where I had spent so many hours of my earlier youth. I watched my former playmates run a high-powered full court pick-up game, complete with at least one mid-air blocked dunk. While enjoying the free live homeboy sports, a surprising realization hit me: nearly everybody on the court, young men in their late teens and early 20s, was Catholic.

They had been educated through eighth grade in the Catholic school two blocks south of our housing project, and most, I suspect, attended Catholic high schools.

Conspicuously absent was the “in crowd,” the brothers who, because of their sports prowess and personal toughness, had dominated the basketball court at will a few years earlier. Now just one was present, displaying none of his former salient athletic ability, but still mouthing off, selling woof tickets in an aggressive, tensely tired, heroin-suppressed voice that no longer scared anyone.

The “In Crowd” had peaked in fearsomeness and admiration somewhere in their mid-teens. At that age, nearly everyone revered them, emulated them, or sought their acceptance. Then the “In-Crowd” discovered heroin. At first it made them look hip as they joked beside the basketball court with half-closed eyes. Eventually the stuff conquered them, plunging them into addiction, overdoses in public stairwells, and semi-homelessness.

That summer they were still dangerous, flashing thick hunting knives or pistols at sudden opportunistic moments. But they seemed more frightening to the neighborhood’s cash-laden gypsy cabbies than to the athletic young men playing basketball, some of whom had undoubtedly been their victims years earlier, but who, by that summer, had become victors on and off the court.

The guys controlling the game that day were mostly in college, working, or both. Some were home for the summer from universities like Hampton, Colgate, and Syracuse. They were survivors and thrivers of our 1950/60’s ghetto upbringing.
Not all of us who survived and thrived had attended Catholic school. I never did. I think that most of those who “made it” had value systems that enabled us to separate ourselves from the street at will, although we still interacted with it. Religious study influenced many of in those value systems.

It appears that Catholic school alumni comprised the plurality of those who avoided heroin.

The following summer, 1971, I connected with a project peer I had previously known only distantly. I had never hung out with him before because he had always seemed too corny, too square, to merit my attention. Then in 1971 between our junior and senior college years, we each learned that the other was majoring in journalism. We shared publishing opportunities and became close friends.

He would complain that his restrictive Catholic institutional upbringing had stunted his approach to life. He also reported that his slightly younger brother, who had attended public high school, ended up on heroin like most of the neighborhood guys our age. Comparatively, being stunted by Catholic school seems preferable.

In 2007, the gangster rap culture sits on the throne that heroin addiction occupied 37 years ago, lording over young black men, misguiding their drive, altering their values and stealing their futures. Concurrently, Catholic schools are decreasing in number and impact as dioceses contract during an era of population shifts and publicized scandals.

Yet, independent schools affiliated with black Baptists, Lutherans, and other denominations appear to be increasing.
We, who have accepted Christ, regardless of denomination, should look beyond historical Catholic school sins, which are human failures, and see the successful channeling of lives away from the street abyss that God wrought through them. We should ask God to replicate this in the students attending today’s black Christian schools.

Let’s pray, contribute, and work to further multiply and enhance black Christian schools and help them to develop disciplined, goal-oriented, completion-prone survivors and thrivers.