Delfonic McCray, 13, was big for his age, 6 ft. tall. He liked basketball and girls, and kept love letters carefully folded in his Michael Jackson wallet. He and a friend were on their way to a Chicago Bulls basketball game and stopped at a housing project on the west side of Chicago to see a girlfriend. As they approached the back entrance of a graffiti-scarred tenement, a group of youths taunted them. Delfonic approached tentatively, then turned and ran. One of the youths casually drew a .22-cal. handgun and shot him. "We had a good kid coming along," said Delfonic's grandmother. Now that he was becoming a man, she had gone out and bought him a new suit. "I had no way of knowing he would be buried in it," she said.
Four-year-old Demont Beans was playing on his tricycle in front of his home in south-central Los Angeles. In the front yard of a neighboring house, James Barnett, 23, was arguing with his girlfriend and her brother. Police say Barnett drew a .22-cal. revolver. The bullet he fired struck De- mont in the head. The boy was rushed to Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center, where the average daily admissions to the trauma center include four gunshot wounds, three stabbings and three cases of "blunt assault" to the head. Demont died on the operating table. For Dr. Arthur W. Fleming, the chief of surgery, it was nothing new. "This is the closest thing to a combat hospital that you'll find in peacetime," he says.
Colin Fowles, 32, was once known as the fastest man in the North American Soccer League. He was a star player on the Fort Lauderdale Strikers from the team's founding in 1977 until its dissolution two years ago. Fowles kept in shape by playing in amateur leagues, as he was doing one night two weeks ago during a pickup game in Dade County's Bunche Park, outside Miami. As half time neared in the scoreless match, a noisy squabble several hundred feet from the game erupted in gunfire. The gunmen charged onto the playing field, firing wildly at wit- nesses to their fight and anyone else who got in the way. Fowles, who once outran a quarter horse for 80 yards, could not outrun the bullets flying at him. Said Charles Benedict, an eyewitness: "What happened to Colin was cold-blooded murder."
Every murder is different in its own way. Each has its own perverse logic, its own cast of mourners, its own sad finality. But a staggering number these days have something in common, something that has become part of a frighteningly familiar but largely unspoken national scourge: the epidemic of violence by young blacks against other young blacks.
The leading cause of death among black males ages 15 to 24 in the U.S. is not heart disease, not cancer, not any natural cause. It is murder by other blacks. More than 1 out of every 3 blacks who die in that age group is the victim of a homicide. Across America, particularly among the underclass in the nation's urban ghettos, brother is killing brother in a kind of racial fratricide. More than 40% of all the nation's murder victims are black, and 94% of those who commit these murders are black. The 6,000 or so Americans who lost their lives because of black-on-black violence in 1981 alone rivals the number of black servicemen killed during the twelve years of the Viet Nam conflict.