by Jeff Chang
On the Move
Outside the political ferment of Bambaataa’s household the revolution was being pre-empted. In 1968, heroin made a sudden, dramatic return to the streets of the southeast Bronx. Richie Perez, later of the Young Lords Party, was then a teacher at Monroe High School across the street from Bronx River Houses. “It came fast and there was a lot of it. It was all over the place. Students I knew were getting strung out,” he says. At the same time, white gangs joined together in a loose federation to prey upon on youths of color. Black and Puerto Rican gangs in the Soundview area surged in response to the junkies and the white gangs, and then they turned on each other.
Bambaataa was drawn into the gang life as inexorably as any young boy from Bronx River would have to be. The first gang that caught his attention was a group founded there called P.O.W.E.R., an acronym he says stood for “People’s Organization for War and Energetic Revolutionaries.” P.O.W.E.R. took up the Black Panthers’ rhetoric but had the somewhat less lofty, if no less urgent, purpose of protecting Bronx River from being overrun by Bronxdale’s Black Spades. Bambaataa enlisted, but when the group began a war with the white gangs, he says, escalating violence and police repression eventually drove their leaders underground. “That’s when I decided to turn Spades and then flip Bronx River into Spades,” he says. P.O.W.E.R.’s only remaining claim to history is to be the first gang named on the 1971 Peace Treaty.
As a Spade, Bambaataa made his rep by being unafraid to cross turfs to forge relationships with other gangs. He says, “I was a person who was always in other areas. So if I was a Spade, I still was with the Nomads. If I was with the Nomads, I was hanging with the Javelins. When I came into any group, I had the power, the backing of the other group I was with. Although I was a Spade, I still had power and control of some of the Nomads, some of the Javelins.” Soon, Bambaataa’s ability to move between gangs did not look like a weakness, but a strength. “I was the person that if you had problems, I could rally up three to four hundred at one time and move on you,” he says.
The Spades’ president, Bam Bam, made the whip-smart young Bambaataa a warlord. He was responsible for building the ranks and expanding the turf of the Spades. “I took my things of attacking areas from the history of Napoleon, Shaka Zulu. I used things I was reading in school to attack areas and make them join up with us,” Bambaataa says. He helped consolidate Bronx River’s control of the Black Spades and enable their spread to the Soundview, Castle Hill and Monroe Houses, and as far west as Patterson Houses. The Spades soon moved into the projects of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens and became the city’s biggest gang. “Everywhere there was a police precinct, there was a Spades chapter,” Bambaataa says.
When racial tensions exploded at Stevenson High School, Bambaataa led Spades in confrontations with white gangs all across Soundview and West Farms. But he also showed signs of ambivalence. “For the first week things seemed to go okay,” he wrote in a class assignment. Then, in the third person, he described the escalation of racial gang tensions to a climactic shopping center rumble. “After that day Stevenson was never the same peaceful high school again.”4
As these battles were escalating, the 1971 truce brought together Black and brown gangs in the South Bronx. The peace treaty, particularly the Spades’ president Bam Bam’s personal commitment to it, had a profound impact on the young warlord. Bambaataa began to search for a way out, and he found his skills in mobilizing for war could just as easily be turned to peace. As his friend Jay McGluery told journalist Steven Hager, “There were so many gangs and he knew at least five members in every one. Any time there was a conflict, he would try and straighten it out. He was into communications.”5
Herc’s New Cool offered Bambaataa a way forward, and two former Black Spades had also become DJs—Kool DJ D at Bronx River and Disco King Mario at Bronxdale. Bambaataa apprenticed with both ex-Spade DJs, then began throwing his own parties in the community center just steps from his front door. “When I did become a DJ, I already had an army with me so I already knew that my parties would automatically be packed,” he says.
