In most major urban metropolitan areas, including Austin, Texas, many adolescent African-American males have tragically been relegated to a permanent underclass, surviving in a subculture of poverty, crime and drugs, and predatory, senseless street violence. African-American males have become social pariahs feared by some, totally ignored by others, and largely kept in the margins of American society.

The causes of this national disgrace are complex and multi-dimensional. African-American youth have been Ill-served and literally betrayed by an inadequate and at times, dysfunctional, public education system. Too often, African-American children are born to and raised primarily by teenage girls after engaging in unprotected sex with teenage boys, neither of whom are financially, socially or emotionally equipped to bear the burdens of parenthood. As a result, children born to these circumstances, along with their teenage parents, get trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty, financial despair and economic stagnation. Tragically, American prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers are now home to millions of African-American males, many of whom have been incarcerated for preying upon and victimizing other African-American males. Wide spread urban gentrification and the reduction in housing discrimination has ironically fostered the mass exodus of millions of middle and upper class African-American professionals from inner city ghettos into new African-American professional enclaves in formerly all-White suburbs.