BLACK LEADERS MUST ADDRESS MURDER RATE

A distinguished group of black Americans will assemble in Washington
next month to put finishing touches on a blueprint for uplifting
their race. Called "The Covenant with Black America," this plan is
the product of a brain trust of black leaders -- people committed to
fixing what's broken in black America.

The 254-page document, a copy of which I obtained in advance of its
scheduled late February release, is an action plan to make black
people healthier, improve the education of black children, reduce the
high black incarceration rate and help black Americans acquire wealth
and become economically self-sufficient.

As important as all of this is, it doesn't go far enough.

Somewhere in this document, amid all the talk about what individuals
can do to strengthen the race, there should have appeared these
words: Thou shall not kill. Anyone who is serious about uplifting the
black race ought to have ending the slaughter of black people high on
the list of things to do.

According to Tuskegee Institute data, 3,445 black Americans were
lynched in this country between 1882 and 1968. As horrific as that
Jim Crow "justice" was, it pales compared with the black-on-black
carnage now taking place.

Of the 15,365 black people murdered between 2000 and 2004 whose
killers are known to law enforcement officials, 14,025 of them were
killed by other blacks, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.

To put this into context, more than four times as many black people
were killed by black people 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 a top priority. 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 cancer eating
away at the hopes and aspirations of those 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,
black and Hispanic residents combined make up the population majority.

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?

Education and jobs are part of the answer. And drug trafficking and
drug abuse have a lot to do with black-on-black murders. But behind
these causes are people 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.

As it should be for the well-meaning drafters of The Covenant.