The Valley of the Shadow of Death

by Kermit Alexander

  While the supply lines of the powder cocaine originated in Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, before being smuggled up through Mexico, the cooking of the powder took place in the States. The distilled crack, or rocks, was then sold on the streets by black street gangs, who spread the drug through their own communities. As the crack trade was highly competitive, dangling the promise of high profits, street-level dealers began heavily arming themselves in an effort to protect their stash and drug-dealing turf.

  Now, in Hyde Park, the narcotics task force prepared to make a “buy-bust,” an operation in which an officer in plain clothes posed as a drug buyer. When the drugs and money were exchanged, the seller was busted and placed under arrest.

  As the police engaged in the operation, they saw a black teenager hiding behind a fence. He was holding a gun. He was someone referred to as a “boner,” an armed gunman guarding the rock house against robbers.

  When the police identified themselves, the teen fled. The police chased him, caught up with him, and eventually captured him. When they did, the weapon was gone.

  Officer Duran, who had accompanied Detective Manlove on the raid, searched around the bushes and then found where the teen had stashed the weapon. He returned holding an old rifle with a folding stock.

  It was a .30-caliber M-1 carbine, containing live rounds of ammunition in the clip and barrel.

  It was tarnished and scuffed. The letters PBG had been scratched onto its wooden base.

  Police took the weapon, as well as the live ammunition, and booked it into evidence.

  The teen was handcuffed, put into a police car, and booked. He was seventeen years old, and he lived in an apartment complex on Tenth Avenue. His name was James Kennedy. On the streets he was known as Little Cat Man. He belonged to a Hyde Park gang called the Rolling Sixties.

  * * *

  “Stop it!” I yelled. “Just stop!”

  Someone was pulling at me, shaking me. A loud noise rang in my ears.

  “Don’t make them go away. Don’t let them leave again,” I pleaded.

  The shaking and ringing continued.

  “They’re not dead, Mama, they’re not dead. Mama, go get ’em. They’re not dead.”

  That little girl again, in front of Madee’s house.

  “I know,” I said, “I know. They’re not, they’re right—”

  “Kermit, wake up,” my wife, Clarice, said as she shook me. “Wake up and get the phone.”

  “What? What?”

  “Phone call, answer it,” she said. “It’ll be for you, probably the cops again.”

  She put the ringing phone on my chest.

  It was early evening and the autumn sky was just beginning to darken. By night I prowled; by afternoon I slept.

  Earlier that day I had cleaned out my mother’s house. The landlord needed to rent it.

  I had carried a box of photographs into my house and fallen asleep next to them. In my dreams my slain relatives lived. Now the phone had killed them again. One more ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Kermit?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?”

  “This is Tony. Tony Anderson, from Juvenile Hall.”

  It took me a minute to compute as I came to, still shaking the dream from my mind.

  Tony was a friend of mine.

  “Yes, yes . . . Tony. What’s up?”

  “Got a minute?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not supposed to be making this call. I’m going outside of channels, but I felt there was something you needed to know.”

  “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  “I don’t know if this is legit or not, but there’s a kid down here, sixteen, seventeen. He just got arrested, and I overheard him talking about a murder. Sounds to me like it’s your case and he might know something about it. Actually sounds like he might have been involved.”

  Now fully awake, I sat up and began calculating. I had no idea if this was another false start, but I had to act on it as if it were real.

  “Kermit, what do you want me to do?”

  “Isolate him. Don’t let him go anywhere.”

  I wanted to give him as little time as possible to concoct stories or excuses.

  “Will do, are you coming down here?”

  “No way, if I did I’d rip his head off.”

  17

  GLADIATORS, PANTHERS, AND TALES FROM THE CRYPT

  BLACK STREET GANGS in Los Angeles have their roots in collective acts of juvenile delinquency in the 1930s, but became a permanent fixture only following the World War II migration. As the numbers of blacks living in Los Angeles increased dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s, the informal boundary lines separating black and white neighborhoods began to blur. White Angelenos worried about property values, and desiring racial homogeneity, attempted to draw new lines beyond which blacks could not cross.

  White youth living in these borderlands began acting as racial regulators, forming street groups, most infamously a gang known as the “Spook Hunters.” Such organizations sought to intimidate blacks, curtail their movement, and prevent entry into white enclaves. This street terrorism, in addition to the governmental tactic of restrictive housing covenants, served to concentrate blacks in limited areas. It also prompted some blacks to question whether Los Angeles represented any improvement over the Jim Crow South. It led others, such as the black noir writer Chester Himes, to conclude that it was worse. Moreover, the white regulators spurred some younger black males to form their own defensive groups, which provided their members with a sense of safety, of power in numbers, as well as feelings of acceptance and belonging.

