Beginning with the Kennedy administration, large amounts of federal monies became available for programs aimed at fighting juvenile delinquency.6 In 1965 Chicago received a $685,000 grant to coordinate all street work programs (“Streets”) in the city under the direction of City Hall. But, according to Lawrence Sherman, Streets failed to maintain a working relationship between the police and the social agencies for two complementary reasons: “its expanded purpose of social change and the changing socio-political environment.”7 Sherman attributes the termination of Streets to the aldermanic candidacy of detached gang worker Fred Hubbard in 1966. “The great fear at city hall was that Streets would channel gang members into the civil rights movement.”8
After 1966, relations between the police and the city government on the one hand, and the gangs and their supporters in various social agencies on the other, deteriorated completely. The aspirations of certain liberal and radical groups to politicize gangs, and the intense fears of the Daley administration that gangs would indeed become politicized, coincided to define these street gangs as proto-grassroots community organizations whose goal was to seize political and economic power in Chicago.
The emergence of the Black P Stone Nation, and to a lesser extent the Devil’s Disciples, as potentially powerful political forces on Chicago’s South Side was the consequence of a combination of factors: talented charismatic leadership, support from local liberal and even radical groups, federal intervention, and violent police opposition.
After 1965, the First Presbyterian Church (in the Woodlawn area of Chicago), under the leadership of Reverend John Fry, became the central headquarters for the Blackstone Rangers and the catalyst for its organizational growth. Several of the Stones’ leaders (including President Eugene Hairston and Vice-president Jeff Fort) were placed on the church payroll in order to carry out community work with their own gangs. From the beginning, Reverend Fry attempted to transform the Rangers from a traditional lower-class gang built around conflict with rival gangs (primarily the Disciples) into a political organization that would dominate Woodlawn and possibly the entire city of Chicago.9
The spring of 1968 brought a $50,000 grant from the Kettering Foundation (General Motors money) to the First Presbyterian Church to continue its work with the Blackstone Rangers. The money was primarily used to pay bail for the increasing number of Rangers who were arrested, as conflict with the police escalated. More significant than the Kettering grant was the almost one million dollar OEO Youth Manpower Project grant of June 1967.10 Originally the Reverend Fry had attempted to obtain the grant for the Stones alone, but the Office of Economic Opportunity balked at the idea, requiring that the Disciples be brought in and that the grant be used to stimulate opportunities for a broader cross section of Woodlawn’s youth. The grantee for the project was to be The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), a broad-based grassroots community organization begun by Saul Alinsky in 1961, and one often at odds with the mayor. OEO pushed through the program against apathy from the mayor’s office and intense opposition from the Chicago Police Department, thereby defining a new relationship between the federal government and the grassroots minority community which had, heretofore, always looked to local government as the source of public benefits. The only concession to local government was OEO’s last-minute announcement that the head of the Youth Manpower Project would be chosen with the consent of the mayor. None of the candidates proposed by TWO was approved by the mayor, and a full-time administrative director for the Youth Manpower Project was never chosen.
The goal of the Youth Manpower Project was to train ghetto youth in rudimentary academic skills and place them in private industry. The teaching was to be carried out by gang leaders acting as “subprofessionals” at four centers in Woodlawn, two manned by the Rangers and two by the Disciples. One of the Rangers’ centers was the third floor of the First Presbyterian Church. Gang leaders were employed as assistant project directors, center chiefs, and instructors for annual salaries of $5,000-$6,500. Gang members attended the centers for instruction and received $45 per week plus traveling allowance. The program was novel, experimental, and highly controversial. School officials claimed that the gangs were forcing students to drop out of school in order to participate in the Youth Manpower Project and to pay kickbacks to the gang leaders. The police claimed that the centers were being used for narcotics, sex, gambling, and storing weapons.
Following the award of the OEO grant in the spring of 1967, the Gang Intelligence Unit (GIU) was reorganized, placed under the internal investigation division of the Chicago Police Department, and assigned a new “tough” commander. Participants in the project were regularly stopped on the street, searched, verbally abused, and arrested on disorderly conduct and curfew violation charges. The training centers and TWO headquarters itself were frequently intruded upon by the police without search warrants.11
The newspapers, especially the Chicago Tribune, continually criticized the Youth Manpower Project. In the spring of 1968, Senator John McClellan’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations held public hearings in Washington on the grant and project.12 Senators McClellan, Karl Mundt, and Carl Curtis were clearly committed to exposing the deficiencies of the program, particularly in light of the large OEO grant to YOU (Youth Organizations United) pending at the time as well as the request by the Youth Manpower Project for another year’s funding. The senators spent more time illuminating sordid details of the relationship of Fry and LaPaglia to the Stones than they did investigating TWO and the Youth Manpower Project. In fact, the senators often seemed confused about the organizational affiliations of the various witnesses and tended not to distinguish between TWO and the First Presbyterian Church.
