1In January of 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. moved into a dilapidated apartment at 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in the heart of the Chicago’s West Side slum neighborhood of North Lawndale. After a series of victories in southern battlegrounds that had led to the passage of landmark civil rights legislation, King was gearing up to take on the problem of de facto segregation in the urban North. His choice of Chicago as a theater of combat was well reasoned. With its massive ghettos on the West and South sides of the city, Chicago was often referred to as the most segregated city in the United States; King felt that if he could desegregate Chicago, he could desegregate anyplace. Moreover, his decision to make the West Side his base of operations, rather than the more historically and culturally established South Side, was no less calculated. Next to Chicago’s storied South Side Bronzeville area, with its respectable brownstones lining the streets surrounding the city’s famed jazz clubs, the West Side was a faceless, voiceless, powerless slum. Demonstrating to low-income West Side residents that they would not be forgotten as they had been in the past, King expected to be warmly received, and, in his first months in Lawndale, he certainly was. “I have to be right here with the people,” King told a reporter for the city’s leading black daily, the Chicago Defender. [1]

2Among the first of these “people” King received in his new home were the leaders of one of the West Side’s most fearsome black street gangs, the Conservative Vice Lords, a group which, in the spirit of the time, had begun to refer to themselves not as a gang but as “nation.” [2] In the wake of the previous summer’s catastrophic riot in Watts, Los Angeles, King was no doubt worried about the potential of these young men to disrupt his nonviolent strategy by fomenting violent rebellion. Yet, what King did not seem to realize was that the Vice Lords in his home that day represented another civil rights movement—one inspired not out of the pronouncements of civil rights leaders but rather out of the everyday injustices faced by Lawndale residents—that had been gaining strength on the streets of the West Side since the late 1950s. By the summer of 1966, when young men shouting “Black Power” clashed with police in the streets during the West Side riot and a group of neighborhood activists chose to conduct a dangerous march against the wishes of Dr. King, it was clear that this other civil rights movement was at odds with the cautious strategy being pursued by King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Explaining in a press conference why he and other West Side residents would participate in the march into the lily-white neighborhood of Cicero, despite predictions of horrible violence on the part of white residents there, West Side Organization (WSO) director Chester Robinson declared: “We are not marching into Cicero to appeal to the white conscience, but to demonstrate to everybody that rank and file people now are a new breed, a new kind of cat without fear.” [3] The remainder of this paper seeks to excavate the origins of this “new breed” in the confrontations of youths with indignities they faced in the schools and streets of Lawndale from the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, and to show how the militant style and racial solidarity articulated by youth gangs became a vital source of inspiration for the other civil rights movement that was developing here. [4]

3On May 25, 1958, a West Side gang worker named Jim Foreman received a call informing him that a sixteen-year-old youth in the gang he supervised had been arrested for pulling a loaded revolver on another youth. Upon arriving at the police station, the officer in charge told Foreman that the youth had drawn his weapon in self-defense, that no shots were fired, and that he was willing to let the whole matter drop without filing charges. Once outside the police station, Foreman attempted to use this instance of largesse to challenge the boy’s negative views toward the police. “Those guys are human beings the same as any other adult,” he argued. “The fact that they are cops only means that they have a particular job to do of enforcing the law.” Not entirely convinced of his mentor’s line of reasoning, the youth replied, “Yea Jim, what you say is real all right, but how come they always slap you around whenever they stop you.” [5]