  While these black street organizations, or “clubs,” as their initiates called them, may have begun as defensive mechanisms, they soon took on a life of their own, and began turning their aggressions inward, competing and fighting among themselves, primarily over local disputes (“beefs”), as well as turf. The Slausons, Gladiators, Businessmen, and other clubs began to mimic the pattern against which they had initially rebelled, as they carved up portions of South Central Los Angeles and claimed them as their own. Neighborhoods, blocks, parks, and other hangouts were declared as belonging to one club or another. The newly constructed housing projects, including Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens, and Pico Gardens, where many young people congregated, also became hotbeds of gang membership.

  The youth from the clubs typically liked to dress up, show off their cars, hang out, look cool, and try to impress the young ladies. But if members of another club attempted to cross a line or infringe on their turf or action, this was taken as a challenge, often resulting in a physical altercation. The gang fights of the 1940s and 1950s typically involved fists, brass knuckles, tire irons, and bicycle chains, occasionally knives, but seldom guns.

  By the 1960s, several trends converged to change the nature of the black street gang. First, the number of blacks migrating to Los Angeles accelerated, placing ever greater strain on the traditionally black areas to absorb and contain the newly arrived migrant population. Second, the early stages of deindustrialization and its erosion of the inner-city economy destabilized black job markets and employment opportunities. Finally, intertwined with the burgeoning numbers and diminishing prospects was disappointment at the civil rights movement’s inability to deliver timely and tangible benefits to urban blacks. While the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented ideological victories and promised to improve conditions in the rural South, the pace of change in northern and western cities, to which so many blacks had migrated in recent decades, remained maddeningly slow.

  These collective dynamics dovetailed with a generational shift. The first waves of African-American migrants relocating in Los Angeles applied a relative perspective to their situation, comparing the opportunities of the West favorably to sharecropping and Jim Crow. The earlier migrants also shared a culturally ingrained sense of deference, inculcated since birth. You showed white people respect—or else. You lowered
your eyes, and submissively vacated the sidewalk when they walked by. Thus, while it wasn’t perfect, in general the way whites treated blacks in Los Angeles was a big improvement from what they and their ancestors had faced, and from which they had fled. The idea that L.A. represented something new and different for blacks is exemplified in the words of the African-American scholar and Harvard sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, who after visiting Los Angeles in 1913 declared the city “a new heaven for black people.”

  However, for the younger generation that never knew Jim Crow, and who came of age under the rhetoric of civil rights, a different set of expectations prevailed. Impatient for change and frustrated by what they saw as a selling out of the promise of equality, many younger blacks began challenging the established order. They rejected the “yes sir, no sir” obsequiousness of their elders, bucked under the restrictions of movement imposed by racial boundaries, and fought to resist unequal treatment at the hands of the LAPD.

  The tensions that had been building then erupted in the wake of a traffic stop on August 11, 1965. The Watts Riots, which involved the active participation of L.A.’s black clubs, would end up changing the nature of black street gangs in Los Angeles. Following the riots, the gangs called for a kind of truce, as members of once-rival clubs became the new disciples of a politically motivated group, called the Black Panthers, as well as a competing organization known as U.S., or United Slaves. For Southern California in particular, the Watts Riots of 1965 marked a political dividing line, separating the Martin Luther King–led civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s from the radical Black Power era of the late 1960s.

  Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the Panthers became the vanguard of the Black Power Movement. The Panthers, along with Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and Ron Karenga and U.S., sought to distance themselves from the nonviolence of Dr. King and to demand change through the doctrine of armed resistance. Initially called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, they adopted the symbol of a panther because it was known as an animal that acted peacefully if left alone, but fought to the death if cornered and threatened. Dressing in black leather coats, army boots, dark glasses, and berets, the Panthers projected an image of power and militancy. Following after police cars, armed with guns and penal codes, the Panthers checked the officers’ actions against the language of the law in an effort to curtail police abuses of discretion. On May 2, 1967, the Panthers created a national stir when they stormed the California Capitol building in Sacramento wielding shotguns. In addition to such militant acts, the Panthers also exerted a presence in the community, organizing breakfasts and literacy drives, performing charity work on behalf of the inner-city poor.

  The legacy of the Panther Party and other radical black political organizations remains contested. For some, the channeling of street energies into a politicized movement marked a positive development for L.A.’s inner-city black community. As one black studies professor states, “In the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion young men began to abandon the territorial differences that had become part of the established norm of street organization culture in favor of organized black radical politics. The Black Panther Party would come to reflect these aspirations, serving as the vanguard of the youthful movement. As a result of this process of radicalization, black-on-black violence in Los Angeles would come to a virtual standstill.”

  Leading national and local law enforcement figures viewed the Panthers differently. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called them “the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States.” Similarly, Chief Gates remembered the Panthers as “a criminal gang,” “who sought power for themselves, not the people. They were hoodlums. . . . They were mean. They were violent. And that got them into difficulty with us.”