The committee’s star witness, George “Watusi” Rose, was a former leader of the Stones turned police informer who described the ways in which the Stones were colluding with Fry and LaPaglia to milk the project and deceive The Woodlawn Organization. He testified that the Rangers coerced children to pay tribute in order to be allowed to go to school, conducted shakedowns of Woodlawn merchants, and received kickbacks from the trainees. Jeff Fort was called to testify, but his attorney, Marshall Patner, led Fort out of the hearings when his request for the right to cross-examine all the witnesses who had leveled charges against the Blackstone Rangers was denied.
Once the hearings indiscriminately brought out even the thinnest rumors of scandals associated with the Youth Manpower Project, there was no chance that it would be funded anew as had been requested. The project terminated in the summer of 1968. (The YOU grant was subsequently vetoed by the White House.)
At the same time that the Blackstone Rangers and Disciples were receiving government money (and some private grant money as well) on the South Side, the older Vice Lords gang13 was beginning to move in the same direction on Chicago’s West Side. In the summer of 1967, a young white liberal graduate of Dartmouth, the University of Michigan School of Social Work, and the Peace Corps arrived in Lawndale to conduct research on the attitude of ghetto youth toward poverty programs for Trans-Century. Over the course of the next two and one-half years David Dawley became deeply involved with the Conservative Vice Lords, lived in their neighborhood, and took part in their highest-level decision making.14
Whether the involvement of the Vice Lords in a host of social action programs would have occurred without Dawley is an open question. While he was associated with them, however, the Vice Lords moved further than any of the other Chicago gangs toward programs of community betterment. In the summer of 1967 the Vice Lord leaders attended meetings at Western Electric and Sears Roebuck; the result was “Operation Bootstrap,” which formed committees for education, for recreation, and for law, order, and justice. But things did not really get off the ground for the Vice Lords until February 1968, when they received a $40,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In rapid succession the Vice Lords founded a host of economic and social ventures.15
Until 1968 the V
ice Lords maintained good relations with the Regular Democratic organization and the police, but their movement toward political and social activism brought increasing strain to these arrangements. The Vice Lords worked with Jesse Jackson in Operation Breadbasket, and in the summer of 1969 joined with the Coalition for United Community Action to protest the lack of black employers on construction sites in black neighborhoods.16
In the 1968 political campaign the Stones and Vice Lords both worked against the Chicago Democratic machine. At least on the South Side, according to Sherman, the traditional Democratic majorities were deflated.17 After the election the Gang Intelligence Unit was increased from thirty-eight to two hundred officers. In early 1969 the mayor announced a “crackdown on gang violence.” State’s attorney Edward Hanrahan announced that the gang situation was the most serious crime problem in Chicago.
It is difficult to say with certainty how many members of the Blackstone Rangers, Disciples, Vice Lords, and Latin Kings were committed to the state prisons between 1967 and 1975.18 Membership lists for the street gangs are not available (even assuming that membership could be defined). The warden of the Cook County Jail told the McClellan committee in July 1968 that there were approximately 275–300 Blackstone Rangers and the same number of Disciples in the Cook County Jail. During the summer of 1968, the jail experienced the kind of gang violence that became commonplace in the state prisons during the next half-dozen years.19
The mayor’s office’s 1970 report “Organized Youth Crime in Chicago” gave no total number for gang members who were sent to the penitentiary.20 The report dealt exclusively with three gangs—Vice Lords, Blackstone Rangers, and Disciples. The report stated “that of the approximately 300 total indictments [of members of these three groups] for 1969, there have been over 100 felony convictions, 20 for murder.” Assuming that a substantial percentage of this group of 100 was sent to prison (and there is not the slightest reason to believe that they received any leniency) this suggests a sizable gang presence, which was swelled by vigorous recruitment, in the state prisons by 1970. Many of those named before the McClellan committee as leaders of the Stones and Disciples, and as employees of the Youth Manpower Project, have done time at Stateville.
How can one evaluate the experience with businesses, social agencies, politicians, and police shared by the Blackstone Rangers, Disciples, and Vice Lords during the late 1960s? What kind of world view did they carry with them to the state prisons as they were increasingly arrested and convicted after 1968?
Whether these supergangs had indeed become politicized has been the subject of considerable public and scholarly debate.21 The most thoughtful comment on the question of the politicization of the late 1960 street gangs has been provided by Walter B. Miller, who recognizes that there are at least two views of what is meant by “politicized gang.”
The notion of “transforming gangs by diverting their energies from traditional forms of gang activities—particularly illegal forms—and channeling them into ‘constructive’ activities is probably as old, in the United States, as gangs themselves.” Thus, in the 1960’s when a series of social movements aimed at elevating the lot of the poor through ideologically oriented, citizen-executing political activism became widely current, it was perhaps inevitable that the idea be applied to gangs. Two major models of activism existed—a more “radical” militant model, which saw gangs as a spearhead in the attempt to undermine established sources of power (often white power), and a less radical “social betterment” model, which conceived gangs as the basis of a kind of indigenous community service enterprise.22
Miller counts the Blackstone Rangers and Devil’s Disciples as having been politicized on the “social betterment” model but concludes that “even among the most affected, there is little evidence that activism replaced illegal and/or violent pursuits.”
