What does it mean to gangbang? What did it mean in 1988, when Nicholas started? Here’s the current definition from urbandictionary.com: “to be posted on yo set or turf and protect it or sell drugs on it.” But gangbanging didn’t always mean selling drugs. Once upon a time all it meant was protecting turf.
The story about gangs reaches way back. Give me a little bit of space to profess.
In the early twentieth century, waves of African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North, the exodus resulting in massively overcrowded black slums in many cities, not only in New York but also Chicago and Philadelphia. Suddenly, the North in many ways took on the hue of the South. The professed liberalism of the pre–Civil War North frayed in the presence of refugees from the lynching epidemic below the Mason-Dixon line. With restrictive covenants and spasmodic violence, preexisting and defensive white populations, who themselves were a multiethnic stew in the wake of late-nineteenth-century immigration, sought to limit the “territory” the newcomers might “invade.” Not only street actions but also the official policy vocabulary of the period borrowed from the language of pest control. In addition to confronting residential segregation, African Americans all too often also encountered blatant discrimination. Jobs were harder to come by than anticipated, and for African Americans in particular, the Great Depression eradicated the small gains of the preceding decades. In the 1940s, African Americans were wedged together in overcrowded pockets of places like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles—and they were out of work.
The situation in the early twentieth century was similar in the Southwest. Large numbers of Mexicans migrated into Texas, Arizona, and California, joining Mexican American populations who had been on that land already for generations, even before the United States annexed these territories from Mexico in 1845. They, too, were confronted with segregation and discrimination. And during the Depression, this country deported more than 12,000 people of Mexican descent, including American citizens, further poisoning relationships between Mexican Americans and whites.
Given the intense competition over land and labor, white-on-black race riots flared between 1917 and 1923 in East St. Louis; Chester, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia; Houston; Washington D.C.; Chicago; Omaha; Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; Knoxville; Elaine, Arkansas; West Frankfort, Illinois; Rosewood, Florida; and, famously, Tulsa. In the wake of the Depression, Harlem experienced its own cycle of race riots, in both 1935 and 1943. And also in 1943, on the West Coast, Los Angeles witnessed the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots,” when U.S. sailors and marines attacked Latino youths. Further domino effect riots against Latinos spread to Chicago, San Diego, Oakland, Evansville, Philadelphia, and New York.
America’s story in the twentieth century is in so many ways a sordid tale. It is the story, a tragic litany, of the things people have done to survive in a rapaciously competitive, ethnically and racially fractured society. White racism is a part of this story but, mind you, only a part. Pretty much everybody was out for his or her own and lined up against everybody else. Across the country, gangs formed as “self-protection” societies in response to harassment from larger ethnic groups. The harassment could fly in all kinds of directions, and as gangs emerged, they could also brew rivalries within the ethnic group from which they came. Exhibit A is the Mafia and its feuding families.
One oral history tells a story this way about how, in the 1930s, “The leaders of the [Catholic] Church [in Los Angeles] sponsored an athletic club to foster brotherhood and friendship among the Mexican/Chicano minority members within the community.” The Church was responding to the emergence of gangs in the previous decade, and trying to channel the social energies in a positive direction. Because there had been “a lot of racism and violence towards Chicanos and Mexican immigrants in the Boyle Heights area,” and because “school aged children were regularly harassed and bullied by members of the larger ethnic groups,” the boys in the community “decided to form a self-protection group which would serve as escorts to and from school for their younger brothers and sisters.” They called themselves “White Fence.” As they grew, they began to war with other Chicano gangs. These were the tensions the Catholic Church was trying to defuse. Instead, over the course of the 1930s, White Fence slowly moved from self-protection group to aggressive barrio gang. “By 1939 The Los Angeles Times was writing articles about the ‘White Fence Gang’ which murdered 2 males and left their bodies along Whittier Blvd.”
