MENU TITLE: Perceptions of Former Youth Gang Influentials: Transcript of Two Symposia .
Series: OJJDP
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Irving Spergel

National Youth Gang Suppression and Intervention
Program
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago

Distributed by:
Juvenile Justice Clearinghouse
Box 6000
Rockville, MD 20850
1-800-638-8736

THE YOUTH GANG PROBLEM
PERCEPTIONS OF FORMER YOUTH GANG INFLUENTIALS
TRANSCRIPTS OF TWO SYMPOSIA

Irving A. Spergel
National Youth Gang
Suppression and Intervention Program
School of Social Service Administration
University of Chicago
January 1990

Two conferences or symposia were conducted
involving young adults who were figures in the
organization and leadership of major violent and
criminal youth gangs in Hispanic (mainly Puerto
Rican) and African-American low-income areas or
ghettoes of Chicago in an earlier period. The
conferences were viewed as part of an Assessment
stage of a Research and Development process to
discover promising models or approaches for dealing
with the youth gang problem, and ultimately testing
these approaches. We had already surveyed a variety
of criminal justice, community agency, and school
personnel in 45 cities and 6 institutional sites
for their views and recommendations as to what to
do about the youth gang problem.

We thought it important also to assess the problem
and determine how to deal with it based on the
views of those who had significantly experienced
youth gang life and who had been reasonably
successful in surviving and moving beyond this
stage to productive and legitimate careers. There
is a tendency by policymakers, practitioners, and
even academic theorists and researchers to
encapsulate the youth gang stage as if it exists in
isolation from the entire life cycle of people,
especially males, in low-income areas. We also
obtained the views of gang youth currently in
various agency or correctional programs about the
youth gang problem and the ways and services that
seemed to be most helpful. The results of this
latter analysis will be included along with the
present transcripts in a later more comprehensive
report of "Perceptions of Former and Present Youth
Gang Members: What To Do About the Problem."

The present documents are edited transcripts
of two symposia of Hispanic, mainly Puerto Rican,
and African-American young adults between 25 and 45
years of age in two all-day separate meetings held
three months apart in 1989. We had attempted to
meet with the two groups of former gang
influentials together, but this did not prove
feasible. The participants, although from various
gangs in the Hispanic and black communities,
apparently felt more comfortable with peers within
racial/ethnic and specific territorial boundaries
than across them. This was despite the fact that
several of the participants knew each other from
the different areas. The Hispanic symposium
contained former youth gang influentials, including
those from opposing gangs from the Humboldt Park
area on the near Northwest Side. The African-
American symposium contained former gang
influentials also from opposing gangs, on the West
Side of Chicago.

It is not an easy matter arranging such a meeting.
Participants must feel comfortable and accept its
purpose and process as legitimate in terms of their
own values. Honest, useful, and "non-show boating"
or non-media slanted responses are required. The
basis for such meetings has to be a substantial
amount of trust usually derived from previous
positive working relationships with participants.
The writer had developed close relationships with
most of the Hispanic participants in the course of
three years in which several had assisted with
various research and demonstration projects. This
was true to a more limited extent with the African-
American participants. The key field organizers of
these meetings were Roberto Caldero of the Humboldt
Park group, and Melvin Delk of the West Side group.
These men had ongoing relationships with the
participants. Without their support and skill, the
discussions would probably not have been as full or
useful.
The symposia addressed such questions as to why the
participants joined gangs, what satisfactions they
derived, why they left or changed their status with
the gang, their views of current youth gang control
and prevention policies and programs, and what more
they thought needed to be done.

A key purpose of the writer or editor of these
transcripts was to provide the reader with a
critical sense of the decisions, ideas and life
experience of these young men and one woman in a
complex and turbulent social environment. The youth
gang problem tends to be stereotyped, if not
mythologized, by the news media and even by agency
practitioners and researchers often uninten-
tionally, in part because of lack of adequate
knowledge. The youth gang problem is in fact many
problems and perhaps non-problems for its
participants in a particular place in time. There
are differences between black and Hispanic gangs,
between different generations of youth gangs, and
of course, among individual gang members within a
particular youth gang in terms of behavior,
motivations, norms, and values.

The influence or constraints of the larger society
in the ways it structures opportunities and values
for Hispanics and American blacks is most apparent
in these transcripts. Hispanic gang influentials
seem to be less impoverished, isolated, and
alienated than African-American gang influentials.
A sense of despair characterizes the views of these
formally most deviant elements of the black ghetto
community which suggests deeper and more difficult
causal factors and the need for a more massive
effort in dealing with the problem than in Hispanic
low-income communities, at least in Chicago.

At both symposia, there were common themes,
although with somewhat different emphases or
priorities. Reasons for joining a gang included:
the availability of gangs, fun, friendship, need
for protection, personal disturbance, lack of
guidance and supervision at home, older brothers in
the gang, ignorance about what one was getting
into, need for status and wanting to be a big shot,
desire for power and political influence, defective
school experience, and so forth.

Youth gang membership seemed to be more total and
continuous in the black than in the Hispanic
community. On the other hand it seemed to be more
culturally defined but also delimited as part of
growing up in the Hispanic barrio community. There
were perhaps more accessible and manageable ways to
leave the gang experience behind in the Hispanic
community. In the black community, youth ganging,
although not necessarily more violent, was a
critical and pervasive element of survival. The
youth gang seems to supplement more basic institu-
tional lacks in the black ghetto, providing
essential controls and opportunities, not as
substantially lacking in the Hispanic low-income
community. Drug use and drug selling are prevalent
in both gang communities but relatively more as a
means of psychological escape and economic survival
for the black gang member and relatively more a
matter of recreation, and even transition out of
the gang for the Hispanic gang member.
Nevertheless, drug trafficking was a matter of
earning money to survive for both gang and non-gang
youth and adults in both black and Hispanic low-
income communities.

Factors motivating youth to leave the gang
included: growing up and "getting smarter", fear of
injury for oneself and for others, a prison
experience, a girl friend or marriage, a job, drug
dealing, concern for youth and community welfare,
interest in politics, religious experience,
assistance and interest of a helping adult and
others. The values of leaving the youth gang for
legitimate life styles seemed to be more available
to Hispanic gang youth. On the other hand, the gang
seemed to continue to offer values of discipline
and support, economic, social and political
resources which could not be obtained readily
through other institutions for older black gang
youth and adults.

In some cases, the transition out of the youth gang
was accompanied by a complete break with gang peers
or leaving the neighborhood. In most cases it meant
mainly desisting from gang violence and
criminality, but not restricting relationships with
former gang buddies. There seemed to be a stronger
tie to the gang culture for former gang
influentials in the black community because of the
power and influence the gang still represented.
Nevertheless, for both African-American and
Hispanic (Puerto Rican) young adults at the two
symposia, the youth gang was regarded as more
negative than positive.