4This incident, recorded in one of Foreman’s daily activity logs, offers a glimpse into one of several interrelated processes that began to transform the street life of Chicago’s emerging black West Side ghetto in the late 1950s. This boy was a member of a Lawndale area street-corner gang, the Egyptian Cobras, which in this period found itself the object of a relentless and frequently violent police crackdown aimed at moving these youths off the streets. In a sense, the boy’s affirmation of the gang worker’s point—that police were just doing their job—did not necessarily contradict his assertion that the cops were always stopping him and slapping him around; from his perspective, this was their job. That it became their job in this moment was partly due to widespread perceptions of a juvenile delinquency crisis provoked by the box office success of a bevy of wild youth films in the second half of the 1950s. Nationally, public concern over the problem led to the formation of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, chaired by Estes Kefauver, which focused much of its attention on the link between the media and juvenile delinquency. [6] In Chicago, a city where gangsters and gangs had roamed the streets for years, the discourse pointed towards much more tangible and mundane culprits. As one in a series of investigative articles in the Chicago Tribune pointed out: “If police officials can be blamed for the growing juvenile delinquency problem, the blame can probably rest on lack of attention to the gangs.” [7] To handle this problem, the newly elected Mayor Richard Daley announced a plan to add 2,000 policemen to the Chicago force. Henceforth, the police and youth gangs would become locked in a battle over public space that would intensify into the late 1960s, when observers would liken the situation to guerrilla warfare.

5Evidence from the streets of Lawndale in the late 1950s reveals a campaign of intense physical harassment that that often employed black police officers to advance the cause. In May of 1957, James Halsell, a member of another Lawndale gang called the Clovers, walked out of a holding cell in the Fillmore Police Station after six hours of detention with vicious welts on his back; the charge of disorderly conduct filed against him was later dismissed in court. [8] During ensuing investigations of the Halsell beating conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Executive Board of the Chicago Youth Centers (CYC), a citywide gang outreach organization, brought together several officials from state and private youth services agencies to discuss the problem of police brutality. One guest, Lieutenant Delaney of the Crime Prevention Division of the Chicago Police, admitted to a hard-line attitude on the part of many patrolmen, whom, he stated, often referred to juvenile officers derisively as “the diaper brigade.” [9] While the CYC Board reported some improvement in the situation as a result of the publicity given to the Halsell affair, the 1960 comments of Oliver Keller of the Illinois Youth Commission reveal that police misconduct was still a pressing problem. Describing one night he spent on the streets of Lawndale with gang workers, Keller spoke of the “unconscionable police behavior” he witnessed in the manhandling of two young boys and the lining up and searching of another group. [10]

6While this kind of police clampdown derived in large part from a moral panic centered on the youth problem, it would be erroneous to dismiss the delinquency problem as wholly illusory. Juvenile arrests and complaints in Lawndale Police Districts 24 and 25 increased more than 50 percent between 1951 and 1957, while the city as a whole experienced increases of 38.4 and 6.7 percent respectively. [11] And, street gangs did, in fact, constitute a significant presence in these neighborhoods, with at least eleven known groups occupying the Lawndale community area, only four of which received the supervision of a gang worker. Nevertheless, that both the mainstream and black press seized hold of gangs as the primary causal factor in the perceived rise in juvenile delinquency rather than a symptom of other glaring demographic, economic, and institutional problems suggests that the discourse of the youth gang epidemic had a deeply-rooted symbolic power. According to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, two black sociologists who completed an exhaustive study of black Chicago in 1945, “saving the youth” was a theme persistently taken up by black ministers in the 1930s and 1940s. “Older people in Bronzeville, like oldsters everywhere,” they wrote, “spend a great deal of their time shaking their heads and denouncing the younger generation.” Such sentiments could lead to somewhat conservative perspectives. According to Drake and Cayton, much of the blame for the youth problem, particularly from the perspective of both the pulpit and the press of black Chicago, fell largely upon parents who neglected to bring their children to church and to show them proper guidance. [12] The power and resilience of such self-help thinking is further evidenced by its remarkable presence on the West Side nearly three decades later. Upon the arrival of Martin Luther King and the SCLC in 1966, for example, West Side minister, the Reverend W. H. Nichols declared, “Dr. King can move into Alabama and say, ‘This is it,’ but here in Chicago each man stands on his own two feet.” [13] That such reasoning still penetrated a sizable portion of the older generation of the black West Side of Chicago even by the late 1950s and early 1960s is indicated by the area’s relative lethargy with regard to civil rights activism. Indeed, as the southern civil rights struggle was making headlines across the nation, Chicago’s West Side was being transformed by the city’s Machiavellian Mayor into a bastion of support for a political machine that offered scant resources to black communities and generally acted to maintain the walls around the ghetto. North Lawndale, for example, fell within the city’s 24^th ward, which in 1959 was the Daley Machine’s top vote producer. Black activists would soon be referring to it scornfully as one of Chicago’s “plantation wards.” [14]

