Browse the Black Studies section of your local Barnes and Noble, and you’ll see why Clifford Simmons takes his job seriously. “Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys,” “Living to Tell About It: Young Black Men In America Speak,” and “Kill Them Before They Grow;” the titles range in tone from pedantic worry to downright hysteria. Apparently, Simmons isn’t the only one who thinks there is a war on for the souls of Black America’s youth.

As the executive director of Blue Nile Passage, Inc., Simmons is in the front lines of that war. Blue Nile is a rites of passage organization, dedicated to teaching young men and women the skills they’ll need to survive as adults. Over nine months, teenagers between 12 and 15 meet every Saturday for lessons in conflict resolution, sexual health, black history, and budgeting, among other subjects. When they complete the curriculum, the young men and women are welcomed into the adult community with an elaborate ceremony.

It only takes a glance at the statistics to see that these skills are a matter of survival. More than 64 percent of Harlem families are headed by a single parent. The median income is $26,000; according to “The Self-Sufficiency Standard for the City of New York,” the poverty line for a family with two kids is $48,048. In 2002, Central Harlem had the most new AIDS cases in the city; a black man in Harlem has as much a chance of living to 65 as a man in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

All of this may explain why Simmons describes his work at Blue Nile in epic terms. At one recent Blue Nile parent’s meeting, a tearful mother thanked Simmons and the group for his help with her son, Tyrell. Women around the room nodded and wiped tears from their own eyes. Simmons waited until the murmuring died.

“I’d like to remind you of what Nelson Mandela once said,” Simmons began. He strode among the mothers, an imposing 6-foot-tall figure with the build of a super-middleweight and a voice that seemed to rumble up from his toes. “‘Our greatest fear,’ Mandela said, ‘is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’”

“Amen,” a woman answered softly from the back.

“‘It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us,’ Mandela said. ‘We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.’”

Simmons walked through his transfixed audience, looking each of them in the eye. “And you are a child of God, and your children are God’s children. And there is a spiritual warfare going on. The devils of materialism, of delinquency, are trying to crush that brilliance out of our youth. They’re trying to crush that genius. And we’re not going to let it happen.”

“We are creating a community of God’s children.”
“And that’s the gang we want them to be a part of,” one woman called from the back. “Not the Crips.”

The women became a chorus of Amens.

Simmons’ war is fought largely with words. Simmons believes that the way his students present themselves will determine the way they’re treated and the way they feel about themselves. Students in the Blue Nile program begin each day by greeting their fellow men with the ritualized phrase, “I divinely respect you, Brother.” They refer to their teachers as Elder. Each student is expected to say his or her name before providing an answer, and that answer has to be delivered in clear diction that carries through the room. If they don’t manage that on the third try, Simmons tells them to sit down and asks another student to answer.

Valencia Johnson, chair of the Education committee, says she’s seen it happen. “They come in here with these images that they can’t do, they can’t be,” Valencia says. “They start to live up to it. Cliff builds their self-confidence because they know he loves them.” She pauses. “Even if it is the old school of tough love.”

The Saturday of the students’ first politics lesson, both the young men and women gathered in the basement cafeteria of the Thurgood Marshall Academy for their session. Simmons stood up to inform them that their Thursday trip to Riker’s had been cancelled. The budget had been cut, and tours were no longer being held.

Simmons explained in detail. “We used to go as part of the RAP program – you know what that means? Reducing the Adolescent Problem. That’s you.”

“So this Thursday, we won’t be having a tour of the prison injustice system. Instead, we’ll meet at Abyssinian and discuss the prisons, and how to act when you get stopped by a cop,” he said. He didn’t have to explain that they would, at some point in their lives, be stopped by cops. “They’re focusing on detention and not on prevention,” he continued. “And if you don’t stay the right course, there’s so many ways to get you in that system.”

“You know why they call it the justice system?” he added. “Because it’s ‘just us’.”

No one laughed.

