(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHY can't we all get along?'' Rodney King's question still resonates six months after the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers who beat him, a verdict that triggered the worst riot in the U.S. since the Civil War. Our inability to answer poses an economic threat as well as a social one. In the years to come, blacks will account for a growing share of the U.S. labor pool. How can we compete effectively with global rivals -- some of whom have a 2% unemployment rate -- if we can't bring the energies and talents of these Americans fully to bear on solving our economic problems? In search of solutions, FORTUNE interviewed more than 30 black leaders from a broad range of fields. Their thinking, and feeling, may surprise you.

THE BURDEN OF BEING BLACK IN AMERICA CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT is national correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on public television.

I believe race is still the fundamental issue we face in this society. I'm speaking frankly because we've tiptoed around this for too long. The reason even well-heeled blacks are angry is that even if you live in an ivory tower, work in a glass-enclosed office with Picassos on the wall, carry a briefcase, and dine at ''21,'' you're still never far from that old line: ''What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.? A nigger.'' That's the burden of being black in ( America. And every now and then some episode like the L.A. riots brings this rage simmering to the surface. We can talk about benign neglect, malign neglect, government culpability, political culpability, and leadership culpability. There's an abundance of all those. But at the risk of sounding simplistic, I believe that lack of communication, misperception, and stereotyping form a triad that seems to be at the heart of the problem. The media, and I say this as a media person, contribute to it. Nowhere -- in print, broadcast news, public affairs programs, or entertainment -- can you find people of color being presented as whole people. Imagine someone from Mars trying to get a picture of who lives in this country by watching television. That Martian would be as prejudiced as anybody else, because he will be frightened by the images of black people he sees on television, especially if he starts with the local nightly news, which is one disaster story or crime story after another. What can be done? Well, when was the last time you invited blacks to your house, or vice versa? If we don't have some kind of human interaction and contact, we go on living in these isolated worlds. That might not matter if black people could ensure, on their own, that their schools were adequately preparing their students, that the hospitals served them, that the political system worked for them. They can't. Why? Because black people do not control anything in this country. The levers of power are still in white -- male for the most part -- hands. That's why all of us, regardless of our income levels, walk around with rage, barely contained.

OUT OF THE BALLPARK, SEEKING THE TICKET WINDOW AL MARTINS is a vice president of public and urban affairs at Xerox.

I don't believe minorities, blacks especially, will ever develop a strong economic base in America's economy. Every time my company announces a product, I hear from a number of black entrepreneurs around the country, saying, ''Gee, can I deliver the goods for you or can I do the advertising or public relations for you?'' What they don't realize is that they are five years too late. When we define a new product or market at Xerox, we go through a very rigorous set of schedules to get us to the point where we know customers want the product. We then say, ''Yes, we're going to go with this,'' and we start hiring engineers and pulling together the organization. The problem is, blacks are not in the circle. They are not part of the design team. The design team is middle managers who don't feel any motivation or responsibility to step out and say, ''Hey, I'm going to see to it that I bring a minority firm on board.'' Or, ''I'm going to sit down with a minority firm and give them the engineering drawings and have them help us with the research in this area.'' White middle America has just not included us in its thought process. Instead, the business goes to the guy next door, or to the guy at the country club, or to someone else in the circle of friends this manager keeps. Most of black America has no concept of this. We're not only not in the ballpark, we don't even know where the ticket window is. Corporate America is going to have to say, ''Hey, we're going to make 150,000 Tauruses next year, and they're going to have rubber mounts. Why don't we go out and find a minority firm?'' That's how you get it going. The second hurdle, if you find a black entrepreneur you want to put in business, is that he's got to get financing. Banks won't lend money to blacks as readily as they would to the white population. But they will lend it, particularly if, say, ABC company walked in and said, ''This is our supplier, and we'd like you to invest in him so he can buy the following list of equipment.'' Then the bank would give him 55%, and he could go to the Small Business Administration and get a guarantee for 20%, and maybe the buyer could advance him 20%. But black America is almost never pulled into that circle. Why? It's racism. It's also lack of direction from the top. The chairmen of a lot of our big corporations say a lot of good things, and I believe they mean what they say. But I don't think they've reached into the bowels of the organization to see to it that what they're saying takes place.

MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL: ALL THE RIGHT MOVES LEONARD ''LEFTY'' GORDON, an ex-gang member, runs a successful community center in San Francisco's Fillmore district.

