Boston's summer job

IN A SADLY predictable way, black ministers in Boston and around the nation say they will do what they can to head off a hot summer of youth violence. Peace parades, peace games, and prayer vigils are all part of the ritual. Horace Small, president of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods, which is sponsoring the upcoming Roxbury Peace Sports Jamboree, told the Globe, ''The goal for the weekend is that nobody gets killed that weekend."

Everyone should wish such efforts well. Boston has been the best city of its size for temporarily stopping youth murders. It went 29 months without a juvenile homicide a decade ago. At the same time, the yearly ministerial ritual only serves to expose the thin veneer of commitment to underserved youth. A program for a weekend might keep a kid alive for a weekend. Year-round programs give kids hope for a lifetime.

The ministers and community activists know they operate within the much larger American cycle of neglect. The country does not see these kids until they see the lit fuse reach the bomb. The nation that opens its coffers to destroy and rebuild Iraq is the same nation where President Bush has proposed slashing $2 billion from community development block grants and other social programs. Massive cuts would fall upon after-school programs, community centers, job training, community policing, and gang control.

Like ministers, some civic-minded groups do what they can to promote hope for a lifetime. This week, for example, the Boston Foundation announced grants of $25 million for a range of educational and social programs in Greater Boston. Such charity ends up as a desperate plug in the dike. Bush's cuts would deprive the city of Boston $23 million in development grants.

Aside from the civil rights movement, the cycle has been incredibly unbroken. Ignore the kids fall, winter, and spring, and then throw them a minimum-wage job in the summer. African-Americans historically have never denied our role in dampening the fuse. In 1899, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote ''The Philadelphia Negro" after interviewing 2,500 households, gaining insight into the lives of 10,000 people. He concluded that efforts to stop crime in low-income neighborhoods ''must commence in the Negro homes. . . . Although it is hard to teach self-respect to a people whose million fellow citizens half despise them, yet it must be taught as the surest road to gain the respect of others."

Du Bois said prayer meetings and church socials have their place, but that there also had to be amusement for the young ''as a means of education, improvement and recreation. If the Negro homes and churches cannot amuse their young people, and if no other efforts are made to satisfy this want, then we cannot complain if the saloons and clubs and bawdy houses send these children to crime, disease, and death. There is a vast amount of preventive and rescue work which the Negroes themselves might do."

Du Bois was clear that black efforts must be matched by a white power structure that stopped behaving as if it despised black people. ''There is no doubt that in Philadelphia, the center and kernel of the Negro problem so far as the white people are concerned is the narrow opportunities afforded Negroes for earning a decent living. Such discrimination is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it and to do so primarily for their own sakes."

Du Bois made the prediction that if white America provided equal opportunity, ''such a moral change would work a revolution in the criminal rate during the next 10 years." The city of Boston proved 10 years ago, with a lot more resources in a booming, warless economy, that a revolution could indeed be achieved in the juvenile murder rate.

Boston's revolution is unravelling. We can wish good luck to the ministers and activists. But they need an entire America that ends this silly ritual. ''The connection of crime and prejudice is neither simple or direct," Du Bois wrote. ''The connections are more subtle and dangerous; it is the atmosphere of rebellion and discontent that unrewarded merit and reasonable but unsatisfied ambition make. . . . How long can a city say to a part of its citizens, 'It is useless to work; it is fruitless to deserve well of men; education will gain you nothing but disappointment and humiliation?' How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face? How long can a city do this and escape the inevitable penalty?"

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.