7Moreover, if blacks in the Lawndale area were reluctant to blame their street gang problem on structural factors like poor housing, high population density, overcrowded schools, and high unemployment, this was certainly not because such conditions were hard to perceive by people on the ground. Between 1950 and 1960 white flight, real estate manipulation, and the relocation of local businesses transformed North Lawndale from a thriving white neighborhood dominated by Russian Jews to a black ghetto on its way out. In this period, the percentage of African American residents rose breathtakingly from 15 to 91, and the overall population in the area climbed more than 25 percent. According to the estimates of local agencies, the increase in residents may have been closer to 50 percent. And this was in a neighborhood that in 1950 already had a density per square mile that was 69 percent higher than that of the city as a whole. One consequence of this demographic change was that the number of people in the area between the ages of 5 and 19 nearly doubled, causing nine of the fifteen secondary schools to go on disorienting double-shift schedules in 1958. [15] As to the state of affairs in the area’s high schools, a study conducted that year found the citywide high school dropout rate to be 50 percent, a figure one would have to assume was considerably higher in Lawndale. Moreover, referring to a recent survey of 3,000 members of 45 different gangs, this same study revealed that a staggering proportion of gang members were recent dropouts, and that most had not been reprimanded for behavioral problems before leaving school. The vast majority, in other words, had not been pushed out, but had merely chosen to quit. What made these figures even more troubling was the report’s contention that “the overwhelming majority of youngsters who drop out of school are unable to find satisfactory employment—or employment at all,” a situation caused by the decreasing demand for unskilled labor in the industrial sector. [16]

8Such were the circumstances in Lawndale when the Chicago Defender ran a front-page article on May 11, 1957 celebrating the arrest of several “young terrorists” affiliated with the Clovers. Despite the sensationalist headlines, however, the youths had actually been booked for a range of petty offenses like disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon. These arrests had been made possible by an undercover reporter for the paper who had infiltrated the gang and attended their meetings, where, the article states, “they met their teen-age girlfriends, smoked pot, consumed cheap wine…” [17] Suggestive of the kind of punitive fervor behind this crusade was the attempt of police officers to beat a confession out of James Halsell. Claiming the gang to number over 200, including several teenage girls and adults, the Defender clearly exaggerated the size of its membership, an error that indicates its tendency to conveniently collapse the world of lower-class youth culture into the identity of a gang. In this area of town, this was a culture inflected with the styles of the many recently arrived southern migrants that lived in its blocks. Situated in this context of poverty, this culture continued to bear the stigma of rural backwardness in a moment when much of black Chicago picked up the Defender to read about the struggle for progress and “the improvement of the race.”

9Thus, the attack on the gang problem within the black community involved a reaction against lower-class street life on the whole: a street life that male teenagers and young adults, many floating idly and precariously between school and work, came to dominate. This kind of virulent attack against West Side ghetto youth culture, moreover, was hardly limited to moralizing ministers and journalists. William Watson, a gang worker with the Clovers in 1958, described police officers in Lawndale repeatedly threatening to take members of the gang to the station if they did not remove scarves from their heads, and on one occasion lining up the youths and confiscating their cigarettes and money. [18] The previous worker with the Clovers, Norm Feldman, also witnessed patrolmen tearing up cigarettes found on the youths; in one instance, a policeman burned a hole in one of the Clover’s clothing with a lit cigarette. [19] The tone of such tactics is highlighted by Feldman’s retelling of an incident related to him by a Clover who was arrested by two black patrolmen as he and four other Clovers sang on the corner of 16th and Lawndale in the early evening:

