Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  Los Angeles’s demographics also made peace work complicated. Inner-city gangs once largely fought along racial lines. Mexicans against Mexicans, Blacks against Blacks, Asians against Asians. But by the 1980s, the ethnic math had become trickier. Samoan gangs formed from Carson to Compton, often affiliating with Black Blood or Crip sets. Cambodians and Latinos turned bloody rivals in Long Beach. Salvadorans clashed with Mexicans from MacArthur Park to the Valley. Blacks and Latinos warred on the beach in Venice.

  In 1980, a gang peace conference at California State University at North-ridge drew 1,500 Latino gang members, and ended with a treaty that lasted a year and a half. In 1984, a treaty in Hawthorne brought together a number of Sureño sets. But both these peaces were doomed by the quickly changing conditions on the streets. The crack trade was spreading. Giving up one’s ‘hood was no longer an option.

  After the Long Beach Arena riots in 1986, KDAY sponsored an anti-gang radio show with Run DMC and Barry White, a former member of the pre-riot Watts gang, the Businessmen, that received over 1,500 calls. The station decided to hold a “Day of Peace” concert and rally in November. These events supported the efforts of the Community Youth Gang Services (CYGS) to organize a holiday truce from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day.

  CYGS was successful in lining up dozens of gangs, including a number of eastside Latino gangs and the mostly Black Bounty Hunters (Blood) set of Watts’s Nickerson Gardens projects, to sign temporary truces. By 1988, black churches, civil rights and nonprofit organizations mounted competing efforts to forge a broader, permanent truce. Bickering between community leaders ended these initiatives, but the idea took root among key gang leaders and activists. The breakthrough moment came at a peace summit later that year, when a Cirkle City Piru named Twilight Bey stood before flashing cameras and shook the hand of Danifu, one of the founding Crips.

  Brothers weren’t ready for this yet. The media had incorrectly described Bey as a shot-caller. He had never made that claim, but soon his own Blood comrades were coming to his house to threaten his life. Bey stood his ground. He told them he was ready to die for peace, and then he demonstrated with his fists, and slowly won the respect of his homies. He was one of a new breed of street soldiers.

  The Deadly Geography of Watts

  Bey was from the Watts projects of Hacienda Village. During the 1950s, Simon Rodia’s gift of beauty-from-rubble, the Watts Towers, marked the physical and psychological center of the city. After the ‘65 Uprising, the action shifted to the revolutionary motion and light on 103rd Street. As the long decline began in the 1970s, the four major public housing developments—Jordan Downs to the northeast, Imperial Courts to the southeast, Nickerson Gardens to the southwest and Hacienda Village to the northwest—became Watts’s irregular heartbeat and tortured soul.

  Down the middle of the city ran the old railroad tracks. The train line that had once delivered big-dreaming southern Blacks to Watts was now the dividing line between the Bloods on the west and the Crips on the east. At Hacienda Village, there were the Cirkle City Pirus, and at Nickerson Gardens, the Bounty Hunter Bloods. On the other side, there were the Jordan Crips and at Imperial Courts, the PJ Watts Crips. Edwin Markham Intermediate School, located directly across the tracks from the three major spires of the Watts Towers, was literally in the troubled heart of the city.

  Administrators at Markham figured that 10 percent of the students banged. The 1,600 seventh-to-ninth graders knew the number was closer to a third.1 They called it “Gladiator School.” It was where youths underwent their rites of passage into ganghood.

  “All of the factions went to that school,” says Aqeela Sherrills, who grew up with his older brother, Daude, in the Jordan Downs projects. “In ‘78, one of the brothers from my neighborhood got killed up there by a brother from Nickerson Gardens. And that started the war. So when I got there in ‘81, it was scary.”

  The older guys in the neighborhood, Sherrills says, “told us when somebody asks you where you from, you fire on him. That was like a sign to say you about to get jumped. Somebody asked me where I was from, I was like, okay, those are the words. So I stole on this cat, we got into a fight, and then eventually I was associated with the crew that I ran with.” Whether he liked it or not, he was representing for the Jordan Downs Crips.

