There are many debates as to why black men are perishing needlessly by each other's hands, but the debate doesn't seem to change anything. It's only rhetoric; but for some of us, rhetoric is all we have left. Some of us have tried to work with Brothers to change their perspectives on life, begging them on bended knee to abandon the 'live hard, die young' paradigm; but it hasn't freed many of them from their anger. What can be done is the ever-present question on the lips of scholars, mothers, police officers and commissioners, grandparents, sisters and aunts, and wives and girlfriends. Where are the fathers of these young black men? Most are absent. The questions is: Why?
According to Bill Cosby, a Philadelphian
himself, "Ladies and gentlemen, listen to these people [black people].
They are showing you what’s wrong. People putting their
clothes on backwards. Isn’t that a sign of something going on
wrong? Are you not paying attention? People with their hat on
backwards, pants down around the crack. Isn’t that a sign of
something or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up?" (Cosby 1)
. Cosby also argues that, "the lower economic and lower
middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the
neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on"
(1). Cosby may not be articulate as well as expected from
someone who earned a master's and doctorate in education from the
University of Massachusetts; however, regardless of the brutality of
his commentary, he did not make up the statistics; nor has Cosby
fabricated what most African Americans know to be true, "We
[as blacks] cannot blame white people" (1) for our problems anymore.
In 1903 when W. E. B. Du Bois published his famed sociological title, Souls of Black Folk, he argued that “the 
contradiction of double aims” (African and American) is
“not weakness” (2). I doubt that Du Bois was wrong In
1903; but 104 years later, after the Harlem Renaissance, the Great
Black Migration, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement,
Cheikh Anta Diop, Maulana Karenga, Amiri Baraka, and
Molefi Asante, there is no doubt that the continued
performance of double-consciousness by African Americans is indeed
a frailty in that by definition it maintains an "ideological position
that discusses Africans as'the other '," and in so doing, "promotes a
Eurocentric supremacy" that not only "misstate[s] the agency
[…of] the evolving ownership of action," but also "seeks to
undermine African agency by artificially constructing […] the
elements of Africanity" (3). In other words, "When African
Americans’ imagine themselves as non-African, or
‘other’, they not only passively accept presumptuous
imaginings of their identities, but they are also denying their
ancestral African origin, which certainly weakens their process of
self-identification" (4). 
This
is not to say that there are not African American men who know exactly
who they are today. There are many hundreds of thousands of Black
men from the time of slavery to today who are 'making moves' in the
right direction. Therefore, below are links to some of the
most powerful Black men that ever were, and are. Through their
image, young Black men can find someone positive to emulate; and
perhaps, connect to these images to build a brighter future for
themselves, their families, and in particular, their children.