Okay, black America, exactly what are we going to do about the Douglass High Schools across the nation?

The HBO documentary "Hard Times at Douglass High School" has been running much of July. It’s about a Baltimore high school named after, outrageously enough, the abolitionist, anti-slavery activist and newspaper editor Frederick Douglass, one of the most erudite men of his era.

Douglass was born in Maryland around 1818. He escaped from slavery in Baltimore in 1838 by disguising himself as a sailor and boarding a train headed north. He virtually taught himself to read and write, and, without a day of formal schooling, managed to learn five foreign languages.

You have to wonder what Douglass would think of the school named after him, which has one of the most dismal academic records in the state. I wrote about Douglass and the HBO film in my regular column for The Baltimore Sun. There’s no need rehashing here what I wrote there.

But the Baltimore Sun column inspired an Asian-American who lives on the West Coast to send me an e-mail. He noticed similarities between Douglass and a predominantly black high school in the city where he grew up called Grant High School.

This e-mailer has asked me not to reveal his name, but he e-mails me regularly. I remember one in which he said that while in college, he noticed black students tended to steer clear of courses in math, science and engineering (Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, the African-American president of the predominantly white University of Maryland Baltimore County recently told me only 2 percent of doctorate degrees in math and science are awarded to black students.).

About Grant, the e-mailer was even more revealing. While Grant’s football team "routinely crushed" his "lily-white" alma mater, the school was among the worst academically.

"When I was in high school," the e-mailer wrote, "I heard more about Grant’s atrocious academic performance. It was one of the few Sacramento schools that had no math team -- or at least none ever showed up for a math meet. Most high schools in the city put 20-40 from that year’s graduating class into the University of California system."

The e-mailer said his alma mater sent 85 students to the UC system. Grant sent two.

"When I was in college," the e-mailer continued, "I got an inkling of why Grant was in such sorry academic shape. The mother of one of my college classmates worked in juvenile justice so he heard all the dirt on various schools." Part of that dirt, according to the e-mailer, was a "contest" that members of the Grant football team had his senior year.

What was the goal of the "contest?" To see who could get the most girls pregnant.

The "winner" was a star athlete who got three girls pregnant. The e-mailer said this same athlete had run-ins with the law for break-ins and thefts. "If he hadn’t been a star athlete," the e-mailer opined, "he would have been in jail."

Perhaps only the guy’s genitalia needed to be locked up. Mind you, all the things that the e-mailer described occurred sometime in the 1970s, over 30 years ago. Anyone wondering how black America got to such a state where nearly 70 percent of black homes have no father need only ponder if such "contests" -- and, more importantly, the mindset that inspires them -- as the one Grant’s football team had may have been a contributing factor.

Any idiot with a Y chromosome and a penis can get a girl or woman pregnant. The only contest that matters is whether you can -- and how well you can -- raise any children you create. It kind of makes me wonder where the dimwits on Grant’s football team that year got their values.

That infamous story about those dizzy white girls in Massachusetts who made a pregnancy pact has been discredited. It’s possible the story the e-mailer sent me about Grant is just as bogus. But even if it is, aren’t there still problems aplenty in many inner-city, predominantly black high schools?

The HBO documentary about Douglass showed teen girls who had gotten pregnant before they left high school struggling academically, thus lowering their odds of graduating and increasing the odds that they will raise their children in poverty (The daddies of the babies, as you may have predicted, are nowhere to be found.).

So, black America, what are we going to do about the Douglass High Schools and Grant High Schools across the nation?