Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  A Dub History of “Boyz-N-The Hood”

  Jackson was proud of his rhyme. In it, Eazy cruises through town, “bored as hell” and wanting “to get ill.” First he spots his car-thief friend Kilo G cruising around looking for autos to jack. Then he catches his crackhead friend JD trying to steal his car stereo. After having words, JD walks off. When Eazy follows him to make peace, JD pulls his .22 automatic. In an instant, Eazy kills him.

  Like nothing has happened, he decides to see his girl for a sexual interlude. But she pisses him off, so he “reach(es) back like a pimp and slap(s) the hoe,” then does the same to her angry father. Later, he witnesses Kilo G getting arrested. Kilo won’t be given bail, so he sets off a prison riot.

  In “Boyz-N-The Hood,” girls serviced the boys, fathers were suckers and crackheads were marks. It was a seemingly irredeemable sub–Donald Goines pulp world. But then there was the unexpected finale.

  Kilo makes his trial appearance and there his girlfriend, Suzy, takes up guns against the state. In the gunfight, Suzy seems bulletproof. The deputies can’t stop her. Instead she goes out on her feet, not on her knees, getting sent up for a bid just like her man, barbed-wire love. By introducing this twist, a sly interpolation of Jonathan Jackson’s real-life drama, “Boyz-N-The Hood” rose to the level of generational myth.

  Perhaps O’Shea had heard the story as a youngster of another seventeen-year-old brother named Jackson, killed by sheriffs and prison guards in a 1970 Marin County courthouse shootout.

  As Angela Davis would later remind jurors in her own trial, Jonathan Jackson lost his brother, the writer George Jackson, to the prison system at the age of seven, serving a one-to-life sentence for second-degree robbery. In early 1970, some white and black prisoners at Soledad had a minor fistfight. White prison guard O. G. Miller swiftly ended the fight by firing at three black inmates—all of whom had been known as political activists. Two died almost instantly. Guards refused to allow medical aid, and the third was left in the yard to die. Later that winter, after an announcement that a grand jury investigation had cleared Miller, prisoners attacked another guard and threw him off a third-floor balcony. George and two others, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, the ones considered the political leaders of the prison, were framed for the murder. The crime could automatically bring George the death penalty.

  George’s letters to Jonathan, later collected in Soledad Brother, revealed the depth of their relationship. In the letters, he taught the younger sibling about communism, sex, resistance, being a man. But the letters remained much of what Jonathan would know of his brother, and words only hinted at the loss Jonathan was feeling. Davis wrote, “[B]ecause it had been cramped into prison visitors’ cubicles, into two-page, censored letters, the whole relationship revolved around a single aim—how to get George out here, on this side of the walls.” In turn, George noticed a change in his brother. In a letter to Angela Davis in May of 1970, he wrote of Jonathan, “[He] is at that dangerous age where confusion sets in and sends brothers either to the undertaker or to prison.”

  On August 3, in what many took to be an ominous sign, George was transferred from Soledad Prison to San Quentin Prison, in whose gas chamber he might be executed. Four days later, Jonathan strode into the Marin County Courthouse where a prisoner named John McClain was defending himself against charges he had stabbed a prison guard. Two other prisoners, Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, were also present to testify on McClain’s behalf. Jackson marched into the trial chambers with an assault rifle and a cache of weapons, and sat down. When he rose, it was to calmly say, “All right, gentleman, I’m taking over now.”

  Jackson taped a gun to the judge’s head, took several jurors and the district attorney as hostages, then walked with the three prisoners out to a van in the parking lot. Soon enough, a San Quentin guard shot at the van, and other guards and sheriffs joined in with a hail of gunfire. The bullets wounded the district attorney and a juror. The judge, Christmas, McClain and Jackson were killed.

  Deputies immediately began a nationwide search for Angela Davis, who was accused of supplying Jackson with one of the guns. She was captured and sent to prison on trumped-up charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. During Davis’s trial, George was killed by prison guards in a deadly prison-break attempt. Davis, Drumgo and Clutchette were later acquitted of all charges.

