It’s a story about hope and the potential of children raised in poverty and men who understand these children because they can look at these boys and say, “There, but for the grace of God go I.”
But as I made my way from one interview to another, listening to the heart-breaking news from Portland Oregon on my car radio along the long stretches of Interstate 85, from rural South Carolina to suburban Atlanta, my reporting about the dearth of black male teachers somehow felt inconsequential.
The news from Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Oregon, after all, was about death and shattered lives … about yet another angry, armed, unstable boy who took one life, as well as his own. Why? We’re left once again with the pain and the continuing debate about guns and the mental health crisis that appears to be part of a larger crisis: anger and hopelessness among the young.