Institutional ways of dealing with the youth gang
problem or of preventing youth from joining gangs
were viewed somewhat differently by the two groups.
For the former Hispanic gang influentials, improved
services and especially changed attitudes and
practices by agency personnel, especially the
police, were seen as important. While some of these
views were echoed by the African-American group, a
more substantial community and societal effort was
seen as required. A massive infusion, not only of
economic, but spiritual and intellectual, resources
was thought to be needed. Equity or fair treatment
by the larger community, increased opportunities,
better personal or local community discipline or
social control and stronger community mobilization
were seen as important by both groups.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
NATIONAL YOUTH GANG PROJECT

Symposium of Former Hispanic (Mainly Puerto Rican)
Gang Influentials
May 27, 1989

Participants:

ROBERTO - Age 36, formerly a gang member, director
of youth agencies, manager artistic productions,
business entrepreneur, management consultant,
political campaign organizer, community
organization trainer, and presently legislative
director, City Council Committee on Housing.

THOMAS - Age 29 years, formerly leader of Latin
Kings, faction, and presently senior street worker,
Gang Crisis Management Agency. Thomas is African-
American, married to a Puerto Rican woman, they
have a 3 year old daughter.

RAYMOND - Age 45 years, formerly member of Go-
getter gang, also an organizer of the Latin Angels
and Latin Kings, presently director of a drug abuse
agency.

JACKIE - Age 30 years, formerly organizer and
leader of Spanish Cobras, presently owner of a
small construction and remodeling company.

MANUEL - Age 26 years, formerly a member of the
Latin Kings, presently Delivery Truck Driver for an
electrical supplies distributing company.

MICHAEL - Age 30, formerly leader and general,
Latin Kings, presently supervisor of counselors at
Mental Hospital Aftercare agency.

SPERGEL - Professor, School of Social Service
Administration, University of Chicago, National
Youth Gang Suppression and Intervention Project.

DAVID - Project Director, National Youth Gang
Suppression and Intervention Project.

OTHERS

SPERGEL:  OK, let me start things off. I'm
extremely pleased to see people I haven't seen in
quite awhile, and you guys all look very well like
you're all thriving and productive. What we're
trying to do today is hold an informal meeting, a
discussion that would be helpful to us in a
project. It's called the National Youth Gang
Suppression and Intervention Program. It's a
project, we're doing in cooperation with the Office
of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of
the U.S. Justice Department. I think it's the first
ever attempted, at a national level, to understand
the problem and more important to develop models or
systematic ways for dealing with the youth gang
problem. We've been at it for almost a year and a
half.

What we've done first is review the literature on
gangs and what programs exist. Second, we're now
finishing up a national survey of 50 cities and
sites, we've interviewed about 250 or more people,
including police, sheriffs, probation, parole,
prosecutors, judges, corrections officers,
community-based youth agencies and crisis workers,
and schools. Third, we're going out to visit some
of the places that seem to have promising programs,
where the gang problem has been handled
successfully, where it's been reduced. We will also
talk to some of the young people in these so-called
successful programs.

The one group, in addition, that I thought it
important to contact was former leaders or those
formerly influential with gangs, people who had
been in a gang, had messed up quite a bit and then
were able to leave the gang and go on to legitimate
jobs or careers. They might have important ideas on
what to do about the problem. That is the basis for
this meeting. The key idea of this meeting is to
get ideas, from you as to what might be done based
on your experience as former gangbangers, on how
and why you left the gang and how you were able to
become successful citizens. And then more generally
what you suggest can be done in the future in the
way of prevention, intervention and suppression.
Roberto is going to tell you a little bit more
about that.

ROBERTO:  Basically we're really interested in
putting together some models that can really work.
My thing is that you only do something about street
gangs if you get the community involved, and if
there are some people willing to go out there and
do something. All we're trying to do is give them
some better tools so that when community groups,
church groups, block clubs and so forth get
together and say "look, we just had another
killing, we're really tired." When they reach that
point, they're gonna ask themselves the question,
"What do we do?" We want to be able to give them
some direction, some tools and see which one of
these apply in their particular community. Maybe
it's a school project, maybe it's organizing the
parents of kids who have been killed. There's also
things to look at like parole, police, schools and
local community groups. There's a whole bunch of
different things that touch upon the problem of the
street gang. How can we make those institutions
more effective in doing something about the
problem.

One thing I strongly believe is, because you
were a gang member or a gang leader, doesn't
necessarily mean you know what needs to be done. We
sometimes need to get away from that idea because
it produces a hustling effect among street gang
members. People are always trying to like say well
look, I have so much rank, and I did this and that
and I killed so many people and I did this so I
know you need me in order to solve the gang
problem. That may or may not be true. I feel you
need the advice of people who have been through the
problem. It's extremely helpful. A lot of what I've
learned is just from listening to the guys on the
street. I learned about why I think they got
involved and why they stay in. But we've got to be
able to generalize. There's some unique problems
and things that everybody has or faces. For
example, what happened to me in my gang wasn't
necessarily what happened to everybody else. What
we're trying to do is get to some generalities that
will impact a lot of the guys. That's what I want
you guys to focus on. What are the things that you
went through that other guys are going through. How
can we put that in a program.

Think about the problems and situations you
went through and how you were able to get
yourselves out of them. Maybe there were some
people or some types of things that helped you. Was
it somebody in the church? In the youth agency? Was
it a police officer that helped get you straight
because he kicked you in the ass a couple of times
and told you "get yourself straight." Those are the
things that we're interested in. I'm trying to
think where would be a good place to start. Maybe,
what we'd like is to take out about five or ten
minutes and have you talk about why you joined a
street gang.

THOMAS:  I used to be a Latin King and when I
started out I was on Washtenaw. There was ten of us
together, and you know one thing led to another and
we all joined the Latin Kings. It's hard to
explain, but we didn't see ourselves as a gang
until we got more involved. One guy gets hurt and
you go back and you hurt somebody else. Things just
started and we all got seriously involved.

RAYMOND:  I, myself, I never considered myself to
the point of being a gang member. I was just
surviving, you know neighborhood surviving. We were
divided in groups. At that time we were surrounded
by Polacks and Italians. We wanted to stay in that
neighborhood. We started a group called Latin
Angels. We had to stick together in order to
survive. Then later on, they started the Latin
Kings in which I was considered to be part, I
wasn't ever active. As a matter of fact, I was
counseling some of the guys to stay away from
gangs. Then I became a Go-getter, that's really
when I really went into the drug scene and I really
got ... with the group.

