ON THE WAY to see Kweisi Mfume yesterday, I drove through the lower end of Park Heights Avenue just to let my eyeballs bleed. Mfume was announcing his run for the U.S. Senate. Park Heights, from Belvedere Avenue to Park Circle, was announcing its usual catastrophes: burned-out buildings, abandoned homes and drug traffic that has sparked 30 years of murderous street crime. Mfume reminds us of individual triumph over such troubles, as well as their enduring hold on entire neighborhoods.

He runs for the Senate with his life already a remarkable story of human redemption. Keep driving down Park Heights and head into West Baltimore, where Mfume ran the streets as a young man who felt angry and abandoned. His father gone, his mother dead in Mfume's arms, the young Kweisi went on to father half a dozen children out of wedlock. Five of his six sons stood with him yesterday.

If you looked beyond the warehouse windows, you could glimpse portions of ragged West Baltimore that routinely devour those who might be another Mfume. Farther north, there was beat-up Park Heights Avenue. And on the day Mfume stood there in his hour of pride, a new study out of Washington declared the awful state of so many young black men in Baltimore and Maryland.