by Jeff Chang
The unprecedented gathering threatened to explode from the accumulated fuel of unresolved slights and unpaid blood debts. Sniper cops perched on the roofs of nearby buildings. Television cameras, photographers and reporters filed into the gym.
The presidents, vice presidents and warlords, including a young Black Spade named Afrika Bambaataa, filled the folding chairs set in a circle in the middle of the gym floor. Social workers, school teachers, and other gang members filled the bleachers. The girl gangs were locked outside in the December freeze.
Inside, the tension was thick. Charlie Suarez, wearing a black beret with a red star, black vest and denims instead of his Ghetto Brothers colors, opened the meeting with a command: “I would like for the police to leave or we got nothing to say.” An undercover cop left to great applause, a momentary release.
Suarez reminded the gang leaders that they were there because Black Benjie had died for peace, and then opened the floor. Marvin “Hollywood” Harper, a Vietnam vet and a slim Black member of the Savage Skulls sporting a beret and a gray combat shirt under his colors, stepped up. He said, “When I heard about Benjie dying, I told Brother Charlie of the Ghetto Brothers that I would take a life for Benjie. Charlie told me no, so I won’t. If the Ghetto Brothers want peace, then there will be peace.”
Then he pointed at the Seven Immortals, the Mongols and the Black Spades, and accused them of attacking his fellow Skulls and taking their colors. He pointed at them and blamed them for the death of Black Benjie. One smirked, “I wasn’t there man, I was in court.”
Bam Bam, the leader of the Black Spades, accused the Skulls of invading Spades’ turf with shotguns. The meeting was spinning out of control. Gang members stood up in the bleachers, as if they were ready to set something off. Suarez silenced them all with a word, “Peace.”
Hollywood stepped back up to address the Spades. He gestured angrily with his cigarette: “All we did is ask you people for the colors and you people didn’t give us our colors back. You don’t see us stripping you people, man. You don’t see us stripping the Turbans, you don’t see us stripping the Ghetto Brothers. You don’t see us stripping no other crowd. When we have static, we settle it among ourselves, man, because, like wow, we have to live in this district.”
And here the meeting turned. “The whitey don’t come down here and live in the fucked-up houses, man,” Hollywood continued, his hands a blur of stabbing motion, his voice a newfound weapon. “The whitey don’t come down here, man, and have all the, the fucked-up, fucking no heat in the wintertime. You understand? We do, jack, so therefore we got to make it a better place to live.”
The crowd, even the Spades, rose enthusiastically in assent. Hollywood called for an end to rumors, for a step toward peace. “If we don’t have peace now, whitey will come in and stomp us,” he shouted.14 The gangs roared in agreement, holding up peace signs and Black power salutes.
Bam Bam spoke about dealing with junkies and cops, and the talk turned to how to pressure politicians and change the Bronx. Then Benjy Melendez stepped forward. He looked Black Benjie’s killer in the eye. “You took away one of our brothers’ lives, man,” Melendez said. “You don’t want us to become a gang anymore, right? Because I know you. You was up in the meeting and you told me, ‘Benjy I want to get out alive.’ ”
Melendez concluded, “The thing is, we’re not a gang anymore. We’re an organization. We want to help Blacks and Puerto Ricans to live in a better environment.”
Suarez and Vincenty directed the gangs into smaller caucuses to discuss the fine points of the Peace Treaty. It read:
To All Brothers and Sisters:
We realize that we are all brothers living in the same neighborhoods and having the same problems. We also realize that fighting amongst ourselves will not solve out common problems. If we are to build up our community to be better place [sic] for our families and ourselves we must work together. We who have signed this treaty pledge peace and unity for all. All of us who have signed this peace will be known from now on as The Family. The terms of the Peace are as follows:
1. All groups are to respect each other—cliques, individual members and their women. Each member clique of the Family will be able to wear their colors in other member cliques’ turf without being bothered. They are to remember in whose turf they are and respect that turf as if it were their own.
