The Holy Spirit has moved me to write this admonitory love note to myself, which, I must, of necessity, share with you. The message: "We" are failing "our" young, because we have not seriously--with a life or death intensity--undertaken the task of institution-building. As a consequence, they, our young, and we are bereft of institutions and must be humiliated in those owned by others, which we have no choice but to patronize.

First, let me offer some definitions. By "we" I refer to African American adults who are healthy, literate and/or educated. By "our" I mean those with whom, for better or worse, richer or poorer, each of us has been involuntarily agglomerated, who look like us and who derive from a common cultural vortex: oppression, mis-education, and miscegenation, yet who, through it all, have developed a sense of peoplehood, and whose culture has been adopted around the world: jazz, r & b, fashion, blues, ragtime, dance, rap, tap, etc.

Let me come quickly to the point. On Saturday, March 31, I attended a seminar at the American Jazz Museum, in Kansas City, Missouri, on the corner of 18th and Vine, in the Blue Room, entitled "Bird & Trane: The Inspiration of Innovation." The panelists were poet, publisher, educator, Haki Madhubuti of Third World Press in Chicago, who was formerly known, when I first read him in the '60s as "Black Don Lee," and Dr. Emmett Price from Washington University in St. Louis, an ethnic musicologist of depth and dimension. The seminar was part of the Charlie Parker Symposium 2001, sponsored by this incomparable jazz museum, headed by Ms. Rowena Stewart, formerly of Detroit, Michigan.

Among the most powerful points made at the seminar was that our cultural legacy is controlled by others. Practically all Music companies, Music distributors, practically all media, practically all manufacturers of CDs, DVDs, you name it are controlled by others. Madhubuti quoted a black musician who, lamenting the ubiquity of this phenomena, stated "We make it. They take it." This applies to every aspect of African American culture (which is really the culture of the whole world, as we are the trendsetters for the world: they dance to R & B in Beijing and Tokyo, and Rap in Germany and France). Madhubuti, commenting that his co-panelist's fiance was a lawyer, made the further point that every black musician needs a black lawyer.

While these thoughts were still resonating in my consciousness, I went to see the movie, "Caveman Valentine," starring Samuel L. Jackson, and directed by a very cerebral sister, Kasi Lemons of "Eve's Bayou" fame. The movie was outstanding. I highly recommend it. But, what depressed me was the Ward Parkway Theater, itself. When I arrived for the 10:05 p.m. showing on Saturday night, all I could see were young black children (preteen to post-teen) clustered nervously in groups apparently with nowhere to go, and nothing better to do. The video arcade that used to be adjacent to the theater had long since vacated. Montgomery Ward's was also vacant owing to its bankruptcy. The 8 theaters that used to operate on the lower level were closed by management of AMC for whatever reason. And there were cops and security guards everywhere. AMC has built huge multiplexes away from where the bulk of black people live, in the suburban areas of Kansas City. Wherever these young black kids go, they are viewed with suspicion, and wariness, which brings me to my point (at last).

Black professionals, especially the lawyers, the accountants, money managers and folks with a will and capital, need to get together to build alternative institutions for our young, and, yes, for ourselves. Places we can enter with pride and dignity, without being harried, intimidated, followed, hounded or hassled, because we are socially engaged with other folks who look like us--or, for that matter, who don't look like us! We need to build up a variety of entertainment sectors that can appeal to the disparate interests in our community. We need to own the places that present our culture and that of others.

This is the challenge of this decade. "We" must build institutions. I look at the models, in Kansas City, already up and running, developed by E. Frank Ellis of Swope Parkway Health Center, and Don Maxwell of Community Development Corporation, and can only say we need more, more, more--all over this land! I see the renaissance of Harlem on television and I say we need more. I hear about the educated critical mass building in Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Los Angeles, Detroit, St. Louis, and Chicago, and I say we need more! More, more, more.

We need spectacularly successful individuals, yes. That is nice. Good for them and those in privity with them. But, much more importantly, we need institutions that will survive them and touch more people than them! We need an economic revolution, one in which our children are indoctrinated not to find jobs, but to create institutions, businesses, to become entrepreneurs, so they may own the whole product of their effort. We need the fervor of the civil rights movement on the economic level.

What Charlie "Yardbird" Parker and John Coltrane were to music, we must be in the realm of economic development and self-determination: masters. It may be hard for ex-slaves to deal with the notion of being "masters" of themselves, much less anything else. But, this is our burden, our challenge, our mandate. We've tried integration, and have been disintegrated as a consequence: scattered and peeled, no longer controlling the educational institutions in our community. And, guess what? Test scores have fallen below where they were before disintegration occurred. Black businesses that used to exist have faded away. We have become heedless, conspicuous consumers, dependent on others for everything.

Hopefully, someone will feel the urgency of this message and begin, resume or intensify the effort toward the realization of these laudable aims. Without institutions, our people fall victim to that institutionalization that public policy has already approved and preordained for our young: prison for the boys, and pregnancy for the girls, so that there is a built-in cycle of failure that is self-replicating, a fractal.

Enough said.