That year, he began the Bronx River Organization as an alternative to the Spades. In some ways, the move resembled the Ghetto Brothers’ transformation.6 Bambaataa says, “We had a motto: ‘This is an organization. We are not a gang. We are a family. Do not start trouble. Let trouble come to you, then fight like hell.’ ”
But some battle lines were dissolving. Partying was a new thing. Bambaataa formed a strategic alliance with Disco King Mario’s Chuck Chuck City Crew at Bronxdale, and people from other housing projects came into his fold. The Organization eventually dropped the Bronx River prefix, and evolved into a vehicle for Bambaataa’s expanding gatherings and parties.
While Kool DJ D, Disco King Mario, and other Bronx River DJs like DJ Tex played uptempo disco music popular on the radio, Bambaataa was taken more by DJ Kool Herc’s break-centered—as opposed to song-centered—style. Bam’s sound became a rhythmic analogue to his peace-making philosophy; his set-lists had the same kind of inclusiveness and broad-mindedness he was aspiring to build through The Organization. He mixed up breaks from Grand Funk Railroad and the Monkees with Sly and James and Malcolm X speeches. He played salsa, rock, and soca with the same enthusiasm as soul and funk. He was making himself open to the good in everything. He eclipsed the other DJs as the most renowned programmer in the borough.
Each weekend Bambaataa would preside over a ritual of motion and fun. Jazzy Jay says, “Block parties was a way to do your thing, plugging into the lamppost. Sometimes we used to play till two in the morning. And we had the support of the whole community. It’s like, we’d rather see them doing that, doing something constructive than to be down the block beating each other upside the head like they used to do in the gang days.”
Soulski
He had found something that was powerful, creative, something that signaled life. But it was a death that reversed Bambaataa’s course for good. On January 6, 1975, police killed his cousin Soulski—he will not divulge Soulski’s real name—in a bloody shootout.
Deep in Section B of the January 11 edition of the Amsterdam News was this police-blotter clip:
TWO SHOT DEAD IN BRONX DUEL
Two young men were shot to death during a gunfight with the Bronx police Monday night on Pelham Parkway off White Plains Road, and another was taken to the hospital suffering with injuries. The dead men were identified as Ronald Brown, 20, who lived at 2187 Washington Ave., and Ronald Bethel, 17, who lived at 2100 Tiebout Ave. Taken into police custody was James Wilder, 20, of 2507 Washington Ave.
Disobey
Police said Officers Jeffrey Matlin and Robert Visconti were on patrol on Pelham Parkway when they observed three men in a car who were acting suspiciously.
The police motioned to the car to pull over. The car stopped and the three men got out but instead of walking toward the police car the three walked to the rear of the car.
Police said one of the men had a shotgun and the other two were also armed. The officers reportedly ordered the men to drop their guns but were fired on instead. The police returned the fire and the three ran into the wooded area of Pelham Park.
Shootout
The three suspects ran East on Pelham Parkway with the police chasing them. The two officers were later joined by Officers Charles lacovone, Donald Powers and John B. Kelly who aided the two officers in the shootout.
Police said the 1968 Mercury, in which the three were riding, is owned by Brown’s mother, Mrs. Sarah Williams. Det. Edward Heck of the Ninth Homicide zone is assigned to the case.7
Bambaataa, who still keeps a copy of Soulski’s death certificate, does not speak much on the incident. But he clearly believes something else was going on. His voice lowers to a whisper as he says, “They shot him all in the lungs and the chest, a whole bunch of spots. They tore him up.”
A month after Soulski’s killing, Bronx cops shot dead a fourteen-year-old who had been joyriding in a stolen car. A pol
ice spokesperson claimed the officers fired after the boy had lunged at them with a knife, but autopsies showed he had been shot through the back. Both these incidents precipitated a different kind of crisis than Cornell Benjamin’s had for the Ghetto Brothers; they directed the gangs’ rage outward against the authorities.
Representatives from the Amsterdam News joined community leaders in a grassroots effort to reduce tensions in the neighborhoods. They urged Bambaataa and the Spades not to retaliate, to let the justice system do its work. But the Peacemakers gang had already declared open season on police and firefighters. Other gang leaders called Bambaataa to offer their support should he choose to declare war on the cops.