2. If any clique has a gripe against another clique the presidents of each are to meet together to talk it out.
If one member of a clique has a beef with a member of another clique, the two are to talk it over. If that does not solve it then they will both fight it out between themselves, after that it is considered finished.
If there is any rumors about cliques going down on each other the leaders of each of these groups shall meet to talk it out.
3. For those cliques outside of the Peace Treaty—the presidents of the Family will meet with the clique to explain the terms of the Peace. The clique will given [sic] the opportunity to
a. join
b. disband
c. be disbanded.
4. The presidents of the Family will meet from time to time to discuss concerns of the groups.
This is the Peace we pledge to keep.
PEACE BETWEEN ALL GANGS AND A POWERFUL UNITY.
At the end, Suarez and the Boys Club director, a young priest named Mario Barbell, summoned the presidents into the center of the floor to have them put their hands together as if they were in a huddle. As the photographers and cameramen jockeyed for position, they said “Peace!” and strode out.
The social workers loved it; it seemed an unqualified victory to them. Mayor Lindsay’s corrupt, ineffectual Youth Services Agency director Ted Gross—who had arrived in a pimp-style red-and-white brocade suit and admitted of the meeting, “I thought it was frightening as hell”—stood before the reporters and took full credit.15 The media was electrified, news reports would be glowing.
In some respects, the meeting was a leap forward. The Ghetto Brothers had demonstrated a different kind of street justice, administered within the codes of the gangs. Black Benjie’s alleged murderers were never snitched out to the police. Instead of meeting blood with more blood, the gangs had come to a consensus.
The meeting also left much to be desired. Although many of the girl gang-bangers had been alongside the boys in the street violence that inspired the meeting, they were not even represented in the room, while the media and the social workers got bleacher seats. In the end, the truce meeting mainly felt like a public trial, particularly for the Seven Immortals. But it had failed in its most basic purpose: to convince street gangs to maintain a borough-wide truce.
To this day, Blackie Mercado still scoffs, “We went because we had to go and represent. As soon as we walked out, it was back to the Skulls fighting the Galaxies and all these motherfuckers. How can all this shit be going on when we’re walking out?”
Many other gang leaders left the meeting feeling it was some sort of an elaborate charade. That weekend, the Ghetto Brothers again gathered the presidents, this time in their clubhouse, away from the social workers and the media. The two-hour meeting at the Boys Club, Melendez told the gang leaders, “was a big show. It was just for the media to see, ‘Oh see, the city got the gangs together.’ But people went out of there feeling angry, feeling pissed off, and it wasn’t genuine. Let’s speak for real, because a lot of us here are still holding anger inside.”
In the confines of the clubhouse, the presidents talked of the anger still roiling their ranks over the death of Black Benjie. They said that they were doing all they could to keep anyone from taking the matter into their own hands. Julio of the Seven Immortals admitted he knew the gang was marked and broke down as he apologized. Melendez jumped back in, pointing to Julio. “Attacking these guys is not gonna bring Black Benjie back again,” he said. “It never should have happened, but it happened. Let it never, never happen again.”
That night, the truce was sealed.
The Long Dissipation
But it was bound to end. The warning signs came quickly. Just days after the Boys Club meeting, NYPD’s Bronx Youth Gang Task Force quietly opened for business. One officer bluntly outlined their raison d’etre: “We talk to the gangs. We tell ‘em—’With some thirty thousand cops, we got the biggest gang in the city. You’re going to lose.’ ”16
They tried to get operatives to join the gangs, but when the operatives balked at going through initiations, the cops tried a different tack. “There was a group that the police force made from ex-Marines called the Purple Mothers,” says Afrika Bambaataa. “It was like a fake, secret type gang that was going around attacking people and assassinating them. And word was on the street that whoever catch these cats, they definitely gon’ be dealt with, or if they catch you, you gon’ be dealt with.”
Through interrogations and sweep arrests, the Task Force compiled three thousand dossiers on gangs and gang members in just over a year.17 Mercado says, “Police was fucking with us a lot. They see more than three of us walking, they would arrest us for unlawful assembly.” In short order, the cops had enough to bring down many of the gang leaders. By early 1972, Mercado was in jail. Savage Nomad president Ben Buxton and Turbans president Manny Araujo were also hauled off to prison. “The enemy around the Bronx now at this very moment,” said one of the gang members on a local TV show, “is the policemen.”18 With each succession in leadership, the truce eroded just a little bit more.