  In 1984, when Aqeela was in the ninth grade, he and his homies got into a fight with kids from Nickerson Gardens. Later that afternoon, as they sat on the track-field bleachers, their rivals came back with guns and shot his best friend in the head. Boys who played with each other in athletic leagues just a few years before were now deadly enemies, handed a cold destiny by history and geography.

  New Black Nation

  By 1986, the gang leadership at Jordan Downs was changing. The Jordan Downs Crips were fading, and a new generation of Crips grew from the ground up. In the sprawling projects they cliqued up in different factions like the Playboy Hoo-Rides, the JDC, Eastside Kids, the Sunset Ave. Boys, the Young Hustlas and the Watts Baby Locs. In time the Baby Locs took over, and began “courting in” all the shorties from the cliques into a set of sets, the Grape Street Crips. “ ‘Courtin’ in’,” says Daude Sherrills, “is when everybody got to fight each other. That was a part of your initiation process.” The new Grape Streets positioned themselves outside the traditional Crip/Blood axis. Instead of red or blue, Daude says, “The whole ‘hood started banging purple.”

  In high school, Aqeela distanced himself from gang life, got a job after school selling candy in the shiny exurbs of Orange County, and was accepted to Cal State Northridge in 1988. Daude had a more difficult time. He was determined to make up for getting kicked out of junior high and being held back a grade. He attended night school to graduate with his class in 1986. But as just another eighteen-year-old in Watts, he had no job prospects, and returned to his old ways.

  “I was crackin’, selling weed, beefing with rivals, escaping raids and escaping shootouts, the whole nine, just trying to survive. I didn’t care if I lived or died. It was no role models, no teachers, no preachers, no imams, none of that was around,” he says. Instead he saw his friends heading off to prison or into early graves. On his twentieth birthday, with the news that his girlfriend was expecting his first son, Daude finally decided to save himself.

  Both the Sherrills, who had grown up with the Nation of Islam, noticed that Minister Farrakhan had launched the “Stop the Killing” campaign. Across town, Imam Mujahid Abdul-Karim from the local Masjid al-Rasul was working to end the violence with Nickerson Gardens O.G.’s—an effort which included Loaf, one of the Bloods who had set off the war with Jordan Downs at Markham in the late ‘70s. At the gym in Nickerson Gardens, the peacemakers put up a new mural, entitled “Crossfire (The First Word on Peace),” a memorial to the dozens of residents who had been killed in gang warfare. The words on the wall read, KEEP THE FUTURE ALIVE, and NOBODY CAN STOP THIS WAR BUT US.2

  At Northridge, Aqeela soaked up the music of KRS-One, X-Clan and Public Enemy, read The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin’s account of the Atlanta child murders, and was stirred. He joined the Black Student Union, and embarked on a journey into knowledge of self. He became a fundamentalist Shi’ite, and studied Egyptology, the Supreme Mathematics and esoterica. He was searching for a life mission, and staring at a map of Watts one day, he found it.

  “One of the things I came to is that three of the four major housing projects—the Jordan Downs, Imperial Courts and the Nickerson Gardens—fell in a perfect ninety-degree angle. And the hypotenuse runs from the Nickerson Gardens to the Jordan Downs, which in my studies, was the Line of God, the infinite line,” says Sherrills. “My epiphany was if we connected the Jordan Downs and the Nickerson Gardens, if we brought those two neighborhoods together, we would create a domino effect for peace all across the country.” Geography had been destiny, but history did not have to keep them shackled. Here was the evidence of a higher creative power, a master plan.

  Aqeela took this insight back t
o Daude, who had already thrown away his purple Grape Street gear for African garb and begun organizing peace efforts in Jordan Downs. First they organized the African Brothers Collective, recruiting Black student activists from UCLA, Cal State Northridge and USC to join brothers from the projects in Watts. They held study group sessions and demonstrations. Then they started speaking to their Grape Street comrades, framing peace in the new language and imagery of the streets.

  Aqeela says, “I had to convince the brothers in the neighborhood that we had to be the ones to initiate the process. The way that I was explaining it is that when you take the colors red and blue, which are both represented by the Nick-ersons and the PJs, you get purple, you get the Jordan Downs. And the whole concept of grapes, they’re all on the vine, but they’re all connected.”