Last fall two of our staff members suggested we start a midnight basketball league, an idea they got from a national program that started in Baltimore. At first we said that was the last thing we needed. Then we realized it's not just another basketball league. It has mandatory workshops. If you don't participate, you can't play in the games. At the workshops we talk about employment preparation, manhood development, AIDS education, things like that. We take an African American perspective. The bottom line is that we take young black men, redirect that negative behavior, and make them productive citizens. We started this league because of high crime. Youngsters were on the street from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. when they usually did their criminal activities. The police bought into it. They said, ''No wonder nothing is happening on the streets. They're all in here.'' Now we have two uniformed police officers at each game. In the first 11-week program, 68 kids started and 60 stuck with it the entire time. Many who participated were selling drugs, had records, or were on parole. We also had 350 spectators in here each night. Of the 60 who finished, we placed 12 in jobs, and 14 enrolled in a high school equivalency program. Three are going on to college.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS NOT THE ANSWER SHELBY STEELE, a professor of English at San Jose State University, writes extensively about race and affirmative action.

In the 1960s America underwent a radical change. Rather than entitle people with rights as individual citizens, we began to entitle people collectively -- blacks, women, Hispanics -- in the name of redressing their grievances. This led to separate facilities on campuses, separate study programs, affirmative action policies. It was a mistake. Democracy must entitle people as individuals. We cannot have it entitling one group of people over another. This doesn't mean government should sit back and do nothing. I worked in a meat-packing company to get through college. We had a federal inspector who came by every week to check for cleanliness, to make sure the meat had not spoiled and the trucks were adequately air-conditioned. It seems to me it would be an awful lot less expensive if we did something similar with our universities or the private sector. Instead of affirmative action programs, we should put people in to make sure that discrimination is not occurring at the point of entry. Ending racial preferences would send underdeveloped groups like black Americans a fair and honest message. Here are the goals: If you make them, you will be rewarded by getting into college or getting a job. That way society would honestly earn its diversity over time. At first it would slow the number of blacks getting into the system. Today many blacks in universities have been recruited and benefit from racial preferences in admission policies. But since blacks have a national college dropout rate of 75%, far higher than any other group, that approach seems like a revolving door. The irony is that even though affirmative action has very little to do with the deep and profound problems black Americans face, it is the best issue in terms of giving them a high grievance profile, which is the source of their power. Because the larger society generally capitulates, we play this game, and meanwhile schools get worse and worse, inner cities fall completely apart, and we ask what's wrong. Unless things change, we're going to have more riots like L.A. We've got a victim-focused identity. A victim has license. He can burn down his neighborhood, and he will probably be rewarded for it by the larger society, which will say, By God, we've not done enough. Both the black leadership and white leadership have conspired to perpetuate this victim-focused mentality, in which the only way you can be an authentic black is to be a victim, to be an outsider and not identify with the majority, which means not identifying with the things that can save you. The secret truth, which too many black leaders don't want to mention, is that two-thirds of the black population has moved out of the inner-city ghettos. How did they get out? They paid more attention to education or took advantage of the opportunities that were available -- the military, say, or a vocational program. So let's be honest with the blacks who are still left behind. Let's stop telling them that they are victims and the odds are against them.

WHAT IS THE SHAPE OF OUR DREAM NOW? ANNA DEVEARE SMITH is an actress, playwright, and associate professor at Stanford University.

It's very clear that the black community is not a monolithic group anymore. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The young people I teach have no common ground. I don't yet know what they're connected to. I'm trying to find out. In fact, I'm working on a play about this, called Dream. The question I raise is, What is our dream now? Is there an our dream? If not, what will propel us, what will motivate us? For me, I believe there still has to be a we for African American people. But what shape is that we going to take?

WE HAVE BEEN SUBSIDIZING SLOVENLY BEHAVIOR WALTER E. WILLIAMS is professor of economics at George Mason University.

