by Ben Austen
Kelvin had his first real fight soon after starting at Schiller, when he was eight. Kelvin and Reginald Blackmon were playing king of the mountain on a landfill beside a construction site. Two boys from the next-door tower, 1230 N. Burling, came over to challenge them. One of them was Perry Browley, a star of the Jesse White Tumblers who would later break his neck doing a flying somersault when his hand slipped off the satin of his pants and he untucked too soon; everyone thought he’d be paralyzed for life, but Perry recovered and even went on to start his own tumbling program, teaching gymnastics and conflict resolution on the West Side. Back then, though, he was eight, and Kelvin slung him roughly off the dirt heap. Kelvin raised his arms to signal his dominion. But the boy with Perry was two years older. He knocked out one of Kelvin’s teeth. Kelvin looked around for help from his friend, but Reggie was already in the wind.
4
Warriors
DOLORES WILSON
“IT WAS REAL nice and quiet and peaceful in Cabrini,” Dolores Wilson would say about the years before the King riots. “We didn’t have to worry about gangbanging. After Daley put the Stones in Cabrini, that’s when we started to see gang writing on the walls. That’s when shots started ringing out. That’s how gangs with a plural began to form at Cabrini-Green.” The Stones were the Cobra Stones, a West Side gang. Fires in West Side neighborhoods after King’s assassination left more than a thousand people homeless. The city happened to be by far the largest property owner in Chicago, and it had vacancies. In a simple act of deploying resources at a time of crisis, the city relocated West Side families into 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick, connected towers at Cabrini-Green just to the north of Dolores Wilson’s high-rise. That’s what the social safety net was supposed to do. It caught people who were falling, saving them before they crashed into the depths. But it was one thing to operate a housing program and another to run an emergency shelter. At the very least, a sudden influx of homeless families required a boost in managers and services meant to assist them. Yet none of those things accompanied them to Cabrini-Green.
The Cobra Stones were soon operating out of 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick, and the building came to be known as “the Rock.” The black gangs in Chicago were split into two alliances, the People and the Folks. The People included the Blackstone Rangers, the Cobra Stones and Mickey Cobras, and the Vice Lords; the Folks were the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples, both started on the South Side. Because of Cabrini-Green’s isolation from other black neighborhoods, the street gangs there were mostly unaffiliated with either of these alliances. But the presence of the Cobra Stones helped change that. Rifles were fired from the windows of the Cobra Stones’ high-rise, and teenagers from the towers around it armed themselves as well. If Stones were shooting at them, they were going to shoot back. In one of the neighboring buildings, guys formed a gang called the Blacks, and the blacktop between the close-cropped towers, along the old Death Corner, was called the Killing Field for all the violence it saw.
Standing in this open field, looking up at the walls of crosshatched red high-rises on all sides as if from the bottom of a ravine, you realized suddenly how vulnerable you were. What before were just buildings staring indifferently at one another now could seem vicious. A thousand windows rising up, and in any one of them a heedless seventeen-year-old with a rifle could smudge you out as he would an ant. A woman pushing a baby in a stroller was almost shot as she passed below. Hubert Wilson’s Corsairs stopped practicing on the blacktop. The priest running the nearby Saint Joseph parish opened up his gymnasium for them, but on their way home at night, when tensions between the buildings were high, the boys and girls sprinted across the exposed concrete tract.
Dolores never had any trouble with her daughters, and Che Che was a bookworm. He’d sit out nights on the ramp, under the overhead light, and read past midnight. Her other sons were more rebellious, Michael in particular, who received the greatest share of Hubert’s whippings. Michael was among the teens in their high-rise who formed a gang called the Deuces. Dolores wasn’t happy about it, but she understood. “If they came out the building on one side, there are the Stones shooting at them,” she explained. “They come out the other, and there are the Blacks.”
