COLUMN ONE : Blaming a Hidden Enemy : More blacks are saying they’re targets of a conspiracy that includes probes of their leaders and drugs on their streets. Some fear the plot theories mask the real problems.

Although he admittedly has no direct evidence to back up his belief, Wilbert Tatum says he is convinced there is a conspiracy by the federal government to discredit and destroy the nation’s black leadership.

As he sees it, the series of criminal investigations and charges against black elected officials and civil rights activists in recent years, including the prosecution of Washington Mayor Marion Barry on federal drug and perjury charges, cannot be explained in any other way.

Tatum, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Amsterdam News, New York’s oldest and largest black newspaper, also contends that the feds are involved in a secret plot with Latin American drug kingpins and Mafia drug bosses to flood inner-city neighborhoods with narcotics as a form of genocide against blacks.

He offers as proof what he calls the “authentic language” in a scene in the movie “The Godfather” in which a Mafia don decides to push drugs to blacks because he looks on them as animals without souls.

Tatum’s views may seem far-fetched and even paranoid to most white Americans--and to many black Americans as well. But such beliefs are gaining an apparently growing number of adherents among blacks who feel there must be some ominous explanation for the series of devastating adversities that have befallen the black community in recent years.

Some black leaders fear the prevalence of the conspiracy theories, and the grip they seem to hold on the imagination of so many blacks, signal a deepening racial crisis.

The plot theories reflect “a deep sense of alienation and despair in the black community, particularly in that segment that is basically the lowest in income,” said Michael Lomax, chairman of the Fulton County (Ga.) Commission and the second most powerful political figure in Atlanta after Mayor Maynard Jackson.

“These are people who are being disregarded or ignored,” he said, “It reminds me of Los Angeles in 1965”--the year of the Watts riots.

Some of the purported white conspiracies range from the violence that is now the leading cause of death among young black men to the widespread displacement of blacks from their traditional neighborhoods through gentrification by whites.

Even AIDS, which is killing off blacks at a rate three times that of whites in the nation, is seen by some blacks as a form of government-backed germ warfare against people of color--with the high number of white gay men who have so far died from the disease being merely an expendable test batch for the intended victims.

“More people today are indeed talking about conspiracy,” said the Rev. Bill Adkins, a minister who hosts a radio talk show in Memphis, Tenn. “I must have had 20 to 30 callers . . . who claimed that the reason a black woman was allowed to become Miss America again was that whites want to lift up the black female and suppress the black male.”

Sharon Farmer, a Washington, D.C., photographer and community activist, said: “I hear this stuff all the time, especially from poor folks, who read the least and get the least amount of information to analyze.

“They’ll be sitting over a drink or sitting over a joint, and all it takes is one person to tell them what to think,” she added. “And they’ll believe it, because nothing’s getting better for them. Housing is all boarded up, people are homeless, drugs are decimating the community.”

Looking for Reasons

Ronald Walters, chairman of the political science department at Howard University, contends that the conspiracy theories show that “black people are like every other people in the world. They have to have a logical reason for why things happen to them. And what continues to give these conspiracy theories legitimacy is the continuing real manifestations of racism and power inequality in society.

“I’m not one to give in to conspiracy theories very easily,” Walters added. “But it’s easy to come to the conclusion that whether there is a deliberate conspiracy or not, there is the same effect (as if) somebody sat in a back room and planned something.”

Just looking at some of the statistics underscoring the plight of black Americans is enough to evoke feelings that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” as Vernon Pitts, director of the Fulton County public defender’s office in Atlanta, put it.

--Almost one in four black men between the ages of 20 and 29 is in jail or on parole or probation, many as a result of crimes linked to the drug epidemic in ghettos.

--One in three blacks and almost half of the black children under 18 are living in poverty.

--Black men in inner-city neighborhoods are less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

--The infant mortality rate among blacks is twice that for whites.

In addition, 14% of the 465 official investigations of political corruption between 1983 to 1987 involved black officials, even though blacks made up only 3% of the nation’s total elected officials.

“Black people are not getting paranoid at all,” said Tatum of the Amsterdam News. “Even paranoids have real enemies.”

Doubters See Dangers

Other blacks contend that conspiracy theories divert attention from the real source of many of the problems besieging the black community and engender a feeling that blacks are just the helpless victims of whites.

“What white people have done to us in the past has been legitimately awesome and horrendous,” said Charles King, a race relations expert who heads the Atlanta-based Urban Crisis Center. “But I refuse to believe that there is any organized procedure--and I emphasize the phrase ‘organized procedure’--to bring down black people. It doesn’t speak well for the race to use that as an excuse.

“Whites don’t have to get together and say: ‘Let’s pump drugs down there,’ ” he said. “The drugs don’t come from conspirators; they come from drug pushers who don’t care whether blacks are destroyed or not.”

Clarence Page, a black syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune, echoed a similar sentiment in a column earlier this year, saying: “Charging the FBI with luring Mayor Barry into a cocaine trap, for example, makes about as much sense as blaming banks for tempting John Dillinger to rob them. . . .”

Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first black elected governor, while he was lieutenant governor decried black politicians who used the conspiracy charge as a red herring.

“There are no ‘black’ public officials under criminal investigation,” he said. “A public official is a public official. A guilty criminal is a guilty criminal.”

But belief in conspiracy theories nevertheless appears to be growing among all classes of blacks.

At a commencement address at Salem State College in Massachusetts last May, the Rt. Rev. Barbara C. Harris, the first woman bishop in the Episcopal Church, charged that “the same massive, planned governmental and private-sector attack undertaken in the 1960s to stop the civil rights movement in its tracks has been mounted to discredit and to destroy public education,” she said. “And it is in minority communities that the options and alternatives to public education are fewest.”

“Something in my bones says there’s something going on,” said William Cavil, associate director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture in Oakland. “I don’t understand, if there’s not some conspiracy going on, how every (other racial and ethnic) group has managed to flourish and get ahead in the country except African-Americans.”

“I no longer think it’s a conspiracy. . . . I call it outright war,” said Barbara Sizemore, a black studies professor and specialist in African-American education at the University of Pittsburgh. “We’re now in the second ‘Jim Crow’ period, and it’s going to get worse and worse before it gets better.”

Darrell DeMary, a 28-year-old Manhattan office worker, said of the conspiracy theories: “I think it’s all true. Whites have been doing it to us for years.”

Jawanza Kunjufu, a Chicago-based educational consultant and author of “Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys,” sees a parallel between the treatment of American Indians by whites in earlier times and the treatment of blacks today.

“America dumped liquor on the reservation like it allows drugs to go into the black community,” he said. “If we had a Black Panther movement today, we’d be hard pressed to organize our people, with drugs running so rampant. Our community is so doped up.”

Proponents of the theory that black political figures and civil rights activists are being subjected to selective prosecution by the federal government often cite the covert FBI operations masterminded by J. Edgar Hoover against civil rights workers and anti-war organizers, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

They also point to an alleged “witch hunt” by the Justice Department four years ago to undo black political gains in rural Alabama. Eight civil rights activists, some of them elected officials, were charged by the federal government with voter fraud. But all of the defendants were acquitted by juries except one, whose conviction subsequently was overturned by a federal appeals court.

Statement Cited

In its ruling, the appeals court cited a Justice Department spokesman’s statement “that the investigations were part of a new policy . . . brought on by the arrogance on the part of blacks in these counties.”

Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.), who was rebuked by the House Ethics Committee earlier this year for alleged sexual harassment of a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, often portrays himself as a victim of a conspiracy by the “racist” white media to distort his views and create dissension among black politicians.

“I’ve been painted as an anti-Semite, as a woman chaser and as crazy,” he said in a combative session with reporters last March on Capitol Hill.

R. Kenneth Mundy, who defended Barry, charged during the Washington mayor’s trial that the FBI maintains an “assault force” of agents who travel the country setting up sting operations to bring down black elected officials. Mundy said his information was based on “five different sources”--including a former FBI informant. Federal prosecutors vigorously denied his charges.

New variations on the theme of a white plot against black leaders unexpectedly continue to appear.

Earlier this month, for example, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked the head of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in Biloxi, Miss., what he thought about the romantic affair that led Archbishop Eugene A. Marino, a Biloxi native, to resign his post in Atlanta as the nation’s first black Roman Catholic archbishop.

“I think he’s a victim of a conspiracy trying to topple all of our black leaders,” replied the NAACP leader, a physician named Gilbert Mason.

Alan M. Schwartz, research director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, says that Jews, long the traditional allies of blacks in fighting prejudice and discrimination, have become particularly worried in recent times about the frequent anti-Semitic bias they detect in many of the conspiracy theories.

Relationships between Jews and blacks became severely strained in Chicago two years ago after it was disclosed that Steve Cokely, an aide to then-Mayor Eugene Sawyer and a follower of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, had delivered anti-Jewish lectures at the Nation of Islam headquarters between 1985 and 1987.

In the lectures, Cokely asserted, among other things, that Jewish doctors were infecting black infants with the AIDS virus and that Jews were involved in an international conspiracy to “rule the world.”

“There may be a readiness to accept these things on the part of people looking to place blame somewhere,” Schwartz said. “But I think it’s especially dismaying when, after all, blacks have suffered such stereotyping and scapegoating themselves. And it’s a very terrible thing to hear such remarks from someone who claims to be a leader of a community or a spokesman for a community.”

The Rev. Benjamin Chavis, executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ, contends that the conspiracy theories feed on the deprivations of the black community.

“It’s going to lead to unprecedented social unrest,” he said. “It’s going to make the ‘60s look like a picnic. I don’t think time has run out, but the time bomb is ticking away. “We’re committing billions of dollars in resources to the Middle East, because we perceive this to be vital to our national interest. But if somebody does not solve the disparity between the haves and have-nots, particularly when race is used as a discriminating factor, a much greater threat to our national interest is going to erupt than in the Middle East.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.