To Simmons’ generation, who look with some bewilderment and alarm at the sullen, cocky faces that define the young attitude, Simmons is one of the few people who seem to be able to reach beyond that barrier. Gabrielle Baker, who designed the young women’s curriculum and whom Simmons refers to as a “soul sister,” has seen the changes wrought by the program, and by Simmons methods.
“You see these kids, and they just don’t see anything ahead,” she says. “It’s rap, or basketball, or crime. They don’t see the role models around them. Cliff really turns them around.”

Simmons himself gets worked up into soliloquy over the troubles of African American youth. “They’re living in the world of instant gratification,” he says. “Everything they get comes instantly. They’re looking at TV and looking at 50 channels and everything is going so fast. They’re looking at video games and everything’s ‘boom boom boom.’ They’re the McDonald’s generation. So they don’t see things the way we normally do.

“And then there’s advertising; everything is about materialism. To them, people with ‘bling-bling’ are role models – to be respected you have to have that. So we’re trying to instill different values. That value for us says there’s nothing wrong with having, but there should be a balance with the spiritual.”

Simmons was raised in a different Harlem. He was eight when civil rights riots tore through the neighborhood, sparking a three-night anarchy that left hundreds injured. A year later, he mourned with his parents when Malcolm X was shot and killed at the Audubon ballroom on 165th street. Despite the turmoil, Simmons remembers an adolescence spent attending the lectures and speeches of neighborhood icons. “I came up in a time, during the civil rights era, when there was a different spirit: a spirit of consciousness and community,” Simmons says. “I grew up listening to Dr. Martin Luther King, and to Malcolm.”

His mother was a living example of that community. One evening when Simmons was about eight years old, he was looking out of his window and saw a neighborhood tough guy pick an argument with another young man. The tough picked up a tree branch and chased the other man down the street, cornering him at a basement door.

“He started down,” Simmons recalls, “and I hear this ‘Harold, Harold drop that stick and come on up here.’ It was my mother – she’d been watching from the kitchen window. Well, Harold listened to her and came up to the porch and apologized to her – this big tough man apologizing to my mother.” He chuckles. “I guess that was one of my first lessons in social activism.”

Simmons’ neighborhood wasn’t the only place infused with that spirit. Ever since the massive African American influx from the South in the 1920s, Harlem has served as the cultural heart of the African American community. The jazz and literati of the 1920s and 1930s, the civil rights clashes of 1964, crack and AIDS in the 1980s, and the birth of rap in the 1990s: Harlem echoed the state of African Americans around the country. And Simmons knew it – he felt the intoxicating heartbeat of the entire Black nation pulsing in Harlem.

Remembering the spirit of that time inspires a sense of nostalgia in Simmons. “We, the African-American community, have really lost our way,” he says in his steady, measured baritone. “We’ve assimilated into American culture – a culture that as a whole is bankrupt.”

John Henry Clarke, a prominent African-American historian, was a particular inspiration during his childhood. Simmons recalls during a speech, one of the participants asked a question that had been answered in the first minutes of the lecture. “He looked at them and he said, ‘We are poor listeners to our great messengers: the questions you’ve asked have already been answered, you just haven’t taken the time to read them,’” Simmons recalls. The lesson stayed with him.

But as crack permeated Harlem, and AIDS ravaged his neighborhood in the 80s, Simmons lost touch with that spirit. He dropped out of Baruch college, unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. He took a temporary job at a local bank and stayed for ten years, working his way up until he was a publications consultant.

He never lost the feeling that something was missing. He’d married, and had three children, but he missed the feeling of activism that he’d known as a child. He watched as the young generation became worshippers at the shrine of Gangsta culture, idolizing rappers and dreaming of the extra-legal lifestyle they spoke about. Simmons began having dreams, where he worked with and taught teenagers. He saw himself speaking to groups of people. Then, in 1993, the pastor of his church asked him and several other congregation members to put together a rites of passage program. Simmons knew he’d been Called.

“When you’re in tune with the spirit,” Simmons recalls, “you don’t see it all right away. It gives you little pieces, little visions. There’s no such thing as coincidence; it’s just God’s way of being anonymous.”

