COLUMN LEFT / JESSE JACKSON : End the Silence That Is Killing Our Children : We cannot let alienation from authority and misplaced loyalty protect those who are destroying our neighborhoods.

Four-year-old Launice Janae Smith was too young to know better. Lively and innocent, she thought she could play in a public playground in Washington D.C. Now she is dead, her life cut short by a stray bullet fired into a crowd at a pick-up football game. The gunman was involved in a drug shootout.

Her short life and sudden death cannot be forgotten. Let us see her as an angel, a messenger dispatched to warn us of our misbegotten ways. Backs have been turned too long. Shame has bred silence too long. The guns and drugs have become an urban plague that is consuming our young.

The conspiracy of silence must end. A few weeks ago, I asked youngsters in Miami what they would do if they saw drugs and guns in someone’s locker in school. “I’d stay away from that person,” was the common reply. Then, I asked what they would do if they saw a hood, a white sheet and a rope in someone’s locker. “I’d tell it. That sounds like the Klan and the Klan kills people. I’d tell it.”

Yet, more young black men die each year from guns than the total who died from lynching by the Klan. Our sense of loyalty, of solidarity is misplaced. If the killers were white, surely the young would report them to the police. But when blacks kill blacks, the young resist snitching to a police force that too often doesn’t seem to care much anyway.

Recent testimony by some renegade New York City police officers who profit from the drug trade and official corruption, may horrify the innocent, but it merely confirms what too many urban residents have come to expect. But alienation from authorities cannot be allowed to make the black community into a silent protector of those who kill brothers and sisters. The silence that protects these killers is not solidarity. It is betrayal. We have got to tell it--just as we would if they were with the Klan.

The neighborhood where Launice Smith was murdered is the deadliest in Washington, if not the nation. Thirty-two people have been murdered this year within a square mile of where she was shot. At her funeral, when I asked who there had lost family members to the drug war, 50 people came forward.

It is time for a new civil-rights struggle to take back our neighborhoods. Yes, it’s true that this horrible plague has external sources. As gang members in Los Angeles’ Nickerson Gardens have told me, drugs are not grown in the city. Guns are not made there. But the agents of death are home-grown. They live in the neighborhood. They are young, black and proud. But they are killing our children and must be stopped.

We must end the silence. It is not disloyal to the race to tell it. The killers will burn the race up unless those in the neighborhood tell it and stop it.

For many urban African-Americans and Latinos, this is a terrible time. The politics of malign neglect have become bipartisan. Our cities are hemorrhaging, but there is no urban policy. Racism abounds, but the President has nothing to say on civil rights. No assistant attorney general for civil rights has been nominated to head a department that is demoralized and in disarray. The moribund Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lacks both director and direction.

But we must look inward if we are to go forward. The scourge of race and poverty will not be addressed unless we regain the moral center. And we cannot do so unless we come together to address the killing, to stop the spread of drugs and guns, the black-on-black crime that is terrorizing our children.

As always, the victims and most vulnerable must be the first to act. We need to establish neighborhood preschool programs, to offer alternatives to jail in churches and community groups, to provide mentoring to the young, to set up job and scholarship programs.

At the same time, we must end the silence and stop providing sanctuary for those who prey on our young. It simply cannot be any more acceptable for blacks to kill blacks than it was for the Klan to do so. We have got to tell it.