The purposes of this two-part study were (1) to investigate urban middle school African American girls' physical activity levels and their relationships to attitudes and, (2) to explore urban middle school African American girls' attitude toward physical education. A total of (N = 649) African American girls from 14 New York City middle schools participated in the first study and (N = 992) girls from 21 New York City middle schools participated in the second study. The 3-Day Physical Activity Recall instrument, (Pate et al., 2003) and the Student Attitude toward Physical Education instrument (Subramaniam & Silverman, 2000) were used in the two studies. Results of the first study indicated that African American girls had low amounts of moderate to vigorous physical activity across the 3 days. Their physical activity expenditure had a mean of 186.6 METs, which were well below the recommended 60 minutes of moderate activity or 240 METs per day. Black girls in this study reported spending most of the half-hour intervals doing light physical activities; however, 8th grade girls had slightly higher light intervals than 7th and 6th graders. There were significant differences in the number of intervals of different physical activity intensity for children in different grades. Correlations for physical activity with attitude differences by grade level revealed significance for 6th graders, but not for 7th and 8th graders and asserted that attitudes were positively associated with more vigorous physical activity. These were mostly enjoyment attitude variables, and the relationships were more pronounced for the 6th grade girls than for the entire sample, which included teacher and curriculum as sub-factors. Results of the second study found that African American girls have moderate to slightly low attitudes toward physical education. The 6th grade girls were found to have significantly higher attitudes than 7th and 8th grade girls. Enjoyment variables were the most prevalent factors for attitude and they support other research suggesting that enjoyment of physical education is the major contributor to student attitudes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]