Any economist -- I don't care if he is a liberal or a conservative -- will tell you that if you tax something, you'll get less of it. And if you subsidize something, you'll get more of it -- whether it's wheat or slovenly behavior. In this country we have been subsidizing slovenly behavior by making it relatively attractive. Take a lady who has three kids and who might, on welfare, at a minimum bring in the equivalent of $12,000 a year tax-free. That would include the money she's going to get from the welfare office, food stamps, housing allowances, Medicaid, and other programs. To net that much, such a person would have to earn $15,000 a year before taxes. A lot of these young ladies on welfare can't begin to command $15,000 of value. Maybe the best they can do is earn $7,000 or $8,000. Well, poor people are poor, but they're not stupid. It's not a good short- run calculation to give up $12,000 after taxes in exchange for $7,000 or $8,000 before taxes. An improvement on the status quo would be to say that able-bodied people who can get a job are going to be put off welfare. We're not going to take away everything. You'll still get your Medicaid and maybe some other things, but we're going to give you the incentive to get off welfare and then, when your combined family income gets up to $20,000 or $25,000 or $30,000, you'll no longer even get the Medicaid.

LOOK TO THE ARTS TO SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS ARTHUR MITCHELL is founder, president, and artistic director of Dance Theater of Harlem, an acclaimed dance company that tours both in the U.S. and abroad.

My approach to solving social problems is through the arts. The arts give you a discipline and a structure -- and the key words are discipline and pride. Once you have that, everything else falls into place. At Dance Theater, many of our youngsters come from poor backgrounds. But once they learn that mechanism, it's very easy to apply it to other areas. Most of my dancers are on the dean's list, or graduate magna cum laude. Many are straight-A students. They're now all across the country, excelling in architecture, real estate, law. The assistant dean of students at Columbia law school was one of my dancers. One of my first ballerinas is now a doctor. Once children achieve discipline, they realize there's nothing they can't do, as long as they focus and get the education they need to compete.

WHO SAID LIFE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FAIR? HERMAN CAIN is chief executive of the Godfather's Pizza chain.

What the black community is missing is a winning attitude, a can-do attitude, an attitude that whatever problems we have, we can fix them. Yes, in many instances, a black person has to be twice as good and work twice as hard as a white to get ahead. But who said life was supposed to be fair? Here's what I say to blacks in business. If you want to get anything out of this life, you better look at the situation the way it is in order to figure out how you overcome it.

THE WAR ON DRUGS IS A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND KURT SCHMOKE has been the mayor of Baltimore since 1987.

I don't think that the war on drugs, as currently fought in the U.S., is anything more than a self-inflicted wound. To be effective, it must become a public health war rather than a criminal justice war. The model I favor is the Dutch one. In Holland, drugs, particularly hard drugs, are not legal. But the Dutch consider the addict a patient to be cured rather than a criminal to be prosecuted. As long as people register with the public health system and receive drugs through it, rather than from the criminal underground, they are maintained on that substance until they can be treated. This reduces the profit that can be made through illegal trafficking. Has it worked? Sure. Not only do the Dutch have better control of drugs, they've also reduced the rate of the spread of AIDS because they have long had the needle exchange programs that are now becoming popular here. The mature view of human nature is that some small portion of your population is always going to abuse substances, whether they're alcohol or nicotine or cocaine. Question is, Do you treat them, and try to control their problem, or do you criminalize them and in so doing create larger problems for the society?

KIDS WHO SPEAK STANDARD ENGLISH AREN'T TRAITORS REV. BUSTER SOARIES heads the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey.

Over the past 30 years we've seen social policies that may have been well meaning, but they placed too much emphasis on the role of government and not enough on what people have to do for themselves. Take education. Even poor school districts still have more money today than they did 30 years ago. We now know, all across the country, that strong schools and successful students have a higher correlation to parental involvement in a child's education than per pupil expenditure. & In our church, the majority of the kids come from single-parent families. We ask them all to bring their report cards to church. That reinforces the fact that the schools are right. They're telling the kids: Do your homework; be your best; study hard. Now when they come to church, the kids hear another primary institution in their lives saying the same thing. When they give their report cards to me at services, I give them little gifts, little books, cassette tapes, just thanking them for bringing them. Then I give the reports to a committee. Any kid that has a grade below B in any subject is assigned a tutor. We also contact the parents. We recruit adults from the congregation to serve as tutors, or simply as people who meet with the kids to hold them accountable for doing their homework. While government help is essential, you could give a school a billion dollars, and if the children are not motivated to learn, or are embarrassed to do well, then it won't do any good. We've got black kids whose friends call them white if they speak standard English. They're looked upon as traitors to their race. So there's a subcultural level of failure that has become institutionalized in black communities that government funds can't get to. We have to change that.

TEACHING YOUNG MEN HOW TO BE FATHERS ROBERT L. WOODSON is president and founder of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington.