JACKIE:  I was a member of an organization called
Spanish Cobras. I got into street gangs because of
the environment. The people around me were mostly
gang members and it was a way of life in the
neighborhood. I was brought up in. It was just
another social activity that took part of my life
and a lot of other lives that I grew up with. The
gang gave me a sense of belonging, a kind of
authority within my own community, something I
possessed and controlled with other people. We were
also opposed to other people who didn't approve of
our beliefs. The group started as a social thing
then got off into a drug thing, because there was
money involved, and then it got into organized
crime stuff, like everything was involved,
burglaries, shootings, and all kinds of drug
activities. The economics of the neighborhood was
so bad that anybody that was really in desperate
need of money and didn't know how to go about
making money any other way was drawn right into it
like a vacuum. We just became part of it and the
only way to gain recognition was by proving loyalty
to the organization. And it meant in all different
aspects of what you wanted to do. It would have
been killing, gang organizing, or anything else,
whatever the organization saw as necessary.

MANUEL:  I'm a former member of the Almighty Latin
Kings and Queen Organization. How I started out was
I came from a broken home. Really searching the
streets for love and stuff. I grew to love the
brothers on the street. It wasn't a gang thing in
the beginning. Before I knew, I was caught up in a
world of violence. I've seen and probably done
everything you could imagine--broken every
commitment in the Bible. I was unfortunate. I was
not raised by my mom, so that really left me out in
the open to do anything I wanted to do. So there
was no one who had control over me or my destiny so
I just basically did anything I wanted to. I guess
I had nothing to do and nobody really to tell me
what to do. I used my better judgment, thinking
that maybe that was the best thing for me, but as I
started growing and getting older I found out that
it really wasn't so.

HENRY:  My name is Henry. I became involved in gang
activity in the early 1960s because when I moved
into area, West Town, there were very few Hispanics
living there. So when I went to school, grammar
school, I'd get a nice whipping everyday by the
gang that dominated the school. Little by little
more Hispanics were coming into the neighborhood
and so we decided that in order for us to protect
ourselves we needed to band together. We formed a
gang called the Spanish Lords. I was extremely
involved because I was one of the officers. I was
the war counselor. At that time I was a youngster,
I was 13, 14, 15 and the violence was not that
flagrant. It was a battle of fists or sometimes you
had weapons, but guns and things of this nature
were practically unknown then. And it was more
animosity rather than that much hatred. Drugs were
not heavy. You didn't have big sales of drugs or
all that interest involved. But it was growing in
the 1960s. I'm talking '63, '64. I graduated from
grade school then I went to Touley High School,
which is now Clemente. Latin Kings were the
predominant gang. Latin Disciples were just coming
about. I stayed in the gangs, but I was an
exception because I finished high school. That was
really unknown then. You know if you were in a
gang, the gangs took over you and that was it. I
had a strong father and he kinda controlled. Still,
I took drugs, I drank and so forth. I got into
fighting and violence, but then I left because I
received a scholarship to go to the University of
Puerto Rico. I went to school there for a while,
then I was in the service, and I came back to it
and got involved more heavily with drugs. It was
not so much the thing of colors and gangs even
though I still knew a lot of those people and we
still associated. A lot of my peers died because of
the involvement with drugs. They might have been
killed for bad deals and things of this nature. I
then got married so I pulled out completely. I'm
thirty-eight years old now and I have no
relationship with a gang.

That to me was the beginning of gangs in our
community. That's how they started originally. It
wasn't a matter of taking over neighborhoods to
control. It was more a matter of self preservation
at the time. You couldn't walk in certain areas
because you were going to get beat up. Now if you
have your group then you can walk. Things are
better, you can hang around where you live. You
couldn't do that in those days.

ROBERTO:  Henry, you touched on this briefly and I
wanted to know from you and the other guys, how
would you put your relationship with your parents
at the time you got into street gangs? Did you feel
your relationship was good, bad? How would you rate
it?

HENRY:  I feel it was pretty good.

THOMAS:  Mine was a broken home, but my
relationship with my mother was pretty good.

JACKIE:  My relationship with mom and dad was good,
I had very good support. My dad separated from my
mom when I was about seven years old, but he always
lived near us. He always kept up with what I was
doing. He wouldn't move a lot. We were always over
to see him. My father was very, very, strict. He
believed in the old ways of the Puerto Rican
people. You couldn't goof off in any way or do
anything wrong. He would not tolerate that. But he
wasn't around when we were getting involved. He
tried to show us good things in the way he could.
We had very bad economic problems and there were
nine of us. He couldn't always watch over us when
we wanted to go a certain way. We needed the money
and also we needed to become involved in social
activities. My dad wasn't open to that. He was very
strict with all my brothers.

My mom was always there. There wasn't a minute
when my mom didn't take care of all of us. I mean
we were all well taken care of. None of us were
ever neglected, although we did have parents who
didn't live together. My dad always stood next to
us and watched over us. But there was still not
enough influence to overcome the situation with
gangs, the situation of crime itself. The gang was
part of the crime system even back then, even
though it wasn't as sophisticated as it is today.
Maybe they didn't have the weapons and drugs, but
still gangs back then always had control over the
negative things that went on in the neighborhood,
drug selling, the hangouts, the little club houses.
All that stuff consisted of being part of the gang.

You know, it was all a matter of social
gatherings. Whether you were at Maria's house or
Junebug's house, there was always a click. People
had the same interests whether they were in one
gang or another. The Spanish Lords, the Cobras, the
Lords, the Warlords, all of them were in some part
of the area. They were Hispanics and they were
together at first regardless of the nature of the
gang or different beliefs. They were Hispanic, but
it started getting different once the race issue
was overcome because the Hispanic population was
building. Then the gangs became racially mixed. It
wasn't only Whites against Hispanics or Blacks
against White. It was a thing where if you were in
a gang regardless of you being Black, White,
Hispanic, or whatever, you were bound to be dealt
with as a member of a particular gang. Hispanic
gangs started recruiting Whites. They started
recruiting Blacks and all kinds of different guys.
That's when we started fighting against each other.

ROBERTO:  Henry, let's get back to one thing was
your relationship with your parents good or bad at
the time you joined the street gang?

HENRY:  I had a strict upbringing at home, but the
peer pressure was also to be dealt with. I was a
youngster and I wanted to be with my friends and my
friends were forming a gang as I stated. We liked
what we were doing. We were going to have a good
time.

ROBERTO:  Both your parents were home?

HENRY:  Yeah.

RAYMOND:  I had a good relationship with my mother.
I was raised by my grandparents in Puerto Rico and
then when I came over here my mother was working.
That's when I became free of doing anything. That's
when I hit the street, I went out and used to stay
out all night. I used to smoke reefers. I used to
bring home some reefers. My mother allowed it. She
wanted me to have a good relationship with her.

