POLITICS 88 : CAMPAIGN ’88 : Crowd Cheers Jackson in ‘Crack Alley’ Project

More than 100 New York police officers manned roofs and alleyways to guard the Rev. Jesse Jackson as he campaigned Friday in a crime and drug-ridden Queens housing project block that residents call Crack Alley, but the extra security seemed almost unnecessary.

When Jackson arrived, hundreds were already waiting at curbside, and the throng doubled in size as he walked into the project and residents rushed from their apartments to cheer and to touch him.

The morning before, a 12-year-old boy had been killed a few blocks away when his parents’ house was set aflame in what authorities said was an attempt by drug dealers to punish them for calling the police. Around the corner a rookie policeman had been shot a few weeks earlier while guarding the firebombed home of a witness in a drug case.

By the time Jackson took to a makeshift stage in a shabby courtyard, he was all but surrounded, the turnout augmented by women who peered down with young babies from tenement windows that were barred even on the highest floors.

“Never before have we known an enemy as threatening as drugs,” Jackson told the crowd. “Brother against brother, sister against sister, it is the worst crisis we have ever known.

“The dope pusher dresses as brother, sister, friend, neighbor,” he said to cries of acclamation.

The Jackson campaign hopes its emphasis on the drug issue will boost turnout among blacks, who are expected to support him overwhelmingly, while attracting enough white voters to close the 15-point gap in recent polls between Jackson and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis.

The scene mirrored others earlier this week in Harlem and the South Bronx, where one street corner rally filled most of a city block and where Jackson began to cry in a church as he spoke about children “on 140th Street . . . the subculture, the underclass.”

‘They Can Make It’

“We can’t abandon them,” Jackson said. “They can make it.”

As Jackson left the Queens project, Marlene Hines pushed past her neighbors and security men to embrace him as he walked past.

“I’m so excited my heart won’t stop pounding,” she said. “They brought him to the right location here. No. 1 crack dealer here. South Side crack house here. When he’s President, he will help us.”

Later Friday, in a taped ABC interview with Barbara Walters, Jackson said he would appoint a woman as his attorney general.

“We’ve got to expand options for women in our society,” he said.

Jackson also said he favored former President Jimmy Carter for secretary of state, calling him “extremely qualified.”