Giving Back to the Community: African American Inner City Teens and Civic Engagement was an exercise in ethnographic research. Intentionally different from the more common quantitative studies conducted on civic engagement, this qualitative data gathering project was intended to focus solely on the patterns of civic engagement habits of low income inner city African American youth to better assess the likely causes of civic engagement trends. My research, however, resulted in the uncovering of a much broader story about African American inner city community traditions, networks, and norms. In the end, the research attempts to define this community's version of "civic engagement", and its relationship to mainstream civic institutions and civic life. [This report was produced by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), University of Maryland, and Charles Communications Consulting.]