JACKIE:  I had a good relationship with my mom, but
as I said we were unfortunate not to have my father
there. The majority of my brothers and I feel that
was real critical. We didn't have the leadership in
our family. When our mom was at work, it was up to
you to go to school or goof off and hang out with
your friends. I had a good relationship with my
mom.

ROBERTO:  The question of why you joined the street
gang. How did you guys do in school at the time you
joined the street gang? Were you doing good in
school? Were you doing bad?

RAYMOND:  When I first moved into the area I was
real good in school. I went to Clemente for two
years. The first year I was there, the majority
were Spanish Lords, Unknowns and Kings. Then the
next year more Disciples moved in. It was a lot of
fighting and so we eventually got kicked out of the
school.

ROBERTO:  Thomas, how were your grades?

THOMAS:  They were all right. I got good grades.

HENRY:  I was doing surprisingly well in school. I
was able to get a scholarship as I stated before
and go on to college. I didn't finish college,
maybe through a lack of maturity. I was living by
myself.

JACKIE:  I wasn't too bright. I didn't do good. I
hated school.

MICHAEL (late arrival):  Up to the point I got into
the gang, I was doing excellent in school, real
good. After that school didn't exist no more.

ROBERTO:  So why did you join the gang?

MICHAEL:  Basically, as with everybody else, peer
pressure. I wanted to hang out. I was the youngest
of seven children, all my brothers were street gang
members. Obviously, children look up to their
bigger brothers and that's basically it. I grew up
into it.

ROBERTO:  There's two things I notice with the
older guys, and myself being one of the older guys.
We had the same experiences when we first moved
into a neighborhood. The people obviously from
other gangs and ethnic groups jumped on you and you
felt the need to join a gang as protection. That
was very common at that point. We always had the
experience of having people waiting for or
threatening us outside the school.

SPERGEL:  Were there people in your family, like
brothers who didn't join the street gang?

RAYMOND:  I didn't have brothers that joined the
gang. I just thought that with my broken home that
really I had nothing to do with any of my casual
time. I wanted to be outside and that was the thing
that was happening back then.

SPERGEL:  Did you have some brothers who did not
join the gang after you joined?

MANUEL:  Yeah. I got three of them that didn't
join.

SPERGEL:  Why didn't they join and you did?

MANUEL:  Why do you think they didn't join, because
I didn't let them. I knew what was coming. I knew
what they had to go through. A lot of them weren't
even ready for it. You know.

SPERGEL:  Thomas, did you have brothers who didn't
join?

THOMAS:  Yep. I got a little brother. I be bopping
him upside the head once in awhile so he don't
join.

SPERGEL:  So in other words, there was nobody
around to hit you on the head not to join?

THOMAS:  Well I've got an older brother but he
wouldn't have been no competition.

JACKIE:  I got three brothers that haven't joined
the gang and I think the reason they didn't join
the gang was because they didn't have all the
desire that I had when I was a little kid. I wanted
a whole lot more from life a whole lot faster. My
brothers talked about going to school and being
other things. I thought about having a big stack of
money.

SPERGEL:  That's a good point. Some guys are
looking for something special that other people in
the family are not looking for, or don't need to
look for. Do you have any comments about that? What
gave you the urge? I don't know if you can think
back that far.

JACKIE:  I was on a power trip. That's why I wanted
to get into it. I seen all the things the authority
people got, the respect from the neighbors, the
respect from your home. That's what I really
wanted, I guess. Really I wanted to be respected
and well-known among my peers and that's what
influenced me the most.

SPERGEL:  So, it could be that your brother or
cousin didn't have that need or that power drive.

THOMAS:  They had it, but I wouldn't let them use
it.

SPERGEL:  Did you get status out of being a gang
member?

THOMAS:  Yep.

SPERGEL:  What else did you get out of it?

THOMAS:  Getting shot.

SPERGEL:  Did you have fun?

THOMAS:  Yep, as long as I was doing it. That's one
thing that when I'm working for the agency. I talk
to a lot of the youths. I tell them as long as
you're doing it to them it's fun, but once they
start doing it to you it's no more fun. Which is
true. Even if they shoot and miss you, they might
get you the next time.

SPERGEL:  Did you have fun when you were in the
gang? You said you were like a counselor. Did you
have status because people saw you as a gang
member?

RAYMOND:  Not really, I mean like everybody in that
neighborhood was more or less familiar with the
gang so it was acceptable.

SPERGEL:  But, did you have more status than the
guys who weren't in the gang?

RAYMOND:  I was always the type of individual that
carried myself in a specific way and I was always
respected.

HENRY:  Yeah. I had authority, no doubt about it. I
was a war counselor. I had a lot of authority and a
lot of respect. It wasn't something that I threw
around, although I guess I might have done that
when I was a young man. You kinda enjoy sometimes
being mean and nasty. Yeah. I enjoyed my time as a
young gangbanger.

MICHAEL:  Me, no I was just one of the fellas. I
got respect like everybody else.

SPERGEL:  But did you have more respect when you
weren't with the gang?

MICHAEL:  What do you mean?

SPERGEL:  I mean like somebody would say, hey man
that's a King. They're either scared of you or they
look up to you just like you looked up to your
brothers.

MICHAEL:  I think everybody who is in a gang is
feared. The public gets scared. Your neighbors are
afraid of you when they know you're a gang member.
They don't necessarily fear you. They fear the
gang. So that goes for everybody.

SPERGEL:  Is that something you enjoyed or got
something out of?

MICHAEL:  When I was younger I think so, when
you're 14, 15 up to 18 years old that's machismo.
Putting fear in people's hearts that gives you some
type of satisfaction. But as far as rank or
anything, no, I never really had any official rank,
like president.

SPERGEL:  If you have enough respect from enough
guys that's a lot of rank.

ROBERTO:  We've got people here who are almost 15
years apart in age. Some of the guys have been out
of gang activity for years and some of you have
been out just recently. What we're interested in,
is once you stopped gang activity or being part of
the gang, do you still relate to the gang? Do you
still see some of the guys? Do you get together and
have a drink or maintain contacts?

MANUEL:  I personally have just cut all
relationship with the gang, and that's basically
it.

RAYMOND:  I don't stay in contact directly with the
gang, but I stay in contact with individuals who
were in the gang in the past. They are cooled out.
I also know guys who are in the gang are now at
different levels. When I was involved I would
directly have some kind of say-so, because I had
some authority. But now it's like I suggest things
to them from what I've experienced in my life that
I think is positive for them to take into
consideration, so they can maybe have a better
life.

HENRY:  I disassociated myself from gangs long ago.
My life has changed. I was married at a young age.
I would say 20 is a young age. I got involved with
drugs so that pulled me away from gang activity.