Many years later, he would do a song that he called “Bambaataa’s Theme,” an electro version of the score from John Carpenter’s 1976 movie, Assault on Precinct 13. That movie had ushered in a new genre—the urban horror flick—which would come to include films like Daniel Petrie’s 1981 remake of the 1948 John Wayne vehicle Fort Apache, called Fort Apache: The Bronx. Instead of Indian braves, Zulu warriors or graveyard zombies, Assault on Precinct 13’s heroes defended themselves in a desolate police station against marauding waves of dark, heavily armed gang members seeking revenge for their cop-killed brothers. Bambaataa’s attachment to the movie raises intriguing questions: Did he sympathize with the attackers or the attacked? What kinds of emotions could that filmic assault have fired in him?
At the conclusion of Zulu, the South African warriors appeared on the mountaintop above Rorke’s Drift once again. But instead of attacking, they raised their assegais and their voices in praise-song and tribute to the bravery of the British soldiers. Then they withdrew quietly back to KwaZululand. In 1964, a year after Kenya gained its independence from Great Britain, it may have seemed the perfect ending for the nostalgic audiences of the fading Empire—the natives retreating, despite their overwhelming numbers, before the bloodied but unbowed exemplars of imperial virtue. But in 1975, Bambaataa, thinking not of the past but the future, may have seen that ending much differently.
At the request of community leaders, Bambaataa and his followers had agreed to watch the white cops go to trial in both the police shooting incidents. But the cops were acquitted and the Bronx gangs were ready to roll. Bambaataa had finally reached his turning point. The gangs never launched a final do-or-die attack on the police precincts. Instead, like the chanting Zulu warriors, Bambaataa and his followers withdrew, to live.
Closing the Loop
The alienated youth of the Bronx needed something to believe in. While Bambaataa had been in the Spades, he says, “a lot of the organizations came to speak to us. You had some Christian groups that came around from different churches, radical reverends that came out and spoke to a lot of the street gangs. Some of us just pushed it aside.”
After Malcolm X, who would hear of a heaven for the meek? Only controversial prophets of the Garveyite tradition like the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and Dr. Malachi Z. York (also called Imam Isa, or As Sayyid Issa Al Haadi AI Mahdi), the leader of the Ansaaru Allah community, could speak to alienated youth. Bambaataa says, “They held the teachings of ‘You’re not a ‘nigga.’ You’re not colored. Wake up Black man and Black woman and love yourself. Respect your own. Turn back to Africa.’ That started sticking with a lot of the brothers and sisters.”
Racialized calls to redemption gave Bambaataa’s anger a focus: “I wasn’t agreeing with what white people was saying. You start questioning all that and you start traveling and meeting other people and seeing the struggles everybody had. Everybody is talking about what the white man did from country to country. You start believing strongly what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad was saying, that the white man is the devil. But as you get older and wiser, you see why he did that—to clear off Black people’s thinking that they was inferior and whites are superior and start saying they are of gods.
“What the Nation was saying was, ‘When you’re ready to come, we’ll be waiting for you.’ And that always stuck in my mind and heart. I said I have to do some type of change to get the mindset of the masses that was following me to lead them to another way,” he says.
Months before Soulski’s passing, Bambaataa won a Housing Authority essay-writing contest. The prize was a trip to India. “You had to write an essay on why you would want to go to India. So I won, but when it was time for me to meet up with the people that send you off to go, I was outside giving out flyers for the next party I was giving and forgot all about it. So I lost the trip, which was great, because the following year I won the trip to go to Africa and Europe,” he says.
For a youth who had known nothing but the streets of the Bronx, the trip was life-changing. “I saw all the Black people waking up in the early morning, opening their stores, doing the agriculture, doing whatever they have to do to keep the country happening,” he says. “Compared to what you hear in America about, ‘Black people can’t do this and that,’ that really just changed my mind.”
His head bursting with ideas, Bambaataa came back to the Bronx ready to transform The Organization. “My vision was to try to organize as many as I could to stop the violence. So I went around different areas, telling them to join us and stop your fighting,” Bambaataa says.
