This paper reports on the development of a school-based Afrocentric intervention for middle school male adolescents who are at risk for academic failure or underachievement. The intervention combined the principles of the rites of passage movement within African American communities and current thinking on the process of second culture acquisition to focus on developing the participants' sense of ethnic self as a precursor to academic performance. The Afrocentric rites of passages movement is designed to provide African American males with the grounding in their culture of origin that they need to negotiate the challenges facing them in Eurocentric environments. Six African American males in the sixth grade of a predominantly European American urban middle school participated. The results of this intervention suggest that this is an approach to at-risk adolescent African American males that warrants further attention. An appendix describes the intervention, which began with four months of participation in the "Kwanzaa" group which was primarily social but dedicated to learning Afrocentric principles. The second phase of the program, the Sphinx Club, emphasized applying the principles learned earlier in the year. (Contains 1 table and 22 references.) (Author/SLD)