Following the Depression and the exigencies of World War II, street gangs started to gain in strength again in the 1950s and 1960s, although they didn’t yet function primarily as criminal organizations. This is the era of the so-called “turf gangs” memorialized in the 1961 musical West Side Story, which told the story of violent conflict between a white gang, the Jets, and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The musical, too, reports a story about the need for protection:
When you’re a Jet,
If the spit hits the fan,
You got brothers around,
You’re a family man!
You’re never alone,
You’re never disconnected!
You’re home with your own:
When company’s expected,
You’re well protected!
And, of course, the musical tells the story of ethnic competition:
The Jets are in gear,
Our cylinders are clickin’!
The Sharks’ll steer clear
’Cause ev’ry Puerto Rican’s a lousy chicken!
Here come the Jets
Like a bat out of hell.
Someone gets in our way,
Someone don’t feel so well!
We’re drawin’ the line,
So keep your noses hidden!
We’re hangin’ a sign,
Says “Visitors forbidden”
And we ain’t kiddin’!
In histories of gangs, from antiquity to the present, one finds over and over again a familiar story. As it inevitably goes, groups form in order to provide mutual protection and then, once numbers give them power, they turn to predation, particularly in moments of economic contraction. Scholars concur that this is the basic pattern, unchangeable human nature. The evidence, they say, is “overwhelming.” There’s also another turn of the screw. Once gangs turn predatory, they often prey mostly on their own communities. Like taxing authorities, they come to see their communities as a source of extractable revenue. This is why the stories of gangs and drugs come together. To sell drugs you need a market. A gang delivers turf and a community. It’s easier to sell something illegal where you are known.
In the 1960s, gang violence intensified when eddying currents from economic privation and ethnic tension commingled once again. When postwar American prosperity inevitably turned to recession, massive war clouds of civil unrest loomed on the horizon. In 1960, the unemployment rate for adults in Harlem was about 13 percent, twice that of the rest of the city. By 1961, the number of addicts in Harlem was eight times what it was in the rest of the city. In Los Angeles, the situation was no different, and unemployment for African Americans spiraled from 12 percent to 30 percent from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. In 1964, there were, yet again, race riots in Rochester, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey, creating a litany of urban violence that would come to define the decade. In response to a national poverty rate that had reached 19 percent, Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty. But still, 1965 brought the riots, rebellion, and unrest in Watts. A scuffle after the arrest of a drunk driver led to a six-day explosion of violence, arson, and conflict with police in a neighborhood stripped of resources and agency. The governor of California established a curfew of 8 P.M. across a 46.5-square-mile zone. Thirty-four people died.
In response to the violence in Watts, the Los Angeles police militarized. L.A. recruited its first SWAT team from Vietnam vets. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan advocated strict gun control to prevent Black Panthers and other African Americans from obtaining guns. Within ten years, the Los Angeles Police Department would form the first airborne police division. Its helicopters give the city’s nighttime skies the distinctive thrum of a combat zone, a world Michael would be born into only five years later.
The Watts revolt of 1965 was followed, ripple-like, with more unrest in 1966 and 1967, this time in Cleveland; San Francisco; Chicago; Newark; Plainfield, New Jersey; Detroit; Harlem; Cambridge, Maryland; Rochester; Pontiac; Toledo; Flint; Grand Rapids; Houston; Englewood, New Jersey; Tucson; Milwaukee; and northerly Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The litany goes on.
The tide of violence continued to rise, cresting in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis hotel room and rioting ensued in 125 cities, sending a tsunami of destruction from coast to coast.
As relative prosperity turned to privation, the street gangs depicted in West Side Story evolved. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message about uniting around the table of brotherhood gave way to forceful messages about self-help. Some gangs, which had formed initially as mutual protection societies but had grown into juvenile delinquency groups, now evolved into sophisticated criminal operations seeking to capture some of the drug business. Why should the Mafia alone reap the benefits of preying on African American adversity? Why not keep the business inside the community?
In New York City, Charles Green launched the first independent black trafficking organization in the 1960s, with over one hundred distributors and couriers. His successor was a man named Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. By the time of Nicky’s arrest in 1976, he owned five homes, a Mercedes, a Maserati, and several Lincolns, Cadillacs, and Thunderbirds.
