ABSTRACT
A spectre is haunting black America—the seductive illusion that equality between the races has been achieved, and that the activism characteristic of the previous generation's freedom struggles is no longer relevant to contemporary realities. There is an "internal crisis"—that is, a crisis within the African-American family, neighborhood, community, cultural and social institutions, and within interpersonal relations, especially between black males. The type of violence which most directly affects black men is homicide. Nearly half of all murders committed in any given year are black men who murder other black men. Frantz Fanon's psychiatric insight, that struggle and resistance for the oppressed are therapeutic, is confirmed by the heritage of the Black Liberation Movement. An effective strategy for empowerment in the 1990s began with the recognition that the American electoral political system was never designed to uproot the fundamental causes of black oppression.