SPERGEL:  When you say drugs do you mean using or
selling or a combination?

HENRY:  Combination. So I was more concerned with
myself than my click. The guys who grew up with me
in the gang were more towards self. We were getting
older so we were married. But over the years, I
haven't had any type of relationship with the gang
members. I'd see them on the street, I'd say hello,
but that's about it.

I went into drug selling and using, so that's
the way I got out of gangs. Then I went to work in
the drug treatment field and got to know the guys.
I try to help those guys who are still in the
gangs.

SPERGEL:  So, getting into drugs at that time was a
way of getting out of the gangs?

HENRY:  Yeah.

THOMAS:  I still relate to the majority of the gang
members in the neighborhood. That's part of my job
for the agency. There's a lot of them that still
respect me from the time I was a gang member.
There's some younger ones they will try to
challenge you. I have to threaten them. But
overall, the majority I still relate to.

SPERGEL:  Your role is different at this point. You
are no longer an active gang leader. Your
leadership has different meaning. They're not
threatening you as a gang leader?

THOMAS:  They don't threaten me I threaten them.
There's a bunch of new Latin Kings on Division. The
majority of the older guys are gone. A lot of them
say, "You don't tell us what to do." You know,
things like that, but I straighten them out.

SPERGEL:  So, you're still making use of some of
that old rank you had.

THOMAS:  Right. Yeah.

JACKIE:  The older guys many of them are my
buddies. We still get together and many of them are
still involved indirectly or directly in the street
gang, but many of them are also in jail. OK, as far
as the young group that's out there right now, I
don't say nothing to none of them. I live in the
community. I see them hanging on the corner, but I
don't associate with them. The older guys and me,
we get together and still get along. They
themselves probably do have some direct contact
with the younger guys.

THOMAS:  One other thing, you asked me if I used
some of the rank that I once had. Dealing with some
of these guys you have to do it like that because
they think that they're leaders now and no one can
touch them. There's always someone, some gang
leader who is over them. Most of the time I try to
deal with gang guys myself about certain problems
but if not, I go to the guy who is over them.

SPERGEL:  We're talking about different roles. You
are a professional now with your agency. You've got
to do a job. You happen to be in the same
neighborhood where you used to be very influential
as a gang leader. So that's a special situation.

MANUEL:  I would also state for the record, Jesus
set me free from all this gang stuff. I've accepted
the Lord and that's what set me free and that's why
nothing can happen to me at this point in time. I
used to have a lot of authority and rank and
leadership. I would like to state that for the
record.

MICHAEL:  A lot of the guys I know have gone to
religion. That's their way of getting out of the
street gangs. And I can say that the street gangs
usually respect that. They don't usually bother
them, you know, the guys that have gone religious
and stuff. That happens a lot.

SPERGEL:  How old were you all when you got out of
the gang?

MANUEL:  What Michael said that a lot of people use
that as an excuse, that wasn't my excuse to get
away.

MICHAEL:  No, no don't take me wrong.

MANUEL:  I seen what the gang and drugs was about.
It was about nothing. As far as being lied to and
deceived, that's why I got tired of it. And I feel
that in my life I'm gonna serve something that's
going to be for real. I got tired of my own burning
leaf. It was also the process of people just
keeping faith in the brothers that I got tired of.
I know that this is for real. Everything that I was
into before was nothing. It didn't stand on
nothing. I know that with this faith I'm going to
be standing on something.

MICHAEL:  There's a lot of individuals that use
that as an excuse because once you're in it and you
can get so far up in the ladder, there's no turning
back. The only thing that awaits you is certain
death.

MANUEL:  Now, I'm not even afraid if that happens.
They'd be doing me a favor.

SPERGEL:  I know some of you guys had very high
positions whether it was out in the neighborhood or
in the prisons and they turned back. So there is a
turning point.

MANUEL:  You can't serve two Gods, you know. Either
you're gonna be about this or you're gonna be about
that. That's how a (crime) organization is. I mean
you can't be a slave for two masters, you've got to
be one or the other.

ROBERTO:  You get to a high rank, and the truth is
most of these people here at one point had a fairly
high rank. How did the rest of the guys look at it
when you said hey, "I'm not about this kinda stuff
no more"? I think Michael lays out a good point. I
know some guys get into religion and people kinda
say if they're for real, it's okay. With religion
there is a tendency for people to leave that guy
alone. I know that when guys have gone on to
college and say I'm into school the gang members
kinda respect that and say hey this guy's going to
college and that's good. I've also seen in a few
cases where guys from the gangs will pitch in to
help the guy out with money for books. They know
he's having a hard time and they kinda like say
maybe the guy's trying to do something with
himself. But what happens when guys who have rank
say, hey I'm getting out? I've also seen a lot of
cases where people have gotten hurt.

MANUEL:  The ones that are negative to your getting
out are the ones who are leeching on your power.
They leech off of everything that you provide, and
they want to benefit from it. So that's where
you're gonna catch a lot of the static. The leeches
are always tagging along.

JACKIE:  I felt I should get out the gang was when
I was in prison for a murder that I didn't commit,
first of all. Second is that my right-hand honchos
and all these big time wheelers and dealers put me
out to the cold. And even though my brother was
leader of this club, one of the most powerful gangs
in this city--even if it's one of the smallest--I
was still left out in the cold. My brother's rank
didn't mean nothing because other people now had
most of the power within the organization. This was
the club that I was willing to give my life for.
This was the thing that I believed in.

During the trial, I knew what was going down.
But I was so dedicated to the Cobras I would not
reveal this, even though I had a state's attorney
come to me at 9:00 at night and at 7:00 in the
morning and tell me hey, we know you didn't do it.
We can give you an alternative, but there was no
alternative. I was too dedicated. It was like the
Muslims. They dedicate themselves and put
themselves on a mission. Well, I was ready to die
and go straight ahead because that's what everybody
around me believed and that's what I was taught. I
was taught to be loyal and believe in what I was
doing. But once I seen that loyalty wasn't for real
and I seen my mother and my family hustling to be
able to get me out of jail I said, "Wait a minute.
This is not for me or anybody I love." And believe
it or not just like he says, the Lord has touched
my life in a lot of ways. I've been gifted by the
Lord believe it or not. I know that I'm the gifted
child. There's no doubt about that.

To date the biggest challenge I have had in
getting out of the gang was going out to the
prisons to see the brothers who had lost their
lives for what I believed and they still believed
in. The biggest obstacle I had was going down there
to see them. These guys gave up their lives for
what we thought was right. But I don't see that
because I see the negative aspects that comes out
of these gangs, especially when it comes to power.
We all took a chance and there's no way in the
world I could ever see myself participating or
being part of an organization like that. I'm
dedicated to destroy an organization like that.