One night, the police grabbed Michael from in front of his building. They took him on the expressway, driving six miles south, to Bridgeport, the Irish enclave where Mayor Daley and many city cops lived. Michael believed that the police were arming the Cobra Stones at Cabrini-Green. He said he’d seen a patrol car pull up in front of 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick, the cops popping their trunk and handing out rifles to the gang members. Now the police dropped him off in Bridgeport. “They didn’t even have black cars in Bridgeport,” Dolores would say. She and Hubert were sleeping when the telephone rang. Michael was calling from a phone booth outside a tavern. Hubert told him not to move, and to try not to be seen, and he got his son and brought him home. Another time Michael was taken to the police station. When Dolores arrived, a sergeant was asking her son to identify the police officers who had tossed him against a wall. Dolores could see the cops waiting eagerly for Michael’s response. The police both ignored and brutalized the all-black population at Cabrini, and she felt sure they were looking for a reason to take him into a back room and teach him what happens to boys from the projects who challenge the authority of the cops. “Shut up, Michael,” she shouted. “Didn’t I tell you about lying?” Stunned at first, he caught on. Michael said he didn’t know who messed him up, and he left with his mother.
With the increase in violence at Cabrini, Hubert bought Dolores a gun. It was a cute little derringer with a pearl handle that she kept in her purse. She was more afraid of the gun going off when she reached for her carfare than any situation in which she might feel the need to use it. Dolores had stayed loyal to her South Side hairdresser all these years, and every few weeks she traveled back to her old neighborhood by bus and train. On a return trip from the South Side, she was on the Division Street bus when three guys got on at Clark, several blocks shy of Cabrini-Green. They surrounded a Mexican man seated two rows in front of her and stuck a nail file to his throat. Dolores started tapping the young men on the back. “Why don’t you leave that man alone? This isn’t right,” she cried. No way was she going to pull out the gun. “I wasn’t that much of a good Samaritan,” she’d say. “A tap on the back was about all I had in me.” When the bus driver passed two police officers, he tooted his horn, and the muggers jumped off the bus and ran into the nearest Cabrini high-rise. The Mexican man reported the crime to the officers, and Dolores, being nosey, got off the bus to listen. But then she felt a sprinkle of rain. With her hair freshly done, she jogged home across the blacktop, a hand covering her head. The elevator doors at her building opened, and she saw a crisp $10 bill on the floor, folded in half. She told Hubert about the entire incident, saying, “See, God knows a good deed.”
IN 1969, DAVID Barksdale, the founder of the Black Disciples, merged his gang with the Gangster Disciples, creating the Black Gangster Disciples Nation. The union put an end to street fights between their groups and allowed them better to compete with Jeff Fort’s Blackstone Rangers for control of the South Side drug and gambling trade. While gun battles between the Rangers and the Black Gangster Disciples continued, the gangs also drew attention for announcing their shift into legal activities. The “street organizations” said they were now going to be forces for good, using their administrative know-how and manpower to rebuild. The Woodlawn Organization, a grassroots community group that formed on the South Side to fight urban renewal plans in nearby Hyde Park, received almost a million dollars in federal grants from President Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity to operate job-training programs led by the Disciples and the Rangers. The two gangs ran their own training facilities targeting delinquent teens. Fort’s Rangers started a newspaper, a legal defense project, and the Black P. Stone Youth Center.
In North Lawndale, on the West Side, a gang called the Conservative Vice Lords
went even further. They launched a street academy for high school dropouts, an art studio, and a neighborhood beautification effort (“grass where there was glass”), as well as employment and housing services. The group opened the Teen Town ice cream parlor, two recreation centers, and the African Lion clothing store. The gang legally incorporated, becoming CVL Inc., and received funding from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, from state and federal government, from Sears, Western Electric, and Illinois Bell Telephone, and from Sammy Davis Jr. Members held open houses for the police and met with city officials to prove the authenticity of their about-face. “The turnaround came because we were going to start doing things in our community for ourselves,” the CVL spokesperson Bobby Gore said. For a time in 1969, the three major black gangs formed an alliance they called LSD—for Lords, Stones, Disciples—and in a series of demonstrations targeted the city’s trade unions for failing to hire, train, and promote African Americans. They shut down construction sites and marched on city hall, the sight of these young black men in berets and sunglasses massed in the Loop a source of pride or terror, depending on your perspective.