Simmons threw himself into his project. The eight-member board of directors came up with a curriculum based on seven principles: spiritual grounding, historical black experience, health and wellness, personal growth and development, community consciousness, economic awareness, and political awareness. The program is financed by some small community grants and weekly dues for those parents who can afford it. The money covers field trips and the final ceremony; the 30-member staff is entirely composed of volunteers.

The Blue Nile name reflects the ideals of the program’s coordinators. Simmons ran into Egyptologist Josef Benyakamin and asked him for suggestions for the name of his new program. “In his wisdom,” Simmons recalls, “he came up with the Blue Nile. ‘Abyssinia is the ancient name for Ethiopia. Well, that’s where your ancestors come from. Ethiopia is the source of the Blue Nile. The Blue Nile comes off the hills of Ethiopia and meets the White Nile which comes from Uganda and that starts the flow of the Nile. But the Blue Nile contributes about three-quarters of the water of the Nile.’”

Blue Nile isn’t the first rites of passage program. Similar programs have existed in America since the 1960s, when the militant nationalist group Organization Us created Simba Wachanga (Swahili for ‘Young Lions’) as a training ground and induction program. The idea was based on the tribal induction ceremonies Africans had used for centuries to introduce adolescents to adulthood. But in the 1990s the concept was reclaimed and expanded. It was re-conceived along the lines of a Jewish bar mitzvah, a ceremony to prove that the youth had learned enough about his culture and responsibilities to become an adult.

Since then, rites of passage programs have been flourishing all over the country. There are five programs currently operating in New York City alone; organizations in Ohio, Tennessee, and Connecticut are devoted solely to teaching people how to develop and build rites of passage programs in their communities.

Simmons’ plans for the Blue Nile Passage program are even bigger. He’s been searching out funding to expand Blue Nile into an after school program. “We’ll get them at 6 and keep them until they’re 18,” Simmons said. Once the after school component is in place, Simmons plans to chapter regional branches of Blue Nile across America. He’s already has inquiries from as far away as California and Illinois.

Simmons’ activism has not always been without controversy. He spent several years on the board of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a branch of the Abyssinian Baptist Church that has drawn over $75 million of investment into Harlem. Yet several investors criticized the operation during his term, saying ADC’s micromanagement approach didn’t prepare business owners for the possibility of failure, or create an entrepreneurial mindset in the community: instead, it sent the message that business owners could only succeed by relying on local politicians.

ADC has also been criticized for “selling out” Harlem; the increasing business brought about by new ventures like the mall on 125th street are driving up housing costs and threatening to turn Harlem into every other New York neighborhood. The new Thurgood Marshall Academy, which ADC shepherded, also had its critics. Though it was the first new school built in the neighborhood for 50 years, residents condemned the Abyssinian Development Corporation for destroying the once-famous Small’s Paradise jazz club that had stood on the spot. Though the building had been abandoned for twenty years, residents tried and failed to get emergency landmark status that would prevent the building of the new school and an International House of Pancakes on the lot.

Simmons sees the critics as out of touch, and ignoring the need for a new and revitalized Harlem. There was no reason to be sentimental about a jazz club that had been sitting empty since 1987. “The history had already been lost,” he says. To Simmons, Harlem’s future doesn’t lie in enshrining its past. “We have to attract the school and businesses that will nurture our youth,” he adds.

There’s a great deal of work to be done. According to one local cop, gangs like the Crips and Bloods are a more common career path than college. But through Blue Nile, Simmons hopes to convince at least a few young men and women that the future doesn’t have to revolve around drugs and violence. “We need to put the neighbor back in the ‘Hood; we need to put the brother back in the ‘Hood,” he adds. He hopes to get them to see the world of their parents – the world of social change and social responsibility.

As the students of Blue Nile file out from their studies one afternoon, two of the girls break out jump-ropes and begin a game of double-dutch. The game is played by swinging the ropes in alternating arcs – to play it, the jumper has to stand in the space defined in the middle, straddling the area between the two ropes and jumping on alternate feet when the ropes pass. Two girls make it into the middle. Another tries and trips the ropes. Then one of the teachers moves into position, watching the ropes and timing her entrance just right. The young men and women gathered around cheer as she jumps into the center. For a moment, at least, the space between worlds has been bridged.

Back to top