The core of revitalizing the black community is restoring the family. An example is Charles Ballard, one of my colleagues. Ten years ago this young man got out of prison and adopted a son he had had by a woman before he was arrested. He then started an effort in Cleveland called Teen Fathers where he went to the maternity wards, got the names of the fathers of these babies born out of wedlock, and went to them and asked them why they were not taking care of these babies. What Charles found out was that a lot of these young black men did not know how to be fathers. He taught them. In ten years in one city, he has persuaded over 2,000 of them to declare paternity, and 200 have married the mothers of their children. Charles has demonstrated that you can change the value choices people make. You can call people to themselves. Now if this were cancer research and 2,000 young men had been salvaged, we would have been deluged with requests. People would say let's put more money into it, let's find out what we can do so we % can spread it throughout the country. But since billions of dollars are spent on traditional professional programs to address this same problem without results, there is tremendous resistance to what Charles does by the people who get paid to do the same thing but are ineffective -- social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists. Their industry, the Poverty Pentagon, is threatened.

THE QUICKEST WAY TO GET PEOPLE OFF THE STREET MAXINE WATERS is a Congresswoman from Los Angeles's 29th District.

A real commitment to reinvestment in America requires taking some defense dollars and investing them in public works programs -- redoing our streets, highways, and bridges, making schools earthquake safe. In some cases the private sector could be paid to hire these people for, say, at least a year. To make this work, we'd need massive training and apprenticeship programs in the construction trades, electricity, and plumbing. We'd also need stipends so that while they are in training, people will be able to feed themselves. Otherwise, they're not going to stay in training. They'll be back out on the street selling crack and all that craziness. Many of these men and women are in their 20s and have never worked a day in their lives. So you also give them life-management skills. Explain why some people are unemployable, how you get along in the workplace, what it means to get up and go to a job every day. Mainstream them. That's the quickest way to get large numbers of people off the street.

NO ONE WILL DO WHAT WE WON'T DO FOR OURSELVES Developer THAD WILLIAMS builds moderately priced housing in Los Angeles.

My company sends out mailers to blacks and Hispanics with the same tag line: ''The city of Los Angeles wants to help you buy a new home.'' ((The city provides low-interest mortgages.)) When we run that ad in the black community, we get a tremendous response. From the Hispanic community, we get almost nothing. Hispanics look at government as the enemy. Blacks look at it as a friend that's going to give them something. That's terrible. This attitude has been ingrained into the African American community for too long. Hispanics say, ''We want to do it ourselves.'' Blacks say, ''The government will do for us what we won't do for ourselves.'' No one is going to do for us what we won't do for ourselves.

THE GLASS CEILING FOR BLACKS IS ALL TOO REAL STEPHEN CARTER is a law professor at Yale University.

According to the latest survey data, racial attitudes in this country are hardening. For instance, the proportion of whites who say that blacks are intellectually inferior is rising. I divide our problems into spiritual and material categories. On the spiritual side, what we need more than anything else is a change in our rhetoric. The way we talk about race makes a difference. In particular, we have lacked consistent and firm statements from our political leadership, especially the Republican side, that racial discrimination and hatred are wrong and un-American. Of course, politicians say the right things in times of crisis, like the Los Angeles riots. What we haven't seen, and should see, is a televised address by the President exclusively devoted to condemning prejudice in all its forms and to explaining what we as a nation must do to bind the wounds that cut at our souls. On the material side, the important thing to understand is that if we are going to move toward better education and job training and to giving people a stake in the system, we must signal our commitment to nondiscrimination by stricter enforcement of our civil rights laws. Over the last decade, enforcement of certain types of civil rights law by the federal government has fallen off sharply. I'm not insisting that every racial imbalance you see in the market is caused by discrimination. But in many professions the glass ceiling for blacks is a real phenomenon. In most fields there is a level beyond which people of color cannot rise. The only way to counteract this is through litigation. Will litigation end in quotas? I'm not a big fan of quotas, but as a last resort, when every other remedy fails, I don't know how you can quarrel with them.

EVEN WINOS WOULDN'T LIVE IN THESE PENS Ex-gang members TONY THOMAS and TYRONE BAKER have founded a grass-roots effort to rebuild South Central L.A.