  Many of the members of the Black Panther Party of Los Angeles, including its leader, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, had come from the early black street organizations, particularly the Slausons from the east side of South Central. Conversely, many of the members of the more culturally directed U.S. organization, including prominent member George Stiner, had been Gladiators, from the west side. The question of whether the newly politicized members of these organizations had embarked upon a community-enhancing mission, or whether they were simply street thugs in a new guise, looking to prey upon their own, is not easily answered. The best that can be said is that they were probably both, politically motivated gangsters who sought to profit through their community deeds.

  For while the Panther Party championed a far-left, Maoist ideology and engaged in social work, its members’ behavior often devolved into criminal acts of street violence and drug abuse. Huey Newton was arrested for several shootings, including the killing of an Oakland police officer. George Jackson was sentenced to prison for murder, where he in turn killed correctional officers. Eldridge Cleaver fled to Angola to escape a rape charge, and drew further ire for stating that raping white women constituted political action.

  The blurring of political acts with street crimes played a major role in the Panthers’ demise, as many of its leaders self-destructed, consumed by drugs and violence. In addition, indigenous disputes and power struggles crippled the advancement of the party. Finally, added to the internal disintegration, the Panthers were relentlessly targeted by law enforcement, in particular by FBI director Hoover’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), as internal enemies of the state. Through COINTELPRO, the FBI wiretapped, harassed, antagonized, and infiltrated the Black Panthers in an effort to ravage its organizational viability.

  Thus, through a combination of debilitating drug use, illegal activities, internal feuds, and external governmental surveillance and interference, by the end of the 1960s the Black Panther Party had effectively been destroyed, most of its leadership intoxicated, imprisoned, forced underground, or killed.

  The demise of the Black Panther Party, and street-level organized black political resistance, is viewed by those sympathetic to the Panthers as a failed turning point, a lost moment when street gangs stopped feuding and came together for the betterment of the community and the race. On the other hand, most law enforcement agencies viewed the Panthers as nothing more than thugs and gangsters who opportunistically hijacked the language of politics to advance their own criminal agendas and in the process bred fear among the law-abiding, who according to Chief Gates “called us repeatedly, saying ‘Why don’t you do something about them?’ ”

  Whatever the truth regarding the Panthers, many African Americans in South Central felt a void following their downfall. And regardless of the underlying nature of the Panthers, with the party’s demise the individuals subsumed under its umbrella began to again factionalize according to neighborhood, giving birth to the next generation of black street gangs in L.A.

  * * *

  In 1969, a seventeen-year-old named Raymond Washington attended Fremont High School, on the east side of Los Angeles. Having grown up at the feet of some of L.A.’s now-legendary Panthers, including Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, Washington sought to create a new street-level organization that would fill the void. Attracted by the idea of local control over the streets, Washington and his confederates emulated the “cool” style of the Panthers, dressing in black leather, with berets and fedoras. As Carter had been a member of a group called the Avenues, Washington began calling his group the Baby Avenues, or the Cribs, which due to mispronunciation over time would transform into “Crips.”

  While other explanations for the name abound, these are dismissed by founding members. The term did not come from the fact that they crippled people, nor did it originate from the comic book and movie Tales from the Crypt. The idea that it represented an acronym for a community-based organization—Community Resource Inner City Project, or Community Revolutionary Inner City Project—has also been rejected.

  Ultimately, pieced together from rumor, myth, and informal street histories, no two sources tell the same story regarding Crip origins. But one thing is genera
lly agreed upon: Washington’s Cribs were not to be a political organization, nor did they possess a revolutionary mind-set. Raymond Washington was a talented street brawler, whose techniques rested upon rat-packing victims. Targets of their attacks were those who had desirable items upon them, particularly leather jackets and Stacy Adams dress shoes. Another of Washington’s techniques was to identify the toughest individual in a rival group, beat him up, and then convince him to operate under Washington’s authority.

  In 1971, a west side teenager attending Washington High School named Stanley “Tookie” Williams would unite his gang with Washington’s. As Williams writes, “Words such as ‘revolutionary agenda’ were alien to our thuggish, uninformed teenage consciousness. We did not unite to protect the community; our motive was to protect ourselves and our families.”

  In the early 1970s, in an effort to defend themselves against the aggressions of the Crips, other neighborhood youth gangs, such as the Pirus and Brims, formed a loose counterorganization, initially called the Anti-Crips, before taking on the name Bloods, derived from a greeting used by black soldiers serving in Vietnam.

  For members of the gangs, style, a mentality, and a way of life emerged. “Crippin’ ” and “Bloodin’,” which meant to be or to act like a Crip or Blood, allowed these inner-city youth to form a subculture with its own rules, norms, and codes. It also enabled them to find meaning and purpose, to justify violent and antisocial acts as part of a greater mission or cause. While the Panthers sought to subsume their every activity under the aegis of political action on behalf of the racially oppressed, for the Crips and Bloods everything was done in the name of the dignity and reputation of the neighborhood or block, the “hood.” Crippin’ or Bloodin’ was an escape from the strictures of society, an internal world, before which real-life concerns faded. Parents, family, school, and work all became secondary to the needs of the gang.