Nature red in tooth and claw shows itself in the willingness of drug sellers to see addicts as fair game. Over the course of the 1950s, the ravages of addiction turned the “dope fiend” into a figure from people’s nightmares, a villainous Hollywood trope, and the most despicable of human types. Consider again the words that Michael used to describe life in prison. “I’m trapped in a hell with whom society decrees to be the worst of living and better off dead. Robbers, rapists, child molesters, carjackers, murderers, and dope fiends who would spend their mother’s monthly rent for a quick fix.” Inspired by Dante, he offers a descending list of criminals from least bad to worst, and on his list dope fiends are the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low.
The turn by some street gangs to the drug business perverted the Malcolm X–like drive for black economic independence. But that cynicism was facilitated by a generally accepted social pattern throughout the whole country of treating addicts, and especially African American addicts, as disposable. There was little shame in preying on them, a big contrast to how heroin addicts are viewed today.
The tableaux in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago are all similar to the New York story of Charles Green and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. Starting in 1969, an African American group called the Black Mafia sought control of the drug market in Philadelphia; in Chicago the Black P. Stone Nation and Black Gangster Disciples also got their start, entering into the lucrative drug business in the 1970s. The Los Angeles Crips were founded in the 1960s with ties to the Black Panthers. Initially “a community based organization set up to help local residents,” when one of their founders was killed in 1969 by a rival organization, they transitioned to dealing in drugs and guns. The rising class of gang-based drug dealers was dubiously glamorized in the 1972 blaxploitation film Super Fly.
Today, as it was then, the global drug business is an ethnically structured market, whose points of transition from one ethnic group to another come largely at either the wholesale to retail transition point, or at the retail to street-level transition point. The rule of thumb about sales in the drug business is that most users buy from people who look like themselves. The drug market is fully an equal opportunity employer, and there’s a world of white distributors and independent distributors. But it’s also true that the ethnically structured street gang world of the United States was a very good fit for one part of the street-level end of an intercontinental supply chain. The largest profits, of course, accrue to those working from the production to the wholesale point of the chain, but even further down the chain there was still real money to be made.
For all the profits to be had, though, not all gangs dove into the drug business, and this is an important point to remember. Other gangs focused elsewhere: on car theft or burglary or simply on partying. A study found that in Pasadena in 1995, for instance, only two out of eighteen gangs specialized in illegal narcotics. The same study found, though, that law enforcement systematically overestimated the rate of involvement of gangs in drug transactions. “‘Almost all’ and ‘upward of 90 percent’ were not uncommon estimates of the number of drug transactions that involved gang members from both gang and narcotics experts in Los Angeles.” In fact, the percentage ranged between 30 and 50. But by 2016, gangs and drugs were surely even more intertwined than they had been twenty years earlier. When the global narcotics business and American street gangs joined forces in the late 1960s and 1970s, we commenced what I propose was a new American story. Call it the story of the rise of a parastate, an alternative universe of law and order, fundamentally at war with the legally recognized state. Unbeknownst to the adults around him, Michael grew up in that parastate.
So now we have our definition of gangbanging. The core element is this: protect yo turf. This is what gangs were about in the beginning, before the world was flat enough for drugs to flow so fluidly. But all three words matter: “protect” “yo” “turf.” So try this on for a definition. To gangbang (v.): to protect your turf and use your power to prey on the vulnerable in order to make a profit and support those whom you call your own.
AT THIRTEEN, ROSLYN WANTED nothing more than to be a cheerleader. She—a generous, fleshy girl who wore her skirt and twirled her pom-poms with supreme self-confidence, a gorgeous smile on her face—would get her chance in ninth grade. But like Nicholas, she, too, would find that she needed to join a gang. Hers was not, though, a drug-selling gang. She joined because she was routinely bullied at school for her dark skin and wanted some people who would protect her. To join, she stepped into a stall-lined bathroom at her school and fought seven girls on the cold tiles. She fought them in order to earn their protection.
Why are these things that parents don’t know about?