Reaching Out to Imperiled Black Youths

For every young black man without a father, older brother or uncle to help him learn how a boy becomes a man, actor Hill Harper has this to say:

“You now have a new older brother, a friend, a homie and confidant who cares for you, who is watching you and who is watching out for you. And guess what? I love you! That’s right. I am not afraid to admit this truth out loud.”

Such affirmations may seem unremarkable at a time when whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to those slim volumes with perky titles that tell people they are beautiful and smart and spiritually powerful.

But with his new book, “Letters to a Young Brother, MANifest Your Destiny,” Harper, who plays a coroner on the hit television show “CSI: New York,” embraces a demographic more accustomed to reading about how it is bound for prison or will likely die young.

The book came out at a particularly depressing moment for his intended audience.

In March, a New York Times article with the headline “Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn” whipped through black cyberspace, leaving a community punched in the emotional solar plexus and gasping for air -- not because it carried some bad news, but because that’s all there was.

The article cited academic studies that faulted terrible schools, absent parents, racism, a decline in blue-collar jobs and a subculture that “glorifies swagger over work.”

For some, Harper’s message is a solo soaring above the choir.

After reading the newspaper article, Voltaire Sterling, a Los Angeles attorney and recent graduate of Harvard Law School, threw himself into the grass-roots marketing campaign of “Letters to a Young Brother.” He and two college friends from his days at Morehouse College created an e-mail network of staggering proportions, contacting every single alumnus of the black, all-male school in Atlanta. They attached the article to their e-mail blast about the book.

“It was hard to get through that article and I wanted to reject it,” said Sterling, 26. “Who is taking these surveys? I don’t doubt that to a certain extent it has to be true, but I’m sort of conflicted. I wasn’t rich growing up at all; we were working poor, but when I look around, all of my friends are doing extremely well, knowing who they are and being active members of their communities.”

Harper graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and cum laude from Harvard Law School, and also earned a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He was born and raised in Iowa, and both of his parents are doctors, as were both of his grandfathers and several uncles.

He said he began writing “Letters” after he visited a public high school in New York and spoke to the students about self-esteem and academic excellence.

Several boys at the school came up to him afterward.

To them, the path he laid out might as well have been the yellow brick road. How could they go to college, they asked him, when nobody in their family ever had? What if they didn’t have much money or weren’t good at standardized tests? They also asked him to make sense of their home lives, he said, asking why their mothers brought the men they were dating into their apartments?

“I went right back to my hotel and started writing the book,” Harper said.

He wrote his book as a series of advice-laden letters addressed to a young man. Choose friends with exquisite care, he advises. Select friends you wish were family. Only go into debt to get an education or to buy real estate. Sexual conquests do not a man make.

In the book, Harper shares painful circumstances from his own life, such as growing up in the custody of his father, rather than in a two-parent household. But he urges young men not to take the absence of a parent as personal abandonment. He tells them to be patient and forgiving of parents’ failings.

Although the ideas for the book came easily, getting it published was another matter, he said.

Young black men, publishers told him, do not read books.

Marvet Britto, the New York-based branding specialist who was one of the people behind singer Mariah Carey’s comeback, helped shepherd Harper’s project.

“We went to these meetings and they’d march 15 people into a big room with a round table -- the head of marketing and the head of sales. Then they’d say ‘Hill, we love you, we love your work, we love “CSI: New York,” but young black men don’t read books,’ ” Britto said.

Britto said she explained to publishers that young men of color set pop culture trends; they don’t follow them. Harper’s audience, she told them, was not waiting for the New York Times bestseller list to dictate what they should read. A campaign to reach young black men would have to go to them, she said.

“You go to them in their churches, their neighborhoods, on their websites, instead of expecting them to come looking for you.”

Gotham Books, a subsidiary of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., followed the advice when it published “Letters,” launching a publicity campaign partly in the style of a record release -- fliers, posters and nightclub events -- and part standard book launch, with signings in bookstores. Harper also has spoken at churches and made contacts through the networking of Sterling and his college friends, whom he has dubbed the “Maverick Marketing Team.”

“People have signed on to help not only because Hill is a visionary, but because we believe in this project,” said Stephanie Covington, a Los Angeles-based writer who has worked to promote “Letters.” “This is a call to action, a movement.”

“Letters,” which went on sale April 20, will appear Sunday at No. 13 on the New York Times list of bestselling hardcover advice books. As of Tuesday afternoon, it was ranked No. 130 in Amazon.com book sales.

William Shinker, president and publisher of Gotham, said he was sure that Harper’s message would resonate with young African American men and that Harper would know how to reach them.

“We were impressed by his ambition, impressed with the message and impressed that he wanted to give back and do some good in society,” Shinker said, adding, “I did feel that, frankly, women would buy the book -- that mothers and sisters and aunts would buy the book for men that they knew.”

At a recent book signing at a Hollywood nightclub, dozens of people said they planned to give the book to someone.

Lorenzo Terry, 11, however, waited in line with his aunt to get a copy for himself. Holding his autographed copy, he seemed dazzled by his face-to-face contact with the author.

“He told me I was brilliant,” Terry said, beaming. “I told him I make A’s and Bs, but he said I have to make all A’s. So I guess now I’m going to make all A’s.”