  Jonathan Jackson’s rebellion had been fearless, inarticulate and fatal. George mourned his brother by writing, “I want people to wonder at what forces created him, terrible, vindictive, cold, calm man-child, courage in one hand, machine gun in the other, scourge of the unrighteous.”7 He considered Jonathan “a soldier of the people,” an image that would find a different resonance in the Los Angeles street wars of the ‘80s.

  Whether Cube had intended to or not, “Boyz-N-The Hood” recovered the painful memory. Tracking the lives of Compton hardrocks “knowing nothing in life but to be legit,” “Boyz-N-The Hood” became an anthem for the fatherless, brotherless, state-assaulted, heavily armed West Coast urban youth, a generation of Jonathan Jacksons. The impact of “Boyz” had to do with its affirmation, its boast: “We’re taking over now.”

  And even as these boys unloaded both barrels into their authority symbols, Eazy E revealed their vulnerability. He delivered the rap in a deadpan singsong, a voice perhaps as much a result of self-conscious nervousness as hardcore fronting. Dre mirrored Eazy’s ambivalence in the jumpy robotic tics of the tiny drum machine bell. And as if to cover E’s studio anxiety, Dre added a pounding set of bass drum kicks to help drive home the chorus:

  Now the boys in the hood are always hard

  You come talking that trash we’ll pull your card

  Knowing nothing in life but to be legit

  Don’t quote me boy, ‘cause I ain’t said shit

  The kids knew Eazy’s mask instantly. They might have quoted his lines in their own adrenalin-infused, heart-poundingly defiant stances against their parents, teachers, the principal, the police, the probation officer.

  So Eazy E’s mask stayed. The mercenary b-boys were suddenly a group, perhaps even the “supergroup” Wright had talked about. He named it Niggaz With Attitude, a ridiculous tag that set impossibly high stakes. Now they had an image to uphold.

  Los Angeles Black

  Gangsta rap and postindustrial gangs did not begin in Compton, but a short distance north in Watts. Just like the Bronx gangs, they rose out of, as the ex-Crip warrior Sanyika Shakur would put it, “the ashes and ruins of the sixties.”8

  Watts was a desolate, treeless area located in a gully of sand and mud, the flood catchment for all the other neighborhoods springing up around downtown. In the 1920s Blacks had nowhere else to go.

  They had been present at the very first settling of Los Angeles in the late eighteenth century, and established their first community one hundred years later. Starting at First and Los Angeles streets in downtown, they spread east and south along San Pedro and Central Avenues, where they began developing businesses.9

  While the UNIA and the Urban League had established offices in the city by the 1920s, Los Angeles’s Blacks were different—less idealistic, more pragmatic, even a little mercenary. They joined together to break into all-white neighborhoods by sending a light-skinned buyer or a sympathetic white real estate agent to make the down payment. When Blacks moved in, whites moved out. In this way, they won blocks one by one. Sociologists had a term for this process of reverse block-busting: “Negro invasion.”

  One Black entrepreneur had even figured out how to hustle racial fear. He told the scholar J. Max Bond:

  One of my white friends would tip me off, and I would give him the money to buy a choice lot in a white community. The next day I would go out to look over my property. Whenever a white person seemed curious, I would inform him that I was planning to build soon. On the next day the whites would be after me to sell. I would buy the property sometimes for $200 and sell it for $800 or $900. The white people would pay any price
to keep the colored folks out of their communities.10

  But during the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan burnt crosses at 109th Street and Central Avenue, and whites erected racial covenants and block restrictions that prevented blacks from moving into their neighborhoods under legal threat of eviction. Watts, literally the bottom, called “Mud Town” even by its own residents, was the only place left to go. Because so many Blacks were moving into the city, and a Black mayor was certain to be the result, Los Angeles hastened to annex Watts in the mid-1920s.

  When World War II broke out, southern migrants poured into Los Angeles to fill the need for over half a million new workers in the shipyards, aircraft and rubber industries.11 Now African-American neighborhoods, especially Watts—which had become the center of Black Los Angeles—were overwhelmed with demands for health care, schooling, transportation and most of all, housing. Racial discrimination kept rents artificially high, and led to overcrowding as slumlords exploited poor families, who often joined together to split a monthly bill. Historian Keith Collins writes, “Single-dwelling units suddenly became four-unit dwellings; four-unit dwellings became small apartment dwellings; garages and attics, heretofore neglected, were suddenly deemed fit for human habitation.”12

  These conditions were barely eased when racial covenants were ruled unconstitutional in 1948 and huge public housing projects—the largest of which were Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts and Hacienda Village—began opening in the mid-1940s.13 Watts soon had the highest concentration of public housing west of the Mississippi. But after the end of the World War II, a deep recession set in, and much of Black Los Angeles never recovered.