  At Jordan Downs and Nickerson Gardens, the collective broke up dice games, and gave speeches under a red, black, and green flag. They chanted, “I don’t know but I’ve been told, African people on a mighty road. Let’s destroy the old plantation, now we’re gonna build a new Black nation.” They were updating the spirit of ‘66 with the unique outsider knowledge of the gang-ridden ‘80s.

  “Because of this transition that was taking place, law enforcement was struggling to keep things the way they were. We were job security,” says Aqeela. “So we started standing up to the police.”

  They distributed information about citizens’ rights. They put up anticop messages on the walls. They intervened to stop police beatings. In the projects, fascination slowly replaced fear. The group of voices calling for peace grew.

  Father Figures

  At the same time, Jim Brown, the football and movie hero, was looking for the next generation of leaders. After his storied NFL career and big-screen stardom, Brown had devoted his life to Black nationalist causes. He had developed a life management skills curriculum that he was teaching in prisons, but he felt he had a bigger calling. When he saw Chuck D on a TV interview, he was inspired. “It’s a whole new culture out there, new music, a new language,” he said. “The NAACP has been good in courts, the Urban League helps with jobs. They’re all above these guys on the street and the guys coming out of prison. They can’t relate to them.”3 With fascination and concern, Brown watched his old friend Minister Farrakhan expand his work with the gangs.

  From its mosques in Compton and South Central, the Nation of Islam was sending “God Squads” into the neighborhoods to convert gang members and talk peace. But the squads suddenly seemed to be drawing unwanted attention from the authorities. Just before sunrise on January 3, 1990, a car of two L.A. police officers tailed a God Squad caravan of three cars of thirteen Black Muslims leaving for a morning workout at a Crenshaw gym. The police pulled one of the cars over a traffic violation. One of the Muslims stepped forward to question why they were being ticketed, while the others surrounded the officers. The cops radioed for backup, and a fight broke out. By the end, twenty-four officers, four of whom were later treated for injuries, had used a stun gun and batons to subdue the thirteen Muslims.

  Representatives of the Nation of Islam met with the LAPD a few weeks later to ease tensions. But the day after the meeting, on January 23, L.A. sheriff’s deputies wounded one Black Muslim and shot Oliver X. Beasley in the head, after a confrontation that had begun with another traffic-stop gone awry. Elders were reminded of the authorities’ vicious attacks on Nation mosques and the Black Panthers. Youths—whether gangbangers or not—were looking for someone to defend and protect them, something like a father figure.

  Minister Farrakhan hastily returned to Los Angeles. At Beasley’s funeral, Farrakhan praised him as a man working for an end to gang violence and crack slanging. “Drug dealers deal on the corner and they let it happen,” he said. “The moment someone puts on a suit and bow tie to clean up the problem, here come the police to shoot them dead.”4

  The following week, Farrakhan delivered another public address, this time to a massive crowd of twenty thousand at the Sports Arena. He warned the police and sheriffs that the city was on the verge of erupting. “If we reach a point where we can tolerate this abuse no longer, we will rise up against your authority,” he said. “And we would rather die than live like dogs under your roof.”5

  Thousands of Crips and Bloods were in the audience, and Farrakhan directed the rest of his speech to them. “Stop the killing,” he said, standing beneath a fifteen-foot picture of Beasley. “Why can we take the trigger and pull it at each other? We are killing ourselves.”6

  As he spoke, another message rippled through the crowd: The Minister and Jim Brown would be hosting a meeting that weekend to discuss a ceasefire. It would be held at Brown’s mansion in the Hollywood hills, on neutral ground high above the city.

  Learning to Speak

  From Brown’s deck, the city grid sprawled far to the south, from the hills westward to the coast. Even the city’s violent, smog-altered sunsets would look a lot different up there.