Some day we will outweigh it. Like I said
before, there are more good people than bad people
in the neighborhood, and it's just a matter of us
getting the right people together to take the
frontier. The most important thing is getting
people together against these gangs.

SPERGEL:  How did the gang react when you said you
were planning to leave?

JACKIE:  Well, the gangs were always negative to
me, because of the fact that I've always been very
narrow-minded in some ways and I had always my ways
of seeing things.

SPERGEL:  You never really left, it's just you've
changed.

JACKIE:  Right.

SPERGEL:  You maintain contact with the guys. You
know them. You see them everyday. You bring them
together, but you're doing something different with
them.

JACKIE:  I left completely in way, Irv, because of
the fact that see when I left the gang that
automatically meant no attending no more meetings,
that meant no more dealing drugs on the corner,
that meant also not participating in any kind of
activities they had, whether it meant parties,
whatever it may have been. When they say we're
having a coke party, that's what it is. Those are
the things I left. I am still involved on a social
level. I am instrumental in trying to help a lot of
the kids get out of it. I try to keep my little
brother out of it. I've been successful with that.
Thank God for that. When I left the gang, they
feared me. They fear other individuals who leave
gangs. They fear if we ever really, really were
dedicated to destroying an organization like that,
it wouldn't be hard to do it.

We are the roots of what is going on now.
Things have changed. The gangs are sophisticated in
how they do things now. There's more money involved
and there's contracts being pulled. Before if a
killing was done, it was maybe like a car passing
by. A shooting Al Capone style, something like
that. Now even when they use a ski mask, it's much
more sophisticated than that. Now they're bring the
opposing gangs from other areas to do their hits.
So the Disciples need a Disciple to get hit they'll
have a Latin King or El Rukn or some other opposing
gang come in and pull the hit.

SPERGEL:  So the whole gang's thing has changed?

JACKIE:  Right. It's become like a money thing. And
now they're dealing with each other. Now it's not
the same thing. Now the guys who used to kill each
other are working together at a secret level. Their
young soldiers take the macho role, but when it
comes to talking about money and investments, they
all have their little congregations where only
certain people attend.

HENRY:  To me leaving the gang is the point where
the guys all came to me and said, "Look, so and so
got jumped on. Let's go over there and get 'em."
When I started to say leave me out, that's the
point where I felt I really left the gang. To me
the heart of the gang was always protection, pro-
tecting ourselves. So how did the people react?
When people started coming up and saying we need to
do a hit, or we need to go beat up someone, and you
started to say, hey, I'm not into that?

THOMAS:  Well, me I was really out there most of
the time by myself anyway, so nobody really had
nothing to say about me. I was really always by
myself, I would go by Spaulding and hang out
wherever. I was really more freelance. So nobody
really could say nothing.

MICHAEL:  I got to be like Thomas. I never really
got involved with one special group after prison.
You learned your lesson when you get busted and you
get accused of some serious crimes. Who's willing
to go for the cause and whatnot? After that I never
really got as close to anybody as I would've before
going to prison. Before I would take somebody out
or I would go with somebody who'd say let's go hit
somebody. I used to go around to different
branches. I never really stuck with any one branch.
I'd go by Kedzie, by Spaulding.

ROBERTO:  Henry, you were a war counselor, what
happened when you said "I'm leaving"? Did people
feel like you weren't going to be around anymore?
Did they get angry at you? Were they happy that you
were going to college?

HENRY:  Well, yeah, it was a different
circumstance. I was leaving the country. They got
mad. They were happy for me. In fact, I found out
later that if I would come back I would be the top
guy and they were proud of me. I graduated from
high school, I was going to college and so they
never disliked what happened to me.

THOMAS:  This is like what Jackie was saying. I got
arrested for a murder that I didn't know nothing
about. The only thing that saved me was, at that
time, I was working for Association House. Jackie
and Henry should know him. He's a police officer.
He's the only thing that saved me from getting out
of this murder, because I was with him that night,
coaching a basketball team. So, I got arrested on
this murder, sat in jail for six month for
something I didn't know nothing about. He came and
testified for me and that was really the turning
point where I really got away from it.

ROBERTO:  What we're hearing is that a lot of
people get either picked up for things that they
didn't do or even something that they may have
done. Then you find out that there's no real backup
from the gang that you believe in and that really
makes you think about, why should I be in it? There
is no support when you really need it.

What individuals, agencies, institutions or
situations helped you leave or stay in the gang?
What about prisons? Some of the guys who went to
prisons got more into gangs when they were in the
prisons.

MICHAEL:  The majority of the ones that go into
prison, your burglars, bullsh-- a lot. They come
out and do it again. But you guys who are in for
something serious, assaulting people, attempting
murder, they tend to think about it again, because
when you go up in front of those courts they're not
talking about 2 to 3 years, nowadays. They're
giving boatloads. If you get a boatload of time you
be thinking about your family, you be thinking
about your children and you can hang all that up.
You can forget about the gang really, because the
only gang you're going to know is the guys who are
there in the prison with you. Everybody else out
there in the street that you knew, your ace
coonboon, your honchos, your buddies, you'd be
surprised if you ever get a letter from them.

JACKIE:  The only ones who send you a Christmas
card are mom and dad, sisters and brothers. That's
it.

THOMAS:  Sometimes not even them. Because they've
got to go on ahead and lead their own lives.
Sometimes you're just forgotten about.

SPERGEL:  Do the younger guys on the street have
any sense about what could be ahead for them?

MICHAEL:  No. There's plenty of guys, just to be
specific. There's a couple of the brothers that I
used to talk to all the time, who had good heads on
their shoulders, Frankie and Ralphy. They used to
do good at school, especially Frankie. The other
day, I see them on the news escaping from the Cook
County Jail for murder. And how many days and how
many times each day did we try talking to these
guys? Telling them you got a good head on your
shoulders. Let's get you back in school. It didn't
do no good. These guys are in jail for murder now.
Ridiculous cases, a bunch of individuals we've
talked to, tried to talk to. Frankie's brother,
Ralphy, we tried talking to him, he didn't listen.

THOMAS:  You know I've been shot 5 different times
when I was a gang member. I tell them, you guys
should learn from what happened to me. I try to set
an example but they don't learn. There's a kid who
was shot near the Donald Dukes about 2 months ago
on Division. He's sitting right there in the window
and they passed and shot him in the chest. He gets
out the hospital 3 days later and he's sitting in
the same chair again. He's the hero of the
neighborhood now. He got shot, big deal.

MANUEL:  That's the mentality they have now. What
you just said. Try it again. That's probably why he
went back and sat down on that same chair.

