To counter charges that students had merely taken the opportunity to skip school, boycott leaders set up “Freedom Schools” in churches and other neighborhood associations, where students sang freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome” and discussed civil rights issues. All students who attended Freedom Schools that day left with a Freedom Diploma. The lessons emphasized the contributions Africans Americans had made to the country’s history, compared the boycott to the Boston Tea Party, and encouraged students to think of themselves as “writing another chapter in the freedom story.” Landry had taken steps to make sure these classes were well attended, recruiting students to distribute thousands of informational leaflets in schools and churches throughout the city. The event was a smashing success. Chicago civil rights leaders had, in some sense, mobilized as many people as the March on Washington, and this success led to a series of similar boycotts in Boston, New York, Kansas City, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and other major cities. After several rounds of fruitless negotiations with school officials, the CCCO called for a second boycott on February 25, 1964, which, in comparison with the first boycott, was somewhat disappointing but nonetheless garnered the impressive participation of 175,000 students.
While generally appreciating the magnitude of what had been accomplished during these boycotts, most accounts view these events largely as failures. For one thing, the negotiations that followed the citywide boycotts failed to yield any substantial policy changes. For another, the coalitions of civil rights groups that staged these demonstrations were rife with tensions over strategy, and, in the course of the frustrating negotiations that followed them, the rifts between moderates and militants widened even further. This was particularly the case in Chicago, where within weeks after its triumphant first boycott, the CCCO was already in disarray. At the end of November it voted not to support a boycott of Loop stores called by CAFSNCC and then in mid-December Chicago CORE revealed that it would split into two chapters: a moderate West Side unit and a more militant South Side group. And yet, despite such divisions and despite the lack of tangible gains won by the anti-Willis demonstrations, a new style of organizing was in the making. An emerging class of homegrown militants had stepped onto the stage of the local civil rights struggle—people like Lawrence Landry, soon to be leader of the Chicago chapter of the ACT (not an acronym) organization, and Rose Simpson, head of the Parents Council for Integrated Schools. Defined as “militants” or “extremists” because of their anger over the intransigence of school and city officials and their belief in the need to counter it with more aggressive direct-action tactics, these new civil rights leaders also distinguished themselves by their vision of where to tap the potential lifeblood of the movement: in the streets of the poorest black neighborhoods in the city.
Activists like Landry who had taken on the machine frontally and had been mercilessly crushed, began to look to guerrilla tactics—albeit nonviolent ones if possible—to keep the struggle alive. And as with nearly all guerrilla campaigns, among the most eager recruits were the most precarious members of the community: the young and poor. In fact, black radical circles were discovering ghetto youths as the potential vanguard of black protest politics around this time. In an interview published in Monthly Review in May 1964, Malcolm X, whose autobiography would soon show how a young, small-time crook could grow into a heroic activist, declared that the “accent” in the struggle for black community control “is on youth . . . because the youth have less at stake in this corrupt system and therefore can look at it more objectively.”33 Several months later, Max Stanford, one of the founders of the radical Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), published an article in which he argued that as opposed to bourgeois black youths, working-class gang youths offered a potential rich source of oppositional energy. “Gangs are the most dynamic force in the black community,” he wrote. “Instead of fighting their brothers and sisters, they can be trained to fight ‘Charlie.’”34
Landry had met with both Malcolm X and Stanford in the spring of 1964, and he had come back to Chicago with a new idea about how to fight “Charlie.” While keeping up the pressure about the city’s refusal to adequately address the deplorable conditions of black schools, Landry now sought to capitalize on a form of injustice that was immediately familiar to ghetto youths: the almost daily experience of being frisked, manhandled, insulted, and sometimes arrested for trumped-up infractions in their own neighborhoods. By the summer of 1964, police brutality had come to serve as a perfect focal point for the more aggressive program Landry’s organization ACT was pursuing in Chicago for a number of reasons. For one thing, as groups like ACT and CORE sought to straddle the fence between a philosophy of nonviolence and increasingly popular calls for armed self-defense, direct-action protests against police brutality seemed to offer a way to strike back at the police without using violence. If being manhandled and hauled off by police did not exactly provide a triumphant sense of turning the tables on police power, at least it showed that demonstrators were not afraid to be subjected to such treatment. For another, focusing on the cops as aggressors turned the bodies and minds of youths towards the state and away from petty rivalries with other black gangs. Police brutality, especially when it involved a white officer and a black youth, was the ideal expression of the lack of control black residents possessed over their communities and their everyday lives—an issue that opened the way to a broader critique of race and state power that fit mobile classrooms and white beat cops into the same frame. Finally, this was a golden age for stirring up indignation about rough cops. Things were already bad in the late 1950s, when a federal investigation of the Chicago Police Department had led to the indictment of two West Side patrolmen for tying a black gang youth to a post and whipping him repeatedly with a belt, but the arrival of police chief Orlando Wilson in 1960 ushered in a new period of degenerating relations between the police and black communities.
