News headlines last month painted a dim picture of the life and future of Black youth in Washington, DC. “A deadly burst of bullets kills 3, leaving 6 wounded,” declared the biggest headline on the front page of a leading newspaper in bold letters. Hardly unique of DC. Other cities across the nation, too, share similar horror stories and headlines.

The three major Black Methodist denominations want to stop that carnage before the nation’s Black males become dinosaurs – extinct.

NNPA columnist George Curry reports that the American Methodist Episcopal (AME), African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) and Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) emerged from a joint conference in North Carolina last month with a new plan to save the Black male youth.

They are establishing Saturday Academies in cities across the nation, including Washington, DC, as a way to stem the plight of young African-American youth. The aim of the churches is to slash what Marian Wright Edelman calls the “cradle to the prison pipeline.”

Curry reports that a pilot project is scheduled to begin in the District next month, with a Saturday Academy rotating between three churches in the major Methodist denominations.

Rev. Kathryn Brown, a Capitol Heights, Md., resident and member of Judah Temple AME Zion Church, said the three major Black denominations are united to help save the Black male from extinction.

Rev. Brown is staff coordinator of the conference that brought the three groups together. They called their conference The Great Gathering. The initiative is The Male Investment Plan.

The three denominations have pledged to raise $10 million among themselves to help fund the Saturday academies.

Rev. Staccato Powell, chairman of The Great Gathering, believes that the African- American male crisis is an epidemic. He said today’s crisis in the African-American community is what civil rights was in the community in the 1960s.

“There is still a disproportionate number of African-American males incarcerated,” he said. “We’re going to have to make it crystal clear that this is an epidemic in our community that must be dealt with. “Those demons that we refuse to confront are those that haunt us the most.”

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