  To the south, Compton looked like a promised land.14 The bungalow houses were clean and pleasant; the lots had lawns and space to grow gardens. At one time, the Pacific Electric Railroad station had hung a sign: NEGROES! BE OUT OF COMPTON BY NIGHTFALL.15 But after desegregation, Blacks filled the Central Avenue corridor from downtown all the way through Compton—the area that would come to be known as South Central.

  Black Los Angeles now had a rough dividing line down Vermont Street, separating the striving “Westside” from the suffering “Eastside.”16 East of Watts, in towns like Southgate and Huntington Park, white gangs like the Spook Hunters enforced a border at Alameda Avenue.17 And when whites began to leave the area in the 1950s, they were replaced by an aggressive, zero-tolerance police department under the leadership of Police Chief William Parker, a John Wayne–type character that made no secret of his racism.18 Black youth clubs became protective gangs.

  Los Angeles was a new kind of city, one in which most of the high-wage job growth would occur far from the inner-city outside a ring ten miles north and west of City Hall.19 When these suburban communities proliferated after the war, people of color were effectively excluded from the job and housing bonanza. Indeed, from nearly the beginning of the city’s history, Blacks and other people of color in Los Angeles had been confined to living in The Bottoms—the job-scarce, mass-transit deprived, densely populated urban core.

  These were the conditions that underlined the city’s first race riots, 1943’s Zoot Suit riots, in which white sailors, marines and soldiers brutalized Chicanos and then Blacks from Venice Beach to East Los Angeles to Watts. And these conditions had only worsened by the time a late summer heatwave hit Watts in 1965.

  Remember Watts

  On the night of August 11, a routine drunk driving arrest on Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street escalated into a night of rioting. White police had stopped a pair of young Black brothers, Marquette and Ronald Frye, returning from a party only a few blocks from their home for driving erratically. As a crowd formed in the summer dusk and their mother, Rena Frye, came out to scold the boys, dozens of police units rumbled onto Avalon. In an instant, the scene began to deteriorate.

  Marquette, perhaps embarrassed by the appearance of his mother, began resisting the officer’s attempts to handcuff him. Soon the cops were beating him with a baton. Seeing this, Frye’s brother and mother tussled with other cops and were arrested as well. Another woman, a hairdresser from down the street who had come to see what was going on, was beaten and arrested after spitting on a cop’s shirt. Chanting “Burn, baby, burn!” the crowd erupted.

  Over the next two nights, the police lost control of the streets. They were ambushed by rock-throwing youths. They were attacked by women who seized their guns. Their helicopters came under sniper fire. Systematic looting and burning began. Among the first things to go up in smoke were the files of credit records in the department stores.20 Groceries, furniture stores and gun and surplus outlets were hit next. After these places were ransacked, they were set ablaze. One expert attributed the riot’s blueprint to the local gangs—the Slausons, the Gladiators and the mainly Chicano set, Watts Gang V—who had temporarily dropped their rivalries.21

  “This situation is very much like fighting the Viet Cong,” Police Chief William Parker told the press on Friday the 13th. “We haven’t the slightest idea when this can be brought under control.”22 Later he called the rioters “monkeys in a zoo.”23 By the evening, the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Office had begun firing on looters and unarmed citizens, leaving at least six dead. Two angry whites reportedly drove into Jordan Downs and began shooting at Black residents.24

  Newspaper headlines read ANARCHY U.S.A.25

  The National Guard arrived the next day. The death toll peaked sharply in the last two days of civil unrest. Rioting lasted five days and resulted in $40 million in damages and thirty-four dead. Until 1992, they were the worst urban riots ever recorded.