The model for going straight wasn’t another black gang but Old Man Daley. In the summer of 1919, when Daley was seventeen and president of his Hamburg Athletic Club, Chicago experienced its worst race riot. The violence was triggered when a black teenager at a Lake Michigan beach drifted across the invisible barrier dividing segregated waters; whites responded by pelting him with rocks until he drowned. The larger cause of the rioting was the surge of African Americans then arriving in the city from the South, the first wave of the Great Migration. In neighborhoods like Daley’s Bridgeport, on the border of the Black Belt, white residents were ready to push back against the tide. Already that year there had been numerous cases of African Americans moving into these borderlands only to have their homes dynamited. Over the riot’s five days, thirty-eight people were killed and hundreds more seriously injured, African Americans making up two-thirds of the casualties. An investigation into the riots found that the Hamburg youth organization was guilty of instigating attacks on blacks, though Daley was never personally linked to any of the assaults. He was able to age out of the group and move on because teens in Bridgeport had jobs awaiting them. If there were comparable opportunities in Chicago’s black neighborhoods, CVL leaders argued, then Vice Lords, Disciples, and Cobra Stones likely could also graduate to legitimate careers.
Some of the community work that gangs did was genuine; a great deal of it not. The same could be said of work undertaken by city agencies. But Mayor Daley dismissed it all, declaring any claims by gangs of legitimacy pure subterfuge, their efforts fronts for illicit operations. In a Democratic Chicago without an opposing party, Daley had hardened into a law-and-order conservative. He’d handled Martin Luther King Jr. as a subversive, declared war on rioters after his assassination, and met demonstrations in the city during the 1968 Democratic National Convention with brute force. Daley now announced a new policy that would treat street gangs not as wayward youth but as organized crime. The Chicago police established a special gang intelligence unit, and Daley pressured foundations to cut off funding to the groups, vetoed job-training grants, and prohibited police from holding discussions with any suspected gang members. The gang unit raided the programs that the Disciples and Rangers operated with the Woodlawn Organization. And on an early morning in December 1969, fourteen Chicago police officers stormed a West Side apartment where members of the Black Panthers were living. The officers killed both Fred Hampton, the twenty-one-year-old leader of the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, and Mark Clark, on security detail for the group, claiming self-defense amid a fierce gun battle. Ballistic reports revealed that out of the nearly hundred shots fired, all but one had come from the guns of the police, and Hampton and others were still in their beds. That same month Chicago police arrested several gang leaders on a range of charges, some of which were soon dismissed and others of which stuck. Bobby Gore, the CVL spokesman, was charged with a murder that occurred outside an Ogden Avenue bar and was sentenced to twenty-five to forty years. In prison he was called “Kissinger” for his efforts to keep the peace between inmates, and when he was released, in 1979, he went to work at the Cabrini-Green offices of a foundation that helped other former inmates find jobs.
Within the Chicago Police Department, a force of twelve thousand officers, efforts were also made to repair relationships with the city’s black communities. In the fall of 1968, after police officers chased stone-throwing teens into a Cabrini high-rise and maced a one-year-old in his aunt’s arms, the department sent forty-five black officers into the housing development to calm residents and avert another riot. The police started a special walk-and-talk beat at Cabrini-Green as well, officers on foot socializing with people, with the hope that cops and Cabrini residents could get to know and even respect one another. Sergeant James Severin and Officer Anthony Rizzato volunteered for the community policing assignment. Severin, thirty-eight, was a former insurance investigator and army corporal; a thirteen-year veteran of the police force, he had worked the security detail protecting King when the civil rights leader moved to the West Side. Rizzato was thirty-five, married, with two children. He and his brother had signed up together to become police officers four years earlier. Both Rizzato and Severin were even-tempered and unassuming, and amenable to the idea that it might be more prudent to throw a baseball with a child in public housing than to arrest him for throwing bottles at cars.
It was still light out on July 17, 1970, at 7:00 p.m., when Rizzato and Severin were on their foot patrol. They walked onto the baseball diamond at Seward Park, below the surrounding red high-rises. Rifle shots came simultaneously from two of the towers overhead, 1150 N. Sedgwick and 1117 N. Cleveland, the Rock and Dolores Wilson’s building. Severin and Rizzato were both hit. The officers arriving on the scene couldn’t get to them; snipers continued to fire down from the high-rises, and they were forced to take cover. More police arrived, a hundred of them, blasting out windows and screens as they traded shots with the unseen enemy. Military veterans on the force said it was the closest thing they’d experienced in Chicago to their tours overseas. Officers brought in heavy weapons artillery while a police helicopter hovered over the park, shining its spotlight. Patrolmen drove their squad cars onto the infield and used them as shields as they retrieved their colleagues. Severin and Rizzato were taken to a nearby hospital, where they were pronounced dead on arrival.