10

During the entire ride, the officer kept asking Julius did he think he owned the city and did he think he was “bad.” He asked how long he’s been in Chicago… When Julius told him that he came from Alabama and has been up here for 6 years, the officer told him that he should have stayed down in Alabama where he came from… He said a whole lot of “ignorant punks” come up to Chicago and they think they own the city… Immediately after saying “a lot of punks come up to Chicago and think they own the city,” the officer struck Julius in the mouth… [20]

11Aside from a handful of intrepid youth outreach workers, gangs like the Clovers and Cobras thus had few friends in the last years of the 1950s. While the savage brutality of the Halsell affair raised some concern among residents, it is fair to say that few on the West Side expressed a great deal of sympathy for the “young terrorists” on the streets, especially since the Chicago Police Department had cleverly clouded the issue by deploying black policemen in these high crime ghetto areas. [21] In fact, black support of such aggressive policing of local youths was symptomatic of a broader condition of political disorganization and quiescence on the West Side. Missing from the political culture of black West Side Chicago in this moment were the kinds of feelings of racial solidarity—crystallized out of shared experiences of racial injustices in the field of everyday life—that would make possible the massive civil rights mobilization that emerged in the city in 1963, when over one hundred thousand students engaged in a massive school boycott and one of Chicago’s main dailies declared the unraveling of “a social revolution in our midst.” [22] Indeed, by early 1966 the kinds of incidents of police brutality that were victimizing the Clovers in late 1950s would have pushed the area to the brink of violent rebellion. That year, a massive riot overtook the city’s West Side after police manhandled four youths trying to open a fire hydrant to gain some relief from the sweltering summer heat.

12For decades, our understanding of the forces and dynamics that caused these ideological shifts focused on national civil rights organizations like the SCLC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The prevailing view was that the efforts of such organizations brought mass-based civil rights activism to the urban North in the mid 1960s, but that “the Movement” was quickly derailed by the dramatic rise of Black Power ideologies propagated by charismatic leaders like Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, and Stokely Carmichael and militant organizations like the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). [23] A new wave of historical studies on the civil rights and Black Power movements in the urban North has recently challenged such views, demonstrating both the false dichotomy between civil rights and Black Power, as well as the need to examine the struggles of local activists against racial injustices in northern cities in the decades before organizations like the SCLC and SNCC moved North. [24] As far as these fine studies have gone in debunking our caricatural vision of the civil rights struggle, they have largely overlooked a vital source of oppositional consciousness, racial solidarity, and collective action in the late 1950s and early 1960s that prepared the terrain for the wave of mass-based political action that would sweep through Chicago between 1963 and 1968. That poor school conditions and police brutality would emerge as the two main sites of civil rights activism in the years to come was not a matter of chance. The expansion of gangs, which actually occurred after the advent of the campaign to suppress them, was the organized, palpable expression of a burgeoning black youth culture of the streets that in the late 1950s and early 1960s began to possess a militant edge honed by police repression, the racial injustices of the school system, labor market shortages, and the racial attacks of white youths at the boundaries of the neighborhood.

13This last aspect of street life was a primary motive in the formation of African American gangs in the 1940s and 1950s, when many white gangs carried out vicious attacks against blacks to prevent their movement into white neighborhoods. [25] While continued white out-migration tended to reduce such confrontations by the late 1950s, attacks by white gangs were still common occurrences for black youths, both male and female, in this period. For example, the report of a Lawndale gang worker on April 4, 1958 details an assault by white youths from a parochial school against a group of female black students leaving Marshall High School the previous afternoon. One of the girls later reported that a police officer was present during the incident but paid no attention. Later that same night, a group of black teenagers, at least some of whom were Clovers, drove into a white neighborhood looking for the perpetrators. Upon reaching the Sears YMCA, a group of white teenagers hurled molotov cocktails at the youths, setting fire to one of their cars. [26] In a related incident four days later, members of two white gangs jumped a black teenager outside the Sears YMCA, breaking his ribs and battering his face. Taking refuge inside the building, witnesses observed policemen standing outside with the attackers and laughing. [27]