Kids don't have nothing to do here. All they see are drug selling and killing. They need something positive. Their self-esteem is so low they don't even want to wash their teeth. They're living in pens. Pens -- you know what I'm saying? The windows are broken out. There are holes in the walls. Even the winos wouldn't want to live in the conditions we live in down here. We've set up a nonprofit organization. We want corporate America to reach out and touch us because we need some seed money. We've raised $5,000 so far. We need large sums. Give us a billion dollars and you'll see the difference in six months. The L.A. Housing Authority has gotten billions of dollars. They haven't built nothing.

What have they done with the money? We don't know and we don't care. It hasn't gotten to us. We've gotta help ourselves. Just give us a chance. We're tired of being used. We want to control our own lives. We know what our people need and want. We ask 'em. They want long-term jobs. They don't want no McDonald's jobs. They want education. Not everybody is illiterate, but the majority are. They want on-the-job-trainin g, recreation for kids, so they don't resort to violence. We want to steer 'em in the right direction so they don't do the same thing we done. How long does it take to start? It don't take that long to build jails. They get them up as fast as it takes to blink their eyes.

UP FROM NAIL CLIPPERS TO CASIO CALCULATORS New Yorker MICHAEL FREEMAN is a 17-year-old entrepreneur.

Where I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, there aren't many business people. Most of my friends don't know anything about business. A lot of them drop out of school to sell drugs. When my adviser at school told me about this program on entrepreneurship ((run by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship)), I didn't even know what the word meant. But I tried it. I met with other entrepreneurs. I learned some business terms and got business cards and information on how to run my own business. After my training, the course people gave me $25 and brought me down to the wholesale district in New York. I bought novelty items like folding brushes, pens, nail clippers, and after a week I tripled my money. Now I've moved up to Casio calculators and watches that store phone numbers, and my profits have grown. My comparative advantage is that I can sell cheaper than the average retailer. I'm not yet making enough to live on, but if I keep at it I think I will. I'm still running the business out of my home. I don't have enough capital yet to open my own store and make this a lifetime job. It's very tough to get hold of capital in the inner city. I've got to find some investors. I think America should make it easier for small business people to set aside startup capital. And they should make getting business licenses easier too. There's too much red tape. But if I can really get started, there's a huge market in my neighborhood.

MONEY ISN'T EVERYTHING, BUT IT MATTERS SHARON PRATT KELLY was elected mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1990.

Money alone can't solve our problems, but it's important. Critics say the money government spent on cities in the past wasn't productive. I don't buy that. We made a lot of progress in the 1960s through the Great Society programs. Head Start was a terrific program. Many of the health initiatives were terrific, as was college tuition aid. Yes, there were mistakes and instances of mismanagement. But at least we were moving forward on a domestic agenda.

BUSINESS SHOULD REALIZE IT PAYS TO INVEST HERE UNITA BLACKWELL, mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi (pop. 329), recently received a $350,000 MacArthur Foundation ''genius'' grant, which Blackwell says she'll use to pay her bills.

We've had enough rhetoric. We have to look to people who can stick with it and get things done in our local communities. In my town, people help themselves. We don't have a big pot of money or lots of political grants, but we buy food in bulk with other communities in Mississippi and Arkansas. Once a month we sell big boxes of the food -- chicken, sausage, vegetables, and fruit -- for $14 a box at the city hall. Anyone can buy, but in return they must put in two hours of community service per box. It's also time to rethink business's responsibility to this country. A lot of the best manufacturing jobs have gone overseas. Businesses have to understand that it pays to invest in small towns like this one. If you have a factory in Indonesia and you're making money on it, fine. But you can still open a small plant here, hire 40 or 50 people, and it will pay for itself. You may not make a big profit, but you'll get paid back in other ways. You'll employ people here, make it a better country, get them better educated, and they'll start buying your goods. It will all balance out. I guess I'm what you call a dreamer or a visionary or whatever. I feel that if you're on God's green earth you can do something. Even if you're a businessman in a three-piece suit, you've got warm blood running in your veins. We have to understand there's another way of doing this. We have to take a different trail, because the one we've been on has run out.

WANTED: A KIND OF KIBBUTZ FOR BLACK KIDS EDDIE WILLIAMS is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank.