This is not to say, however, that the supergangs were not affected by the social movements of their day or by their intermittent contacts with liberals and radicals. As Miller argues:
One product of the Civil Rights Movement was the addition of a new kind of justificatory vocabulary to the traditional modes for explaining gang activity. This new vocabulary incorporated basic ideological tenets of the Black Rights Movement and applied to customary forms of gang behavior concepts such as “exploitation by the power structure.” “restitution for past injustices,” and “brutalization by the system.” But verbal behavior must be distinguished from actual practice. By and large, black gang members continued to do the kinds of things they had always done.23
To state that the Chicago street gangs became politicized in the late 1960s thus means one of three things: (1) that the street gangs adopted a radical ideology from the militant civil rights movement, (2) that the street gangs became committed to social change for their community as a whole, or (3) that the street gangs became politically sophisticated, realizing that the political system could be used to further their own ends—money, power, organizational growth.
I believe that the third sense of the term is most applicable to the Rangers and Disciples. The effect of increased media and establishment attention was to make their gang leadership less parochial and more aware of the opportunities that might be realized from “milking the system.” Insofar as the gangs had a model of development, it was the Daley model rather than those of Jesse Jackson or Eldridge Cleaver. Insofar as the supergangs became politicized, in the sense of linking their interests to the social and economic betterment of their communities, the Vice Lords went the furthest.
No doubt there are considerable differences with respect to the type and degree of politicization of different leaders even within the same gangs. While some leaders may have been affected by the radical rhetoric of the Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society, this never seemed a likely path of development for the supergangs. The request by 1968 demonstration leaders that the gangs join in protesting the Democratic convention was rejected by all the gangs.
To the extent that the gang structure provides a status system for its membership, there exists a highly vested interest in its perpetuation for its own sake. Radical politics requires commitment to transcendent values and leaves less opportunity for achieved status for the average youth. Gang leaders from these organizations think less of acting on behalf of their neighborhoods than acting on behalf of their membership.
While the gangs may have become politicized during the late 1960s, their very gang structures set the limits for the degree to which this politicization could progress. Unwilling to give up their primary loyalties to their own gangs on the streets or in prison in favor of more inclusive political symbols and ideologies, the gangs ultimately served as a counterforce to radical politicization.24
Transition of Stateville’s Inmate Social System25
Whatever “truth” there is to the claim that the crackdown on street gangs was politically motivated, the gang leaders interpreted it this way. They brought with them to the prisons a sense of political prisonership as well as a set of high expectations about the kinds of deference they could demand of institutional authorities. They also maintained important ties with outside forces who continued to believe in their capacity to provide leadership to the minority community. To the prison administrators of the early seventies, the gangs posed the challenge of intact organizational structures, highly charismatic leaders, support from the streets, and a long history of inter-gang warfare.
By the summer of 1972 it was the consistent estimate of Stateville gang leaders, of “off brands” (non-gang members), and of guards and administrators that at least 50 percent of the inmate population was affiliated with one of the four gangs. The approximately 400 members of the Black P Stone Nation were governed at Stateville, as on the streets, by the gang’s president and vice-president—Eugene “Bull” Hairston and Jeff Fort—and by a council of the “Main 21.” Since at least several of the Main 21 have been consistently incarcerated at Stateville, daily decision making requires a conse
nsus of the “Mains.” Intermediate leaders are called “ambassadors” and “emirs.” Hairston and Fort have been in relative isolation from the rest of their gang at the Diagnostic Depot in the Joliet branch; yet even in exile they make decisions for the Stones in all the Illinois penitentiaries. “The word” comes down from Hairston and Fort through transfers between the penitentiaries and through visitors who may be, for example, the sister of one leader and the wife of another. The recent introduction of telephone privileges also contributes to a fluid communication between street and various penitentiary chapters.
The Disciples claim a membership approximately as large as the Stones at Stateville. The Disciples are the least organized of the gangs, although their capacity for coordinated activity and collective action varies according to the particular leaders that are at Stateville at any point in time.26 There has been considerable rivalry between leaders of the different branches and continual struggles for power. Ideally, decisions are made by a committee of chiefs and are implemented by cell house chiefs and by lower-ranking superintendents on the assignments. As is true for the Stones, complex, coordinated collective action rarely occurs, and formal decision making is often problematic. The following mimeographed document was turned up by the chief guard in the fall of 1974.
The eight names above are the names of the eight chiefs that will run the joint from here on out. All of them are capable of holding and handling their positions. They will pick another member of the organization to set on the committees with them making it nine. These men are not cell house chiefs. “They are chiefs of the entire joint” the reason this committee is set up is to assure that no Disciple no matter what branch he is from will be abused by a cell house chief. They will use their heads as well as their hands when necessary to keep things running smooth. As you can see from the names above they are from many different branches of the organization this so that as many branches of the organization as possible will be represented. I realize that there are many chiefs whose names are not mentioned above. This is not meant to be disrespectful. Common sense tells us that all of us can not be on the committee. There will be many things these men will have to do to get the joint in order after coming off lockup. The members with problems are to take them to these men. If you do not know all of these men on the list I advise you to seek them out and get to know them.27
Stateville- the Penitentiary in Mass Society Page 18
