Of the 15,365 blacks murdered between 2000 and 2004 whose killers are known to law enforcement officials, 14,025 of them were killed by other blacks

DeWayne Wickham:

To put this into context, more than four times as many blacks were killed by blacks during this five-year period as died at the hands of mobs over the 86 years of recorded lynchings.

If the Ku Klux Klan were responsible for this level of bloodshed, black leaders would make ending this violence one of their top priorities. If the Aryan Nation were behind this senseless slaughter, they would demand extraordinary steps to stop it.

But overwhelmingly, the culprits aren’t bigoted whites; they are a small group of self-loathing blacks. These people are a malignant cancer eating away at the hopes and aspirations of the blacks whose lives they affect. And that impact is widespread.

Eight of the 10 cities with the highest murder rate per 100,000 population are majority black, Morgan Quitno Press reported in its 2005 listing of the nation’s most dangerous cities. In the other two, blacks and Hispanics combined make up a majority of the population.

How do you build better schools and energize economic development in cities plagued by such murder rates? How do you keep middle-class whites and blacks from fleeing to the suburbs — a loss that depletes the tax bases of these cities? How can you talk about a plan to uplift the black community and not have as one of its major components a frontal attack on the causes of the disproportionately high black murder rate?

Sure, I know education and jobs are part of the answer. And I understand that drug trafficking and drug abuse have a lot to do with black-on-black murders. But behind all of these causes are people —those who have little regard for the lives of others. What do we do about them?

For many of us who have escaped the most violent black neighborhoods, the carnage that goes on in them is a distant reflection of the nation’s larger failings. But for those left behind, who run the gauntlet of this violence, the need for an end to black-on-black murder is a matter of great urgency.

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