As the summer of 1975 drew closer, the word began getting out. Jazzy Jay says, “I remember my friend came up and said, ‘Yeah you heard that cat Bambaataa? He’s calling himself Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation now. He got some movement called the Zulu Nation.”
Movement was literally at the heart of the organization, in the form of the Zulu King dancers. “The Zulu Kings started with five main guys: Zambu Lanier, Kusa Stokes, Ahmad Henderson, Shaka Reed, Aziz Jackson. Then came the Shaka Kings and Queens. And it was just as many women that could tear guys up on the dancefloor as there was men,” Bambaataa says. Then the rappers came in. “We had Queen Lisa Lee and Sha-Rock, who was the first two females that was blowing it up, then Pebblee Poo.”
Zulu Nation was returning the Bronx to an era of style, celebration and optimism. “It was no more where you had the Hell’s Angels looking type jackets or you rolling around in dirt-stank shit just to show you were an outlaw and you could be the most dirtiest bastard out there,” he says. “It almost flipped back to the fifties gangs where they was wearing the nice satin jackets and the nice names. As you got into the graffiti artists, then you had the aerosol paintings on the jackets. People was getting more cool. It just started switching the whole culture around into this whole ‘party and get down’ atmosphere.”
At the same time, Bambaataa recast the Organization’s credo. “What is the job of a Zulu?” his Infinity Lessons would later ask. “The job of a Zulu is to survive in life. To be open-minded dealing with all walks of life upon this planet Earth and to teach [each] other truth (Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding). To respect those who respect them, to never be the aggressor or oppressor. To be at peace with self and others, but if or when attacked by others who don’t wish peace with the Zulus, then the Zulus are ordered in the name of ALLAH, Jehovah to fight those who fight against you.”
Gang Legacies
But Bambaataa’s moves were not received well by all. “You had members who were like, ‘What is this? Stop all this Zulu thing,’ ” Bambaataa says. “Some of The Organization didn’t like what we was doing. They became known as the Gestapos. Other ones became the Casanova Crew and other crews that were out there.”
Strands of Nazi symbolism, a remnant of the Hell’s Angels influence, had run through the gangs of the early ‘70s. They kept private “Gestapos,” inner-core cliques of their fiercest warriors who would act as elite intelligence and battle units. As the gang era gave way, early graf writers like BONANZA and SANTANA 204 were known to draw swastikas next to their names.8 One writer even named himself HITLER II. Bambaataa describes the new Gestapos and other similar breakaway crews as “the stickup kid, gangsta style that caused a lot of havoc in the city.”
Au
thorities had long abandoned large parts of the Bronx; renegade party-starters never had to worry about permits and police. But crowd control was always going to be an issue. There were still turfs, Bambaataa says, and “you still had violence.”
So DJs backed themselves with area crews who kept the peace, and, often, other crews out. Grandmaster Flash, for instance, secured the Casanovas. As big as DJ Kool Herc was, he would not play Bronx River unless Bambaataa extended an invitation. On the other hand, only at Bambaataa’s parties could the rawest rival crews come together, their tensions transmuted into raucous energy.
“Sometimes you’d be at parties and they’d start their chanting and we’d start our chanting,” he chuckles. “It’d be like, ‘Zulu! Gestapo!’ And that became known as the ‘War Chant.’ Sometimes there might be other crews there that might get smart and they end up getting it from both sides!”
This adrenaline-pumping unpredictability held an allure—girls, music, dancing, guns, anything could happen. “Sometimes when DJs played against other DJs, you might have lost your whole system if you didn’t win and you didn’t have a large group backing you up,” says Bambaataa. “But if somebody didn’t do right and did wrong in our area, they had to really think, because it was a large percentage of areas that was down with Zulu.
“In the early seventies, there used to be a big thing for [angel] dust. And I started a big campaign on my flyers—’Stop smoking that dust y’all.’ I had my little cliches, had my rappers doing it, and the dealers in Harlem didn’t like that. They sent some Hitlers to come out and hammer us. But they made a mistake. They find out that at a Bambaataa party, everyone at the party is down with Afrika Bambaataa, so they must have ain’t done research to find out what’s up.”