  More than two hundred Crips and Bloods from neighborhoods across the city came to Brown’s house, including the Sherrills, Twilight Bey and an O. G. Blood from the neighborhood of Inglewood known as “The Jungle” named T. Rodgers. Minister Farrakhan said a prayer for peace. Brown took the floor to say that the meeting would not have an agenda, it was a safe space for them to get things off their chests and discuss starting a peace movement. Then Minister Farrakhan, his son, Mustapha, and Brown sat down to listen. And slowly, putting years of bloodshed behind them, the gang members, one after another, stood up to speak.

  After this gathering, the peace work intensified. Brown opened his house to the gang members, first throwing parties, then holding regular Wednesday night meetings. Members of the Rolling 60s, the Rolling 40s, the Harlem 30s Crips, the Venice Shoreline Crips and the Van Ness Gangster Bloods—sets engaged in some of the city’s bloodiest wars—came to participate.

  “Young men expressed their anger and pain but also expressed that they would try to communicate,” Twilight Bey said. “We were asked questions that weren’t ever asked before: What are we going to do to change our situation? Do we have the power? . . . Do we have any say on what happens in political arena? What does it take to change things?”7

  The Sherrills, Bey, Rodgers and several others became the core of Brown’s new organization, Amer-I-Can. They revamped Brown’s curriculum, which, Aqeela says, “became the foundation for the peace being able to happen. It created a common language for us to be able to communicate with. And also it required individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and not blame people for where they were.”

  Twilight Bey and his comrades began organizing peace among the Bloods in Hacienda Village. Imam Mujahid, Big Hank, Donny, Brother Bobby and others did the same at Nickerson Gardens. The Sherrills brothers opened a storefront across the street from Jordan Downs to sell incense and thrift clothes, to feed the homeless and to hold peace meetings. Brown picked up the rent. When Amer-I-Can got its first contract at Nickerson Gardens, all of them came together to teach classes to the next generation of young bangers from Markham.

  Uprisings

  But even as the peace work intensified, gang wars had left 690 dead by the end of 1990, yet another tragic record. The new year brought a new sense of urgency. In March, Rodney King was beaten and Latasha Harlins killed. In June, three cops in the Dalton Avenue raids were acquitted of misdemeanor vandalism counts.

  At Nickerson Gardens, Hacienda Village and Jordan Downs, the leadership was almost in place to broker a truce. But Imperial Courts remained a major question mark. The PJ Watts set at Imperial Courts was run by an O.G. named Tony Bogard, who had recently been arrested for shooting at a sister of a Grape Street Crip. The war between the PJs and Grape Street had been running for at least two years, and it seemed to many that Bogard was in no mood for peace.8

  The day after Thanksgiving, two weeks after Soon Ja Du was sentenced to probation, police were called to Imperial Courts during a temporary blackout. They heard gunfire
and feared they had walked into an ambush, so they began blasting rounds into the playground. When the shooting ended, Henry Peco was dead, hit by five police bullets, one between the eyes, lying in a sandbox. Residents poured out of the projects to stone and bottle the cops. Before the cops retreated, they took into custody one of Peco’s cousins who had been cradling his bleeding body and trying to resuscitate him. They questioned whether she had tampered with evidence.9

  Peco was a former resident of Imperial Courts who had moved to Sacramento after serving a two-year bid in the early ‘80s. He had taken in a younger cousin, Dewayne “Sniper” Holmes, an ex–PJ Watts Crip trying to escape the life. The two had returned that weekend from Sacramento to Imperial Courts for Thanksgiving dinner with the family. When Peco was shot, residents said, he was leading children out of the playground to the safety of their apartments. Police claimed that Peco had fired on them with an AK-47. No rifle was ever found.

  Community activists organized anti-police brutality protests and picked up the support to Congresswoman Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson. Three weeks after the incident, cops destroyed a memorial to Peco in the housing developments’ courtyard. Now residents greeted every police patrol with bottles.

  Police responded by initiating regular sweeps of residents. Then on New Year’s Eve, under the pretext of stopping holiday gunfire celebrations, police staged their largest raid, confiscating no weapons but arresting forty-four residents. Tension in the city over the King trial and the Harlins shooting was already thick, and now Imperial Courts threatened to become a third flashpoint. Before long, FBI investigators and a U.S. Justice Department mediator were en route to the housing development. When they arrived, the walls read, LAPD KILLA.