Kelvin Cannon was six and saw the helicopter whirling outside his window. The police stormed all the buildings and blocked exits. One of Dolores Wilson’s neighbors asked the police what was going on, and the cops knocked him down and beat him with batons. The police searched apartments, using battering rams and sledgehammers to break down any doors not opened to them. Officers arrested several people that night, including anyone who didn’t cooperate. Among them was one of the suspected shooters, twenty-three-year-old George Knight, a member of the Blacks gang. When a warrant was issued for another suspect, Johnny Veal, an eighteen-year-old Cobra Stone, Veal feared that officers would kill him if he was brought in for interrogation, so with his lawyer he later turned himself in to a judge. Prosecutors said that the two men were celebrating a truce between their rival gangs by teaming up to kill cops. They were each found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of one hundred years in prison.
As difficult as it was to shock the city after the turmoil of recent years, the cop killings represented for many Chicago’s collapse into chaos. On the streets, any regard for authority was lost. “A complete breakdown of law and order in this town when the citizens murder two policemen whose assignment was to improve relations between the police department and the citizens,” said a representative of the police. An editorial in the Defender called the murders “one of the most revolting of the current epidemic of terrorist acts in the black community.” Public housing had been viewed with distrust from its outset, the critiques usually colored by a general
wariness of any assistance for the poor. In the Cold War hysteria of the 1950s, residents in the Cabrini rowhouses were forced to take loyalty oaths in exchange for their government aid. But now public housing was also seen as the place where too many welfare-dependent black people were stacked atop one another in too little space. The government housing intended to clear out the slums a mere generation ago was now the “projects” and epitomized all the unruliness and otherness of the city in decline. And Cabrini-Green at this moment became the proxy for all troubled public housing. “That’s when it started,” Dolores Wilson said. “Now they could say, ‘It happened at Cabrini.’”
Just like the Italian slum that preceded it, Cabrini-Green’s location only blocks from the Gold Coast added to its emerging infamy. Twelve other police officers had been killed in the previous eighteen months in an increasingly violent Chicago, with eleven of those murders occurring on the South Side. In Englewood, an officer was sitting in his squad car filling out paperwork when someone walked up and shot him point-blank. By 1970, however, most white Chicagoans rarely spent time in South Side neighborhoods like Englewood, and they probably passed the Robert Taylor Homes only in a car speeding along the Dan Ryan Expressway. But Cabrini-Green remained that uncommon frontier where white Chicagoans still crossed paths with poor blacks. They drove or even walked by Cabrini-Green with some regularity. People from Lincoln Park, Old Town, and the river districts by the Loop regarded the housing project as a place to avoid, or to go to for felonious offerings. They followed the reports in the media of late-night violent crime at Cabrini as if hearing about a near miss.
The city’s news teams, too, needed only to look in their own backyard to cover another grim story on public housing life. In the days and weeks after Severin and Rizzato were murdered, every incident at or even near Cabrini-Green received extensive news coverage, with journalists exercising their more noirish proclivities, doing their best Nelson Algren. The on-and-off gunfire became “a special kind of rain.” The thousands of children at Cabrini were “clenched in a cold concrete-and-steel fist of seventy acres.” A Chicago Tribune editorial titled “Near North Hell,” reviving the old Little Hell moniker, described the development as “a Hydra’s head of problems and, like the mythical monster, as one problem is cut away, two more come to take its place.” The Chicago Sun-Times ran a special series in which it sent a black staff writer—actually, a college student, an intern, who was promoted for the assignment—to live for a time at Cabrini-Green, the newspaper publishing his dispatches as if they were being filed from the jungles of South Vietnam. “For several days, he lived there, talked with residents, roamed the dingy corridors and littered playground, played ball with its teeming young.”