THOMAS:  He got shot right here in the chest, you
know, and it's like nothing happened. The same
thing when a girl got shot a couple of years ago.
The girl was never in no gang or nothing. But she
was sitting out there with a gang member. She got
shot, she lost her eye. When she got out of the
hospital, I see her walking around everyday gang
representing, you know, wearing black and gold--
gang colors. And I said look at this idiot, you
know.

SPERGEL:  I want to apologize somewhat. We did try
to get former female gang members here but we
weren't successful. So how does this situation
apply to the girls?

THOMAS:  Same thing, with the girls hanging out
with the guys, that's what it really is, and then
they're being in it just to hang out with the guys.

SPERGEL:  It's also not just macho, but macha.

MICHAEL:  That's right. They got their own thing,
the girls hanging out beating up the other girls.

JACKIE:  Usually the girls get all stepped on. I
know we dogged them. Hold our drugs, hold our guns,
you use them.

THOMAS:  I remember having a girl hold a gun for me
because we were at a party one time and what
happened is we got into it with the Warlords at
Northwest Hall and the girl couldn't get it out in
time and these guys were chasing us with jacks and
I'm running and they're swinging the jack at me and
that's why ever since then I never trusted a girl
with a gun.

MICHAEL:  And for the record you wouldn't have done
anything, anyway.

THOMAS:  Yeah. OK.

JACKIE:  We would use their houses for storage and
hangouts.

MICHAEL:  But there are some girls who are like
regular gang members. They gangbang, they fight,
they get down. Some girls do the shooting. Yeah,
there's some girls that will shoot you in a minute.

SPERGEL:  Did those girls join for the same reasons
the guys do? Are they joining because of the
status? Why are they joining? Does a girl who says
I'm a Queen, does she have status?

MICHAEL:  No. Not really. You got to address that
to the girls, you're asking us for our opinion. We
have some say but you got to ask the girls what
kind of status they think they have.

JACKIE:  About 3 or 4 weeks ago there was a fight
on Rockwell, and one of the girls wasn't a gang
member and one of them was. The girl who wasn't a
gang member kept saying, "I don't want to fight
with her, because she's a Cobralette. They're all
gonna jump on me." Sure enough, she got half way
down the block and she got jumped on. That's some
kind of status for them. It builds them up. "I'm a
Cobralette or I'm a Queen" or whatever it may be
and this girl might think she's tough. She's going
to prove to her she ain't tough and usually they
pick on the girls who the guys like more. See the
guys in the group like a girl and the other girls
will probably pick on her.

HENRY:  My thought on that is there were different
reasons for why the young ladies might get in. Some
of them were just interacting as a young lady who
likes a guy who happens to be in a gang. I know
when I grew up a lot of these girls were respected.
And they weren't into any of the gang's activities
except for dances or get-togethers. There were
others who got involved at a different level. They
wanted to act like the guys. They took part in some
of the negative activities that were taking place.
But I agree you need young ladies to talk to about
this. It varies.

SPERGEL:  Does that mean that the fellows were in
the gangs for different reasons? Such as power? To
get girls? Make a few bucks? Or a combination?

MICHAEL:  I always looked at street gangs as having
a variety of members. There's different clicks in
the street gangs itself. You got those guys who
like to just party, get high and mess with the
girls. Those ain't really the gangbangers. You got
those guys who are the gangbangers, who are the
stone killers, who are usually the ones who are
doing all the killing in the street gang or the
hits. Then you got those guys who are the stealers,
the burglars. There is a little click of guys who
are always stealing, breaking into people's houses
and stuff. They're not all straight up partiers,
straight up whatever. They've got different
purposes.

DAVID:  One more question about the women and girls
in the gang. Irv and I were in a conference in
Washington, and one of the women there said the
gang has a greater impact on girls than boys. If a
girl gets into a gang, her life is never gonna be
the same. You're not going to find any women out
there who are respectable and part of the community
who used to be part of the gang.

ROBERTO:  There is. We have one right now. She's
working with our alderman right.

MICHAEL:  Most of the girls get out with their
husbands, their old man. He's a gangbanger. He lays
back and, of course, the old lady gonna lay back
and have kids and whatnot.

ROBERTO:  I'm getting hungry. Let's break for
lunch.

SPERGEL:  I have a question before we break. How
representative is what your saying about gangs?
Whether in the Hispanic community or in the Black
community, or in other neighborhoods?

THOMAS:  I think the Black Gangster Disciples and
the Vice Lords are more like a religion and the
Vice Lords are like that, too. As street workers,
we had set up a meeting with the Black Gangster
Disciples, and they all stood up when the leader
came in. Then they sat and they said prayer. I
think it's more like a religion.

MICHAEL:  Along that same line, I think the Black
gangs are much more sophisticated then the Hispanic
gangs. I think along with their religion aspects,
they are much more organized. They do a lot of
things that Hispanic gangs don't do, for example,
forced recruiting. That's not popular with the
Hispanic gangs. No one actually ever forced you.
They're somewhat more tied into organized crime,
especially the El Rukns, to name just one. These
guys are into making money, they're putting all
their money into real estate. Hispanic gangs are
not as finessed as the Black gangs. They do deal
drugs, but not on the large scale like I think
Black gangs do. That's not to say the Hispanic
gangs don't have members who do get large
quantities of drugs, but that in itself is usually
for themselves. The individual members are trying
to make big bucks, but not to share really with the
gangs. Whereas in the Black gangs, the whole group
is making all that money and funneling it into
illegal activities: guns, real estate, prostitution
and things like that.

SPERGEL:  I'm not sure you're right. You may be
right for the El Rukns. I'm not sure how typical
that is for the Vice Lords or the Black Disciples.
My own sense is that there are still a lot of kids
coming up from the neighborhood and fighting each
other and there isn't as much criminal organization
as you all think there is with the Black gangs.
Thomas, you've been closer to them in recent years
because of your work with the youth agency. I
suspect they may be relatively better organized,
but it doesn't mean they're well- organized.

THOMAS:  There's really three Black Disciple
groups. There's Black Gangsters; then you've got
Black Gangster Disciples; then you've got Black
Disciples. The Black Gangster Disciples are more
organized than the other two. All three of them
have leaders and they can be as one. As they say,
"all as one."

ROBERTO:  I'm on the streets, and the majority of
the guys that are out on the streets in terms of
the Black gangs, they seem a whole lot different
from the Hispanic gangs, just the guys who are out
on the street, not the heavies, but the guys on the
streets. Are they joining for the same reasons? Are
they getting the same things out of the gang?

THOMAS:  Yes, and like Michael said a lot of them
be forced to join. It's a lot more of them being
forced to join the gang than in the Hispanic gangs.