The post-truce experiences of the two men who had run the Bronx Boys Club meeting, Eduardo Vincenty and Charlie Suarez, were representative. Vincenty was shot in the face when he tried to stop a fight. While he recovered, the Youth Services Agency eliminated his job, along with the ten-person youth crisismanagement team charged with mediating gang beefs. All the proposals the gangs were drawing up for jobs, service, and recreation programs were dead on arrival.
Just two days after the second truce meeting, FBI agents, alerted by the publicity over Black Benjie’s murder, arrested Charlie Suarez on his AWOL charge. As soon as they legally could, the Marines moved him out of his Brooklyn Navy Yard holding pen, fearing the Ghetto Brothers were preparing a massive gang attack on the Yard. After Congressman Herman Badillo interceded to have Suarez receive an Undesirable Discharge from the Marines, Suarez slowly drifted away from the Ghetto Brothers, eventually departing for Philadelphia with a full-blown heroin addiction.
As resources dried up, so did the Ghetto Brothers’ fervor. In a round of budget cuts, the Youth Services Agency closed the GB’s storefront. Some drifted away, some into the armed services, others to family and jobs, still others to drugs and jail. Melendez took a youth-worker job with the community organization, United Bronx Parents, and stepped down from the gang’s leadership. For his gang advocacy, Manny Dominguez was fired from his job at Dwyer Junior High.
In the streets, the romance with the gangs was over. On the part of Kelly Street called “Banana Kelly” for the way it curves, near where the Savage Skulls, the Young Lords and the block’s residents had once battled cops side by side, vigilante groups were chasing out gang members with pool sticks, pool balls, chains, and knives.
The largest gangs, Black Spades and the Savage Skulls, were fragmenting. Some Spades were registering voters, some were embroiled in the long war with the white gangs of the North Bronx, others were elbowing into the drug market. Some Skulls had begun motorcycle clubs, others were running protection rackets.
For the young Afrika Bambaataa, now a leader in the Black Spades, the peace meetings had a profound effect. He had been with Bam Bam as they cleared the blocks of drug dealers. Now he and other Spades assisted with community health programs. Bam Bam was fighting in Vietnam, and Bambaataa was gravitating to the disco parties that former Spades were throwing.
Across town, someone finally made a movie of the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls, the gang documentary 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s. But they seemed to be going through the motions. Hollywood, the fiery soul of the Bronx Boys Club meeting, was still flying cut sleeves but his protean energy was gone. Blackie was raising two children with his wife, struggling to make it between prison bids, and feeling nostalgic. “In the old days, it was nice,” he said, tentatively, “we just lived for now.” The youthful confidence he displayed in Rita Fecher’s reels had been replaced by adulthood and doubt. Only scenes of a block party—featuring a DJ spinning Chic records on Technics turntables as a teenage beauty named India chanted, “Yes yes y’all! Freak freak y’all!”—gave the movie any emotional lift.
If the Skulls and Nomads had dissipated, some Ghetto Brothers still spoiled for the great war. Amidst death threats to his wife and daughter from some of his Brothers, Benjy Melendez finally quit the group that had been his life, gathered up his family and disappeared. Bronx legend had it that Melendez died in prison and Suarez of a heroin overdose, GBs to the end. The only things that remained were the graffitied walls bearing the arrow-tipped tags of the gang and its members, and the music of the Ghetto Brothers’ Latin-funk band.
Gonna Take You Higher
The peace treaty had been momentous. Change was sweeping through the Bronx. Youthful energies turned from nihilistic implosion to creative explosion. Typically, the Ghetto Brothers were at the vanguard of this development as well.