  After the riots, Watts became a hotbed of political and cultural activity. Author Odie Hawkins wrote, “Watts, post outrage, was in a heavy state of fermentation. Everybody was a poet, a philosopher, an artist or simply something exotic. Even people who weren’t any of those things thought they were.”26 It was a time of new beginnings: A week after the riots, the Nation of Islam’s downtown mosque had been shot up and nearly destroyed by LAPD officers who claimed to be searching for a nonexistent cache of looted weapons. But the mosque survived and thrived. Soon the Nation would welcome Marquette Frye as its most prominent new member.

  The gangs, as Mike Davis wrote, “joined the Revolution.”27 Maulana Ron Karenga put together the US Organization by recruiting the Gladiators and the Businessmen.28 Members of the Slausons and the Orientals formed the Sons of Watts, another cultural nationalist organization. The powerful Slauson leader Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter led many more ex-Slausons and other gang members to reject Karenga and the cultural nationalists and affiliate with the revolutionary nationalist Black Panthers.29

  On 103rd Street, the Black Panthers set up an office next to the Watts Happening Coffee House, which housed Mafundi, a cultural performance space. In 1966, the screenwriter and poet Bud Schulberg opened the Watts Writers Workshop there. It quickly became a cultural haven for some of the most promising artistic voices in the area, including Hawkins, author Quincy Troupe, poet Kamau Daa’ood, and three young poets that would call themselves the Watts Prophets.

  Anthony “Amde” Hamilton, a Watts native, was an ex-convict and an activist when he found the Workshop through Hawkins. Soon he was working at Mafundi and serving as the Assistant Director of the Workshop. In 1969, Hawkins and Hamilton assembled a group of poets from the Workshop to record The Black Voices: On the Streets in Watts. In a bulldog voice—one that Eazy E would later evoke, and that would be sampled by dozens of gangsta rap producers—Hamilton growled, “The meek ain’t gon’ inherit shit, ‘cause I’ll take it!”

  Through the happenings on 103rd Street, Hamilton met Richard Dedeaux, a Louisiana transplant, and Otis O’Solomon (then Otis Smith) from Alabama. They began performing poetry with a female pianist Dee Dee O’Neal, and conga accompaniment. In 1971, they recorded Rapping Black in a White World, a prophetic rap document. On the cover a child of the Revolution—a boy who would come of age in the eighties—wrapped himself in a soldier’s oversized unifo
rm and embraced a shotgun.

  During the Watts riots, they had seen a racial apocalypse outlined in the “freedom flames” blackening the structures they did not own and could not control. Their poems were decidedly edgy, imbued with righteous rage, full of wordly pessimism. On “A Pimp,” Otis O’Solomon rapped,

  Growing up in world of dog eat dog I learned

  the dirtiest dog got the bone

  meaning not the dog with the loudest bark

  but the coldest heart.

  They chronicled tragic pimps, recounted drug-addled and bullet-riddled deaths, and called for the rise of ghetto warriors in the mold of Nat Turner. It was Black Art, as Baraka had called for, that drew blood. But this ferment could not last forever.

  Panthers to Crips

  The Prophets were close to the young Bunchy Carter. Once a feared leader of the Slausons, as well as its roughneck inner-core army, the Slauson Renegades, he met Eldridge Cleaver while doing time for armed robbery, and was now the Southern California leader of the Black Panther Party. He was formidable—an organic intellectual, community organizer, corner rapper, and “street nigga” all at the same time—”considered,” Elaine Brown wrote, “the most dangerous Black man in Los Angeles.”30 The Slausons had started at Fremont High in Watts, but Carter now commanded the love of Black teens of the high schools in South Central.31 His bodyguard was a Vietnam veteran named Elmer Pratt, whom he renamed Geronimo ji Jaga. The two were enrolled at UCLA, where they studied and planned the Revolution.

  The Panthers and Karenga’s US Organization were fighting for control of UCLA’s Black Studies department, as FBI and LAPD provocateurs secretly and systematically raised the personal and ideological tensions between the two. On the morning of January 17, 1969, a Black Student Union meeting ended with the organizations firing on each other in Campbell Hall. Carter and Panther John Huggins were shot dead. Coming after a year of bloody confrontations with authorities across the country that had left dozens of Party leaders dead, the Panthers called Carter’s and Huggins’s deaths assassinations.