If you look at the gross income of the black community, it is roughly equivalent to the GNP of the world's 13th-largest country. That says to me that within this community there's some money to do something, should we choose to do it. If there's a reduction in federal money for scholarships, why couldn't we create our own foundations to give some of our talented people scholarships? I've been thinking a lot about Bruno Bettelheim's The Children of the Dream ((a study of kibbutz children in Israel)). One of our problems here is that many black children are victims of what I call structural discrimination. They come out of a terrible community, go to school for five or six hours, where they're exposed to culture and education, and then what happens? They go right back into this environment that does not encourage such things. The idea I got from the kibbutz is to try to provide a kind of quasi substitute home for children until their values and ideas have been sufficiently shaped, and where they're not unduly influenced by this terrible environment. Rich people do this. They call it boarding school, or Choate. Why couldn't these other kids have a total learning environment that exposes them to things they will never get in their homes?

WE AREN'T DOING WHAT WE KNOW WILL WORK MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN is founder and head of the Children's Defense Fund.

We're not doing what we know how to do well. We're not immunizing our children fully. We're not providing prenatal care to a third of mothers, which increases the chance a child will be born with a very low birthweight and thus be more likely to die in the first year of life or to develop chronic disabilities. We are not providing adequate nutrition in those crucial early years. We've got to ensure basic nutrition and health either through parental education and support or through adequate child care. We know Head Start makes a difference. Yet we give it to only a third of the eligible children, even though we know we can save $3 in remedial costs, in teenage pregnancies, or through improved achievement for every dollar invested.

WANT A JOB? KEEP YOUR LEG OFF THE CHAIR LULANN MCGRIFF is a counselor at City College of San Francisco.

The myth out there is that everyone's a single parent. But I work with a group of young black males at a local high school, and the majority of the troubled ones come from two-parent families, where both spouses are working. When you talk to these parents, you find they want their kids to develop the same values they always have -- church, respect for elders, things like that. But what I hear from the kids is, Yeah we go to church, yeah my father is really strict. But they also say that what I really want is a job, and I can't get one. Part of the problem is that no one has said to them you can't go to a job interview looking the way you look. You can't approach an interviewer like you would your best pals on the street. When I did mock job interviews with them in class, it was interesting how quickly they grasped that, no, you don't swagger in the door like that; no, you don't throw your leg over the chair. Those are things they hadn't thought about before. The schools and parents are not doing their jobs.

BACH IS ALSO A PART OF OUR CULTURE WYNTON MARSALIS is an eminent jazz and classical trumpetist.

The major problem I see is the breakdown in the concept of community that was always one of the strong points in Afro-American life. Today the greatest Afro-American achievements are not known by most Afro-Americans, or by most Americans. Martin Luther King's words can still heal the United States of America. The music of Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong can still teach people about American music, black or white, but nobody is receiving the benefit of this vibrant, vital culture. And you have to know American culture too, and European music. Don't say, ''Well, Bach's music is nothing to me because it's European,'' because Bach also is a part of your legacy and history as an Afro-American. To me there's no such thing as purely white achievement. If you're not equipped with that information, you can't be part of Afro-American culture. We're not a subset of the U.S. We are the U.S., plus this. It's like soul food -- there's the basic cooking, and we add this to it. Right now in the Afro-American community we have a culture informed by ignorance and vulgarity. You ask most people in the black community what is the biggest menace to them, they're not going to tell you the police. It's the guys who stand on the corner beating people up and robbing them. But these guys are the same ones who are celebrated in the media as being victims of the white man. What we need to do is figure out how to make this ignorance that's being celebrated go out of style. My vibe has always been ''down with the street and down with ignorance.'' But it takes me ten years of going to different schools to touch maybe 10,000 kids. A music video will do that in five seconds -- and it'll be somebody holding his dick. These things have nothing to do with poverty. Louis Armstrong grew up impoverished. You wouldn't see him holding his dick in public. His statement wasn't, ''Well, I was a victim of prejudice, so screw everything in the world.'' That's not heroic. And you didn't hear him say, ''Well, I grew up in poverty, so I'm excused from this or that.'' A lot of Afro-Americans think like I do. They're tired of seeing this garbage elevated and considered the Afro-American way.

REALIZING THE DREAMS OF UNWED MOTHERS ELIJAH ANDERSON is a professor of social sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Streetwise, a study of black inner-city culture.