An experienced police officer with a criminology degree from Berkeley, Wilson was brought in by Daley in the wake of a police corruption scandal to modernize and professionalize the Chicago Police Department. Wilson was supposed to produce immediate results to justify his ballooning budget, which led him to institute a controversial stop-and-frisk policy that had the logical effect of dramatically increasing confrontations between police and youths out on the streets in the early 1960s. Moreover, in 1961, Wilson issued the order that “gangs must be crushed” and established a Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU) to get the job done. Yet, perhaps the most important policy change Wilson ushered in was his effort to recruit black police officers. After just two years of his tenure, black officers in the Chicago Police Department had increased from 500 to 1,200, a change that was, on the surface, intended to improve relations between the CPD and black communities, but that actually may have helped facilitate the more aggressive policing tactics being employed by beat cops in black neighborhoods. Under Wilson’s rule, notorious black officers like James “Gloves” Davis were given free rein on the streets in the early 1960s. Davis, who years later would participate in the raid that resulted in the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, earned his nickname from his habit of wearing a black glove on his right hand when he administered beatings. In one particular incident, Davis was disciplined for pistol-whipping a youth, who was later awarded $4,800 in damages.
By the summer of 1965, Landry was rallying hundreds of youths to participate in demonstrations against police brutality in neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. In one protest in the West Garfield Park area, things got out of hand after a police officer had applied a chokehold and sprayed mace on an ACT demonstrator. Within just a few hours after the incident, some two thousand protesters carrying banners that read “Black People Must Control the Black Community” had assembled in front of the local police station to vent their anger by hurling rocks and bottles.35 Once again police brutality against a young man had proven the spark that could ignite the kind of outrage that moved people to act with their feet. That very same d
ay, CCCO leader Albert Raby had led an anti-Willis march of barely one hundred demonstrators from Grant Park into the South Side. Three marchers were arrested for blocking traffic at 64th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue, but, even with news of an upcoming meeting between the CCCO and Martin Luther King in the air, this march failed to muster much energy. What had happened in Garfield Park, on the other hand, had drawn thousands into the streets and had planted the seeds of rebellion.
Almost a month later, on August 13, as the fires of an uprising in the Watts area of Los Angeles—the first in a wave of large-scale civil disorders across urban America—blazed for a third day, this West Side neighborhood revealed what ACT’s brand of direct-action tactics and consciousness-raising could yield. In a tragically poetic twist of fate, a speeding fire truck from a West Garfield Park fire station swerved out of control and knocked over a stop sign, which struck and killed a twenty-three-year-old African American woman. This all-white fire station in an all-black neighborhood had been the object of numerous ACT protests in the weeks leading up to the incident. The next night a youthful crowd of over three hundred battled with police, sparking off two days of rioting that caused some sixty injuries and over a hundred arrests. Occurring in the context of the devastating Watts riot, which began with a routine traffic stop gone awry and then continued with clashes between youth gangs and police, the struggle for community control between gangs and police took center stage in black Chicago. For leaders of the nonviolent movement, gangs would need to be reined in so as to allow direct-action protests to continue without the risk of urban disorders; for those who saw the need for more militant tactics, street gangs seemed like the perfect soldiers—if not leaders—in the battle for community control. Relegated to the role of community problems for many years, gangs appeared suddenly in the guises of social bandits and tragic victims of white oppression.
GANGBANGERS, MINISTERS, AND UNCLE TOMS
It was only a matter of time before gangs themselves began to recognize their part in the historic drama unfolding around them. In the wake of Chief Wilson’s mandate to crush gangs in 1961, gang youths would have had difficulty envisioning themselves as anything other than social misfits, but the script began to change during the rush of civil rights activism that hit Chicago in 1963 and 1964. Reflecting on their turn towards political activism in the twilight of the age of civil rights, members of the Vice Lords, the West Side’s most powerful gang during the mid-1960s, dated their awakening to the summer of 1964. The leaders of the Lords at that time—men in their twenties who had met in 1958 while serving sentences at the St. Charles reformatory (known on the streets as “Charlie Town”)—claimed that what motivated their decision to “do something constructive” was a concern about the “younger dudes” in the gang. “The fellas looked around and saw how many had been killed, hurt, or sent to jail,” they told their biographer, “and decided they didn’t want the younger fellas coming up to go through the things they did and get bruises and wounds from gangfighting.” To be sure, their idea of “doing something constructive” was by no means purely political or altruistic; influenced by increasingly fashionable black power ideas about the key role of black entrepreneurialism in uplifting African American communities, the Lords initially conceived of their turn away from gangbanging as an opportunity to “try to open some businesses.” However, Watts had a dramatic impact on their thinking. “When the riots started in Watts in 1965,” some Lords later claimed, “most people felt kind of proud because somebody could do something like that.”36
Controlling a territory that extended into neighborhoods falling under ACT’s influence in the summer of 1965, the Vice Lords began to see their role in the community in a somewhat different light. Although ACT’s guidance made the Vice Lords a precocious case in the story of gang politicization, this story had hardly begun for them. Before any kind of political expression of black solidarity could take hold among Chicago’s African American gangs, they had to relinquish, at least in part, the brutal struggle for supremacy and respect on the streets. Beginning in the spring of 1965, the city’s largest and most fearsome fighting gangs—the Vice Lords and their West Side rivals the Egyptian Cobras, and the South Side’s Blackstone Rangers and their enemies the Disciples—could think of little more than the imperative of expanding their ranks; their very survival depended on it. By the end of 1966, the Blackstone Rangers and Conservative Vice Lords were each rumored to command more than two thousand members, and their respective rivals—the Disciples and the Cobras—could likely count on the allegiances of between five hundred and one thousand members, which gave them just enough muscle to resist incorporation.