14Such experiences infused the street culture of these black neighborhoods with sensibilities about the importance of racial unity and the need for militant direct action. By the early 1960s, residents of the West Side were increasingly using the term “Uncle Tomism” to describe their situation, a change that street gangs and youth culture helped to facilitate. While the dropout problem and the debilitating effects of the ghetto political economy were at first difficult for youths to grasp, acts of physical harassment by both the police and white youths crystallized a world view that emphasized the importance of collective action, reaffirmed bonds of racial identity across gender lines, and focused on the state as the primary object of opposition. This was a formative phase in the other half of the Chicago civil rights movement, which had deep roots in the terrain of black youth culture. Out of school, out of work, out on the streets, black youths in densely populated neighborhoods like Lawndale were in many ways positioned nearest to the sources of power and racial injustice that would serve as rallying points in the 1960s. Schools, in particular, as indicated by the Marshall High incident mentioned above, were frequently the sites of collective action on the part of black youths to assert the right of African Americans to attend classes without fear of attack. This was an especially salient issue in Lawndale, for both of the high schools—Marshall and Harrison—were located at the edges of the neighborhood in predominantly white communities. It is no coincidence, then, that the school problem came to eclipse the gang epidemic in the early 1960s, when residents of Lawndale joined protests all over black Chicago against the inaction of Superintendent Benjamin Willis in dealing with the deleterious conditions of black schools. [28]

15The sudden emergence in this same moment of large male fighting gangs, with memberships drawn from several neighborhoods, was an expression of the youth militancy and collective identity formation thus far described. Yet, other powerful forces were at work, for a great deal of blood was shed in fights between African American gangs seeking to control manpower and territory. Street fights had always occurred, but this dynamic of expansion and control was new. For example, the Cobras and the Clovers were relatively small groups in the late 1950s, numbering between twenty and forty members depending on how one wanted to define membership, which was then largely voluntary. We know this because these groups spent a good deal of their time hanging out at the community center and participating in activities organized by its staff—athletic leagues, singing groups, dances, and various outings. By 1960, the Clovers had broken up in the aftermath of a prolonged gang war with the Cobras, and a new gang to the scene, the Vice Lords, was in the process of forcibly absorbing almost every club, clique, and gang in the area around 16th and Lawndale. When the dust had settled in 1963, several gang murders later, the Vice Lords, the Cobras to the west, and the Roman Saints to the east, were the only gangs left standing in Lawndale. Moving further out of the orbit of gang workers and the community center, these fighting gangs replaced fists with guns, used beatings to coerce youths to join, and held as highest ideal the quality of “heart,” which connoted a willingness to fearlessly put one’s life on the line for the gang. [29]

16In interpreting the meaning of these ruthless recruitment drives, one must remember that these street gangs would not discover the enterprises of the drug trade and extortion for several years. The control of space in the early 1960s, therefore, had little to do with money. It did, however, have a lot to do with power. To understand the sense of empowerment derived through participation in such actions, one must look outside the prevailing paradigms of underclass history, and engage gang violence as an emotional response to the conditions of ghetto life. On the most fundamental level, the drive for territorial control through increased membership represented an impulse to create a secure space in the face of random attacks by other gangs and the arbitrary actions of police. On a more subconscious level, these gangs were participating in the creation of a social system within which their actions would possess a recognized value and a sense of power. Observing in 1961 the detrimental effects the Vice Lords had on youth programs, gang worker John Ray noted the magnetism that this emerging gang culture possessed for black youths: “[…] it seems that the Vice-lords cause a decrease in the agencies’ attendance when they are engaged in an activity in the area; not because they are afraid to come to the agency, but because they want to be where the Vice Lords are […]” [30]