Sometime after they had become Bronx celebrities, the Ghetto Brothers were approached by Ismael Maisonave, the owner of a small Latin label called Salsa International/Mary Lou Records who had mostly recorded descargas and guaguancos by the likes of Charlie Palmieri, Cachao, and Chivirico Davila. Benjy and Victor Melendez jumped at the chance to record their original compositions in a real studio, and signed the five-hundred-dollar contract. No date is listed on their eight-song album, Ghetto Brothers Power Fuerza, but it was probably released in 1972.
“This album contains a message; a message to the world, from the Ghetto Brothers,” the handwritten liner notes read. “If the Ghetto Brothers’ dream comes true, the ‘little people’ will be ‘little people’ no more, and make their own mark in this world.” But this wasn’t the protest or counterculture music the notes seemed to promise.
The Melendezes had grown up listening to the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and doo-wop. Other Bronx Puerto Ricans—like Willie Colon, a former gangbanger who wrote anthems for the street kids and sufferers, or Ray Barretto and Eddie Palmieri, whose music reflected Brown Power ferment—were updating Cuban roots music into a uniquely Nuyorican sound. But the Ghetto Brothers’ post-bugalú music seemed closer to the teen-themed Latin pop of California than the salsa of the Bronx, more Willie Bobo than Willie Colon.
Benjy and Victor brought back sweet melodies to the South Bronx, mostly writing closely harmonized pop with a wicked Latin backbeat, songs of love and betrayal with titles like “There Is Something in My Heart” or “You Say You Are My Friend.” Only “Viva Puerto Rico Libre”—a composition that moved through jibaro, bolero and funk styles—revealed their politics. The album was recorded in one take—lo-fi, raw, brimming with enthusiasm, a feeling that all their pent-up creativity could finally be released.
The Ghetto Brothers’ album never sold many copies or moved far beyond the Bronx, but it signaled an important shift. After the truce, the Ghetto Brothers band played Friday block parties, plugging their amps into the lampposts and inviting all the gangs to their turf. They were difficult, rowdy crowds, but songs like “Got This Happy Feeling,” a nod to The Beginning of the End’s “Funky Nassau,” and “Mastica Chupa Y Jala,” with its Santana guitar-hero aspirations, kept them dancing. The band’s signature song, “Ghetto Brothers Power,” was a funky Joe Bataan–meets–Sly Stone sure-shot. Benjy called out, “If you want to get your thing together, brothers and sisters, let’s do it Ghetto Brother style.” Then they launched into the kind of blazing drum-and-conga breakdown that drove the Bronx kids crazy. The song climaxed with a promise: “We are gonna take you higher with Ghetto Brother Power!”
Instead of the kind of power t
hat came from ideology, collectivity, or the barrel of a gun, this was the kind of power that came from celebrating being young and free. The turf grid was disintegrating. Gangs were dissolving. The new kids coming up were obsessed with flash, style, sabor. For them, the block party—not the political party—was the space of possibility.
The gangs had risen out of the ash, rubble, and blood of 1968. Five years later, the circle was ready to turn again.
The Father.
Photo © Marlon Ajamu Myrie
4.
Making a Name
How DJ Kool Herc Lost His Accent and
Started Hip-Hop
. . . the logic is an extension rather than a negation. Alias, a.k.a.; the names describe a process of loops. From A to B and back again.
Paul D. Miller
It has become myth, a creation myth, this West Bronx party at the end of the summer in 1973. Not for its guests—a hundred kids and kin from around the way, nor for the setting—a modest recreation room in a new apartment complex; not even for its location—two miles north of Yankee Stadium, near where the Cross-Bronx Expressway spills into Manhattan. Time remembers it for the night DJ Kool Herc made his name.
The plan was simple enough, according to the party’s host, Cindy Campbell. “I was saving my money, because what you want to do for back to school is go down to Delancey Street instead of going to Fordham Road, because you can get the newest things that a lot of people don’t have. And when you go back to school, you want to go with things that nobody has so you could look nice and fresh,” she says. “At the time my Neighborhood Youth Corps paycheck was like forty-five dollars a week—ha!—and they would pay you every two weeks. So how am I gonna turn over my money? I mean, this is not enough money!”