A Letter From the Publisher: Sep. 16, 1985

Except for the occasional lurid headline and sketchy story, the epidemic of murderous violence by young U.S. black men against one another goes largely unreported. This week, TIME's Nation section features a full-length account of this alarming phenomenon in American society. The idea for the story, and a large portion of the reporting, came from Correspondent Jack White, until recently a member of the New York bureau and now Chicago bureau chief.

Says White: "As a black reporter specializing in black America, I had long been aware of the plague of black-on-black homicide in the nation's ghettos. But it took two incidents to focus the story. One was the brutal murder in Chicago last year of a black high school basketball star, Ben Wilson, by two youths who seemed to have no motive at all. The other was the incredible burst of support from black New Yorkers for Bernhard Goetz, the white subway vigilante. He was a lightning rod for the fears that many blacks have of their own violent young men."

White interviewed crime victims' relatives, police officers and academics in New York and other Eastern cities. In Chicago, Correspondent Don Winbush reported from neighborhoods afflicted by youth-gang violence. He observes, "All around me were decent, hardworking, caring, strong-willed people. How could senseless, callous acts of violence erupt so frequently?"

Los Angeles Correspondent Dan Goodgame spent a long night with dedicated doctors, most of them black, in a hospital emergency room in the city's violence-ridden south-central ghetto. "It was a relatively quiet night," says Goodgame. "Only five gunshot wounds, four serious stab wounds and four head injuries from clubbings." In the line of duty, Atlanta Reporter Frank Washington once found himself threatened by a "steelyeyed" street tough in Miami's Coconut Grove area. "If he saw me hanging around much longer, he would kill me. It was that simple, and that sad."

Staff Writer Richard Stengel, who incorporated the bureaus' vivid reports in his story, immersed himself in books and papers on the subject by criminologists and social scientists. Senior Editor Walter Isaacson supervised the project. Says he: "It was important to amass as much research as possible. Black-on-black violence is a very sensitive subject, one that black leaders are only now willing to talk about." White agrees: "I thought it was time to bring it out of the closet. It's time, long past time, for the killing to stop."