17The masculinist codes of gang culture particularly appealed to youths in their late teens and early twenties, those who found themselves arrested precariously between childhood and adulthood. Piecing together profiles of individual gang members in the 1960s, the high percentage of young adults still living with parents into their early twenties is striking. Such circumstances inform the move of older youths of nearly every fighting gang to separate themselves from younger boys by creating junior and senior divisions. Many others in this age range shared apartments with wives or girlfriends while continuing to run with the gang. The reports of the gang worker for the Cobras suggest that many such youths grappled painfully with their inability to fulfill the role of male provider. While returning to high school was one answer offered by workers, they also described having to defend youths in front of “hostile” principals, who had sole discretion on re-admittance decisions and could require attendance at continuation school. [31] In any case, school was a hard sell when there was little indication that a diploma would lead to a decent job. This was a moment that witnessed the flight of industrial jobs from low-income areas of the city, making employment in the services sector the only viable alternative for dropouts. Gang workers complained constantly about the difficulty of placing youths in jobs, and even when they could find employment, services work was often temporary, always low-paying, and offered little chance of promotion. Perhaps most importantly, the servile nature of such work degraded it in the eyes of gang youths, many of whose fathers had held more masculine, blue-collar jobs in previous years. It is suggestive that the Vice Lords would eventually join two other “super gangs”—the Blackstone Rangers and Eastside Disciples—in demonstrations that effectively closed down several construction sites to protest racial discrimination in the hiring and promotion of blacks in the building trades. [32]

18In his study of Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York, Philippe Bourgois views their lives on the streets in the terms of a “search for respect” in the context of social marginalization. [33] A similar “search” drove Lawndale’s epidemic of gang violence in the early 1960s, but unlike the crack dealers Bourgois observes, the Vice Lords and Cobras could not even rely on a niche in the underground economy. Partly due to this complete lack of resources, these youths were sensitized to the changing political climate in the ghetto, which in the early 1960s began to warm to their rebellious style. This was when a syncretic discourse of civil rights and Black Power hit home, providing poor youths of color (also Puerto Ricans) with languages for articulating the meaning of the injustices they had been confronting for years. News of the efforts of the SCLC, CORE, and SNCC in the southern struggle for rights informed their militancy with a sense of what theorist Alain Touraine refers to as “historicity”—the consciousness that their acts of resistance on the streets were part of a larger historic movement that challenged fundamental social relations. [34] Take for example, this Vice Lord’s explanation of a near-riot situation that occurred after several Lawndale gangs responded to the shooting of a black youth leaving Harrison High by making violent raids into the Polish neighborhood around the school:

19

What happened, this guy was coming from school and he was shot and killed…There was mostly Polish living over there… He wasn’t doing nothing, just walking down the street coming from school… And when this happened…everybody just thought the same way. The Lords decided to go on over there, and some kind of way we ended up with the Cobras too. It was just that everybody was out there, all the groups on the West Side. You know, before that, any time we went over there - in South Lawndale - we almost always would get dusted, or maybe even killed. But now they think twice… And that’s why I say like Malcolm X, “Violence sometimes serves its purpose.” [35]

20This sense of historicity emerged out of such experiences of collective action in defense of rights. For the Vice Lords and Cobras, this particular event would lead to a temporary truce; shortly thereafter, these gangs would begin to refer to themselves as “nations,” an appellation that qualified their new ideological bent. In the years to come, the Conservative Vice Lord Nation would become an officially incorporated organization, obtaining grants from local businesses, private foundations, and the U.S. Department of Labor to implement community development programs. With funding from a $130,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1968 and 1969, the Lords maintained a teen recreation center, a shop selling black heritage merchandise, a development corporation, a management training institute, a tenants’ rights action group, and an art gallery. During this time, the Vice Lords and Cobras formed alliances with such local political organizations as ACT, Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket, the Garfield Organization, the East Garfield Park Union to End Slums, the West Side Organization, and the Student Afro-American Group. Working with such civil rights groups, members of these gangs participated in demonstrations against racial injustices by slumlords, realtors, local businesses, and school administrators. [36]