These gangs attained their stature through campaigns of forced recruitment, earning them the enmity of many in their communities. In areas like Woodlawn on the South Side and Lawndale on the West Side, where gangs were engaged in Darwinian fights to the finish, there were a good many youths who, whether through their own calculation or through pressure exerted by their parents, wanted little to do with this homicidal world. But gangs could not afford to lose unaffiliated youths to their rivals, and they could never be certain that a group of teens refusing to join them would not at some point run with their enemies. Under such circumstances bloodshed became commonplace in schoolyards and wherever else youths gathered, and Daley’s public relations team made sure to use every gang incident to claim that gangs rather than the mayor’s policies were to blame for the two main problems African Americans had been complaining about for years: defective schools and brutal cops. And although black parents generally understood that Daley was playing politics with his antigang offensive and that gangs were providing him with a convenient excuse to bring down the boot rather than investing more money, it was difficult for some to remain cool when their children’s lives appeared to be at risk. In one particularly heated community meeting between parents and police in Woodlawn after the killing of a local Boy Scout, for example, an enraged crowd cheered enthusiastically when someone shouted, “To heck with getting accused of police brutality, let’s use some force on these punks!”37
But to an increasing number of residents in certain black South and West Side neighborhoods around this time, gang members were also sons, nephews, cousins, and sometimes daughters and nieces. While the larger gangs around this time were overwhelmingly male, they usually encompassed female branches—the Vice Ladies, Cobraettes, and Rangerettes, to name some notable examples. And they almost always incorporated junior and sometimes “midget” divisions, a situation that was often disquieting for parents but that also indicated just how broadly representative of the surrounding community these organizations were. Moreover, the school protests and boycotts of previous years had revealed to numerous black Chicagoans that many of these gang youths had dropped out of school as a result of systemic discrimination; more and more residents thus began viewing the punishment they received from cops on the streets as further evidence of such problems. All these factors pushed gangs into the main currents of local politics in black Chicago, but even more important was the fact that the gospel of black power had created an enlightened and charismatic set of leaders who recognized larger goals than the mere accumulation of muscle on the streets and who viewed themselves as “organizing” or “building something” rather than just recruiting. These leaders, as in the case of the Vice Lords, tended to be older than most of the youths they were seeking to recruit—mentors, big brothers, sometimes even father figures—and they understood that rather than merely intimidate, their task was to organize, educate, and enlighten. They needed to convince youngsters to turn away from traditional conceptions of street respect and towards a mix of black power ideas related to racial unity, the struggle for civil rights, community control, and black entrepreneurialism.
A sign of the times was the adoption by both the Vice Lords and Blackstone Rangers of the term nation as part of their names—a potent symbol of the new meaning youths were attributing to membership in these gangs. “Their c
ountry is a Nation on no map,” poet Gwendolyn Brooks mused about the Blackstone Rangers.38 Yet nothing enhanced their credibility and status more than the close attention they were getting from top representatives of the SCLC, journalists, and even briefcase-carrying officials from Washington. Beginning in the summer of 1966, almost every major civil rights organization in Chicago wanted sit-downs with the Conservative Vice Lord and Blackstone Ranger Nations, and news of these meetings traveled fast around their neighborhoods. Already admired by teens and kids in the community for their swagger, this publicity made the leaders of these gangs into local heroes in the eyes of the younger generation. In Woodlawn, boys as young as eight and nine formed “Pee Wee Ranger” groups, and kids throughout the area could be heard shouting “Mighty, Mighty Blackstone!” in the playgrounds and schoolyards.39 In Lawndale, young boys crowded around the Vice Lords as they stood on street corners and donned oversized berets like the ones worn by some of the Vice Lord “chiefs,” as the gang’s leaders were called.40
However, if the leaders of the nation gangs were already beginning to look like homegrown celebrities by the spring of 1966, nothing gave them that aura of greatness more than their sudden intimacy with Martin Luther King himself. With the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 now on the books, the SCLC turned to the problem of de facto segregation in the North, and, as fate and circumstance would have it, Chicago was to become the critical battleground for the SCLC’s northern campaign. On some level, the choice was made by default after key black leaders in both Philadelphia and New York City had rebuked King while the CCCO under the guidance of Al Raby had been reaching out to him to help revive its flagging movement. Moreover, King had always been warmly received when he spoke in Chicago, and he felt—naively so, in hindsight—that Daley’s complete dominance over the city’s political machinery offered a unique opportunity. Daley’s press secretary Earl Bush later observed, “King thought that if Daley would go before a microphone and say, ‘Let there be no more discrimination,’ there wouldn’t be.”41
Chicago on the Make Page 25