In the world of unwed black mothers, these young women dream of having a family, a house, a home in the suburbs even. They watch soap operas on TV and identify with those characters. It doesn't matter that the characters are white or middle-class blacks. At the same time, you have young black men out there who are viable sex partners but not viable husbands. They do not have the jobs that will allow them to follow through as husbands and role models for children. And so these two individuals meet. But for the male, even if he means to follow through, the lack of a stable job will not allow him to play that role he envisions, so the whole thing short-circuits. A child is oftentimes the result. Before this can be remedied, jobs have to stop moving overseas, and attitudes in the workplace have to change dramatically. Many managers are prejudiced, but this is something they don't realize. They truly think they are out to get a good worker, but what plugs into their conception of a good worker is white skin. If you're black, that's a strike against you. This is one reason for the kind of unemployment we're seeing in the inner cities today.

WHY NOBODY WANTS TO BE A BUPPIE SUSAN MCHENRY is executive editor of Emerge magazine.

In the black middle class there's a lot of soul-searching going on. You may still find an attitude of let's take care of ourselves first, but there's a kind of critical mass of folks who are uncomfortable with that. Among ourselves we talk about these indifferent professionals -- we call them black urban professionals, or buppies -- who are so involved with their own economic welfare that they aren't concerned about the inner city. It's almost like we talk about them so we won't be them. People in a thousand small ways are finding ways they can reach out and make a difference. One trend we've seen over the past two years is that more black professionals are joining tutoring and mentoring programs. People are trying to form an infrastructure of services for inner-city blacks, whether it's through establishing a legal hot line, sponsoring a family, or working through churches. I honestly haven't noticed anyone talking about moving back to the inner cities once they've left. When you think about what you're going to do with the money you worked so damned hard for, your first priority is to make sure that the people you care about are safe. We're flocking to mostly black suburbs partly because we still can't readily integrate with white society. We work in these corporations, law firms, hospitals, what have you, but we see what the limitations are. You also want to make sure your children can function without the stings of racism penetrating them all the time. You want an environment that gives them self- esteem, where they can see their African American identity and achievement intertwined. That's why young black middle-class professionals are gathering in their own enclaves. We know we'll do things for each other. If I locked myself out of my house at night in a mostly white neighborhood, my neighbor might hesitate to open his door because of the color of my skin. That happened to me recently. But in an all-black area, I'd merely be inconveniencing my neighbors. They'd let me in.

MORE BANKS NEED TO OPEN THEIR DOORS TOO JULIANNE MALVEUX earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. She writes a syndicated newspaper column.

How do we better the plight of people in the inner city? Simple. Anyone who wants to work should have a job. We're closing libraries when we have a literacy problem. That makes no sense. If the government gave jobs to everyone, it would not be make-work. A job in a library, a job fixing roads, a job taking care of children -- these are not make-work, not if what people are doing is socially productive. We also need to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act. Banks are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is investing in our inner cities. In fact, redlining is not only continuing, it's worsening. Why were the rioters in L.A. willing to burn up their own community? Because is wasn't their community. There were some black businesses that were hurt. But how many other people heard the door slam when they went to get a business loan?

THE PROBLEM IS NOT A POVERTY OF VALUES ROGER WILKINS, now a professor of history at George Mason University, played a key role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s.

This summer America was crying and moaning over the fact the unemployment rate had risen to 7.8%. Well, the average unemployment rate for adult black men -- and I'm not talking about guys in jail or guys lying on the street and not looking for jobs -- is 12.9%. It has not been under 10% since 1979. The problem is not, as Dan Quayle suggests, a poverty of values in the black community. Sure, there are people in poor black communities who have lousy values. But the true poverty of values started a long, long time ago, when white people got addicted to the idea that black people were not truly part of the polity and, therefore, didn't need to be considered except to the extent their labor was needed. My fundamental point is that white racism created these problems, not black people. My mother worked on these issues all her life; for 36 years I did, and now my daughter does. But it's no more our job than it is anybody else's. We're just Americans like everybody else.

What the political power in this society has got to understand is that this is a national problem that must be addressed in a national way. The fate of poor blacks is wrapped up with the fate of all of us. It's not an us-and-them situation, as the people in the suburbs where I go to work seem to believe. It really is us and us.

YOU CAN PAY US NOW OR PAY US LATER Real estate developer VINCENT LANE is chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority.

