The City: The City

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Gang Warfare. Contributing to the mood of apprehension is the continuing problem of almost casual mayhem that police label "gang warfare." Violence among the city poor is neither new nor unique to blacks; even the affluent Mafia still practices assassination. But in the taut atmosphere of today's big city, such killings add to the tension, invite police crackdowns and make for scare headlines. This year alone in Chicago, 33 people have died and 252 have been injured in gang warfare. In Philadelphia, there were 30 such killings in all of 1968, and 24 so far this year.

Warring among black extremists is also becoming more virulent. Rivalry has sprung up over control of territory, recruitment of new members and access to antipoverty grants. Since New Year's, the feud between California's Black Panthers and Ron Karenga's US has left three dead and five wounded. In New York City, where Black Muslims and various splinter organizations compete, a former bodyguard for Malcolm X, Charles 37X Kenyatta, was critically wounded this month. Kenyatta leads the Harlem Mau Maus. Less than a week later, Kenyatta's friend, Clarence 37X Smith, head of a group called the Five Percenters, was shot down and killed. A suspected Black Panther informer, Alex Rackley, was found tortured and shot to death recently in a Connecticut swamp.

Bloody Momentum. Despite the similarities in style and revolutionary rhetoric found in black militant groups, there is no evidence of a nationwide black conspiracy. Rather, the manifestations of violence are similar from city to city because they stem from similar ghetto causes. Both the ambushes of police and the internecine black warfare have generally sprung from local, isolated circumstances. Black groups, including such ostensibly disciplined outfits as the Panthers, are too fragmented to achieve nationwide coordination even if they wanted to. With some of the best-known militant figures exiled, jailed or dead, there is no national leadership to hold the extremists together.

Also, it is only a tiny minority of the fringe, black and white, that perpetrates violence regularly. Most Negroes are still committed to the American system and striving for a full share of its benefits. Each new criminal incident, however, creates more animosity and hardens extreme attitudes. Each shooting causes more fear and political reaction, or gives new excuse for revenge. There is no tangible sign that U.S. society has yet found a way to reverse this bloody momentum.