21The best evidence for the political impact of these efforts is the wealth of intelligence reports on such affiliations compiled by the Gang Intelligence Unit of the Chicago Police Department, a branch of the Red Squad established shortly after another nation-gang, the Blackstone Rangers, procured a massive federal grant from the Office of Economic Opportunity to institute a job training program in the Woodlawn area. [37] The relentless drive by the GIU to subvert these gangs with arbitrary arrests and attempts to incite gang rivalries indicates that the Daley Administration feared the potential of such experiments in grassroots mobilization. Thus, the same legal arm of the Daley Machine that cleared the police of any wrongdoing in the murder of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton pursued a vigorous legal battle to pin charges of fraud on the Blackstone Rangers and the Vice Lords. Although the Vice Lords were cleared of all charges of fraud, that such tactics were all too successful indicates that many gang members were unable to extricate themselves from the gang culture that had shaped their understanding of agency, dignity and power.

22Black youths on the streets of Lawndale in the 1950s and 1960s came of age in an environment that lacked the resources with which they could develop a feeling of individual agency in the affairs of everyday life. The emotional response to this shared condition led to both the creation of a subculture of gang violence, with thousands of active participants and many more fascinated onlookers, and the emergence of a militant sensibility among African American youths in general. This helps to explain why black youth gangs in this period would put their lives on the line to defend the rights of blacks to attend school while simultaneously carrying out brutal attacks on these very same youths, and why in the midst of ambitious efforts to improve their communities, acts of gang violence and street crime continued. This also explains the tension-fraught relationships between nation gangs and the civil rights organizations—most notably King’s SCLC and the Black Panther Party—that attempted to enlist them in their Chicago campaigns. Of course the strategy of nonviolence was difficult for gang youths to accept, yet other problems arose over issues of local control. Finally granted an opportunity to fill a significant role in neighborhood life, gang leaders did not want to cede their leadership positions to mass-based organizations whose aims, they felt, did not promise any immediate change for their communities. [38]

23Thus, the phenomenon of nation gang formation should be considered a key manifestation of a larger process of grassroots mobilization in the field of black youth culture. Social movement theorist, Alberto Melucci, has emphasized the ways in which youth culture makes power and its role in social conflicts visible. Noting its position at the juncture between school and the labor market, he argues that youth culture “reflects the tension between the enhancement of life chances and diffuse control, between possibilities for individuation and external definitions of identity.” [39] These tensions grew to crisis proportions on the black West Side of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, as a generation of African Americans stretched the boundaries of childhood by remaining too long in the temporal space between school and work. This was a radicalizing space, where youths came to understand the forces that blocked their own life chances, and developed collective strategies of resistance. While some of these strategies manifested themselves in destructive ways, others illuminated the workings of power on the local level and offered compelling demonstrations of collective action. Mostly dropouts themselves, the Vice Lords would appear again and again in local demonstrations against the conditions of black schools. The shift in consciousness they helped to effect can be seen in the following excerpt—recorded by the Chicago Police Red Squad—from a speech given at a 1965 civil rights demonstration in front of a West Side school:

24

[…] they tell me they writin’ up in the paper big, “Two gangs was fightin’,” ain’t that awful. But did you ever notice they got ‘em where you see four guys standing on the corner, you see the police come and break it up because they know the time has come when you got 18 or 19 or 20 gonna start goin’ over there and fight for what they want. Not just fightin’ each other no more, goin’ over there and take stuff from the white people what they have took from us. And it’s not a gang you understand[…] [40]