My approach to the housing problem in the inner cities is that we have a people problem. If we fix the people, the housing will more or less take care of itself. I think we need to grow a new black middle class in the inner cities. We need to attract young people who are perhaps more adventuresome and have a pioneering spirit and will gentrify the area. When people say of my mixed-income approach, ''You'll never get middle-class people to move in next to these welfare people,'' I say three things. They will if it's safe, if it's clean, and if there's some kind of economic incentive. That last is what drives human beings to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. If they know they can get affordable housing and maybe make some money on it down the road, that neighborhood suddenly doesn't look so bad. You can't begin to talk about rebuilding a neighborhood until you have a safe environment. So I spent a lot of time with Operation Clean Sweep, where we threw out the drug dealers and the gangs and came back with housing that has a security guard or a doorman. Then, you've got to set standards. What you do is provide an environment where tenants have something to lose. You build housing that poor people can live in, not housing for poor people. So you put ceramic tile in the bathroom and ceiling fans in the dining room and hardwood cabinets with stainless steel sinks that don't rust out after ten years. Then they have something to lose -- quality housing that's worth something. The beauty is that it's not expensive. We can rehabilitate a housing unit for about $60,000. You can either pay me now or pay me later. The reason the American public is so fed up with government, especially a government that talks about increasing taxes, is that our taxes increase year after year and things are getting worse and worse. Once people know that the money they spend is going to bring something positive, like kids going to school or vandalism disappearing or crime lessening, that's different. If the farmer in Omaha knew his $60,000 would go to an environment where kids have a chance for a decent education and to act like kids and to, over time, become contributing members of society, then that farmer wouldn't mind having his taxes increase.

WOUNDS HEAL BEST THAT ARE HELD UP TO THE LIGHT GEORGE C. WOLFE wrote and directed the popular Broadway musical Jelly's Last Jam, about the life of Jelly Roll Morton.

It's impossible to discuss the disintegration of the black family without confronting the institution that began it all, which is slavery. Yes, everybody has done guilt, and everybody has done rage. But ultimately, in between the guilt and the rage, there is still nobody taking responsibility. We must deal with those dynamics because they have an impact on everything, on the job market, on how people are perceived. If people are perceived a certain way over a long period of time, they begin to embody the view people have of them. Even though I have a nice apartment and a hit show on Broadway, I can't get a cab! If everywhere you look, you see negative reflections of yourself, it's very difficult to make your way. How do we deal with racism? Ultimately wounds heal best that are held up to the light. That's true of the theater. Even if you take people on a journey full of pain, if on the other side is charity and forgiveness, then healing can begin. LET'S SEE MORE OF THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS DR. BEN CARSON is director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The important thing is that black people have to give up the victim's mentality. Now, one thing that the media almost never talks about is the fact that more than 40% of blacks in this country are middle class and above. It would be a wonderful thing to talk about this group more, so that people would have a lot more role models. I can name dozens of blacks just in this area who live in $500,000 to $1 million houses and who worked their way up to top jobs. It's not rare. That's why when I talk to civic organizations or medical groups in the black community, I emphasize how important it is for these people to get out into other parts of the community and show themselves, make themselves available to kids, tell kids they don't have to be a basketball player or an entertainer to have a nice lifestyle.

TURNING MILITARY BASES INTO TRAINING GROUNDS REV. CECIL MURRAY is pastor of South Central L.A.'s First African Methodist Episcopal Church.

I'd like us to talk about using abandoned military installations to recycle human potential that's now being wasted. I'm talking about the undertrained and untrained people going into the 21st century with no skills, and the homeless, of whom there are more than 35,000 on the streets of Los Angeles alone on any given night. How would it work? Two parts. Government would take care of logistics: food, clothing, dormitory sleeping, health care. Volunteers from industry, education, health, and private groups would do the mentoring, the teaching, the equipping. You would assign certain job priorities to these institutions and recruit volunteers to meet those requirements. For instance, you might ask the health people to give so many woman- and man-hours per month. You'd ask the state college system to give, the engineers to give, the teachers to give. And they would do it. Persons who are unskilled don't need custodial services. What's necessary - is for them to go to installations where they can be equipped to contribute to society. As we de-escalate after the Cold War, we will have lots of military installations available. It's doable. We've got facilities, we've got government ownership, we've got the need for a Marshall Plan for our inner cities. These bases are already set up. Let's use them.

WITHOUT COMMON GOALS A SOCIETY CANNOT PROSPER SIDNEY POITIER, star of such films as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, is a longtime stalwart of the civil rights movement.

If a society is to prosper, it must have goals. Goals for education, for the environment, for jobs. I think that America has no goals. None, none, none, none, none. The consumer impulse is all that's operative right now. We reach for very little that requires a sacrifice. What will salvage the black community is part of the design that will salvage America itself. Because there is no America without all of its communities.