HENRY:  My belief is that for one, the Black gangs
are older. They've been around longer. Two, you
find that these gangs came strictly from the all
Black neighborhoods, which changes the whole aspect
of the gang. Basically they sort of join for some
of the reasons we do, but they're more compelled to
join because gang tradition is strong and more
influential with them in their community. They have
to get involved. They're slightly more
sophisticated. They're more together and they're in
their own neighborhood. They control every factor
in the neighborhood. With us there's a mixture of
people living in the neighborhood, so there isn't
the full control and a lot of the violence occurs
because of that. You know, the Black gangs control
all these buildings in public housing.

SPERGEL:  Police statistics show that there's more
drug related gang than violent gang incidents in
the Black community.

THOMAS:  But most of that is going to more drug
related in the Hispanic area now.

SPERGEL:  Now it's changed?

THOMAS:  Right. Now it's going more into drugs in
the Hispanic community, too, now. Except like I
told you earlier in Pilsen, the Mexican community,
it's more just pure gang violence.

JACKIE:  I think that the Black gangs organize and
get together now mostly for racial reasons. It's
basically what Henry was saying what he went
through in the early '60s. In our neighborhood,
even though there's Black members in Hispanic gangs
they still have their own click. They organize for
the fact that they want to show some kind of power
among themselves. This is not because of them being
Black and being in the neighborhood. They get
together because they just have no other way to get
out.

ROBERTO:  Black gangs or clicks take orders from
Cabrini-Green, but other than that they hang with
the Hispanic guys, do what these guys do, have the
same habits. Basically they like the same thing.
Maybe on the South Side it is different, but in our
neighborhood they carry themselves the same way the
other gangs do.

THOMAS:  You know like somebody said about the
South Side, especially over by 38th and Cottage
Grove there's Black Gangster Disciples. There's a
project there, but I can't think of the name. Them
guys are real organized. Also, by Westinghouse
School where Disciples and Vice Lords hang out on
the same corner, they deal drugs together.

JACKIE:  In the all Black neighborhoods there's a
lot of prostitution going on, and gangs have
control of that. In our neighborhood the Black
gangs will not tolerate prostitution. So they
basically have some of the same values we do. A lot
of things that the Black gangs do in an all Black
community that the Blacks in our neighborhood don't
do, or didn't used to do. But the Black gangs that
are in our neighborhood now, a lot of them like
Roberto was saying, came from Cabrini-Green. But
before that the Blacks that lived there were
brought up around us, and most of them have the
same habits we got. They are the one's mostly in
control still.

DAVID:  Is it harder to get out of the Black street
gangs?

MICHAEL:  I think it is.

THOMAS:  Out of the Disciples especially. The
Disciples are more forced to join than the Vice
Lords and El Rukns. El Rukns are more organized.
They're much more of a religion. They don't
tolerate a lot of the gang violence. You know a lot
of their stuff is organized crime. Somebody's
burned them out of drugs or something like that,
then they'll do a hit. They're more into drugs and
religion than gang violence. As far as the
Disciples in Robert Taylor Homes, you have about
six different gangs, but the ones that you hear
about mostly are the Disciples and Vice Lords.

DAVID:  And what are the others doing?

THOMAS:  They're split, some hang with the Vice
Lords, some hang with the Disciples.

DAVID:  Are the Vice Lords into religion?

THOMAS:  Not as much as the Disciples I don't
think. I think the Disciples are probably more into
it.

SPERGEL:  Are there guys coming in from other parts
of the city, or out of town, other states?
Occasionally you hear of CRIPS, Bloods or Jamaican
posses coming in.

MICHAEL:  Gangs from this city are moving out into
the suburbs and getting stronger. The El Rukns, the
Kings and they're moving out. There ain't nobody
outside coming into this city. For example, your
Crack has not had it's day in Chicago yet. That's
just blatant in New York City, and they wonder,
"why isn't it that bad here?". Then they say well
the street gangs have the control over it and
they're not allowing it in.

DAVID:  Why wouldn't the gangs allow it in here,
why wouldn't they allow crack in here?

THOMAS:  There's crack here, but it's not as bad as
out in California or New York. I know on Leavitt
and Hirsh, and there's Kings over there on Wolcott.
The Kings are really into selling cocaine, you know
a little cocaine and reefers. The Vice Lords began
to sell some crack. Then the Kings shot up the
house to move them guys out, because they really
don't want things like that in their neighborhood.

DAVID:  Let's say the guys in Chicago are going to
Florida, there's a lot of street gang activity or
drug gang activity in Florida. Is there any
connections between Chicago and Florida gangs?

JACKIE:  Yes, there is.

DAVID:  But is that street gang to street gang or
street gang to criminal organization?

JACKIE:  You have both.

DAVID:  There's one thing that we're trying to
determine is, are gangs starting to organize
nationwide? Are they making linkages to others in
different cities?

JACKIE:  I wouldn't say organized gang activity is
what causes people to reach out and that's where
connections come in. I don't think that gang
activity is passed over to this other state and
they're gonna make another branch there. I don't
know of any of it.

DAVID:  When these guys move out to the suburbs,
are they moving out as families to work? Or, are
they going out for business? Or, is it both?

THOMAS:  A lot of them come out of penitentiaries
like Joliet and just stay out in the town there. We
went to see a guy from the Two-Six gang that moved
out to Joliet, but there was some Kings in the
neighborhood too. They were shooting this lady's
house up every night. She had about four, five
young kids.

DAVID:  In Joliet?

THOMAS:  In Joliet, the Two-Six member was supposed
to have been her godson or something. I'm talking
to this guy he told me "No, I'm not in no gang." I
said, "Well, why are they shooting up the house
then? There were about four other guys present. So,
I pulled him to the side and we were talking and I
told him that he was lying. He was in a gang. Then,
he confessed: "Yes, I'm from Chicago" and this and
that and you know. I told him that's the problem.
You shouldn't be here. You know these guys are
Latin Kings. He represented to them and they're
shooting this lady's house up because of him.

SPERGEL:  Nothing to do with drugs?

THOMAS:  Nothing to do with drugs.

SPERGEL:  Some people in California say the drug
problem got started in L.A. City when they had a
lot of gangs. They say when you go out to the
suburbs, drugs started first and that brought the
gangs in. Gangs developed after the drug problem.

THOMAS:  There go the chicken! Which one came
first?


                 AFTERNOON SESSION

ROBERTO:  For the afternoon, I want to focus on two
or three questions. You guys have already touched
on some of them, and it's OK if you repeat
yourselves a little. First, we want to go around
the table and kinda again ask everybody why they
left the gang. I want to make sure everyone
answered that question as fully as possible.

MICHAEL:  The Corrections Department helped me
think about where I wanted to go with my life.
Sometimes I'm grateful for getting busted. I think
if I hadn't gotten busted, I would be either dead
or in the same path my brothers have taken. The
Criminal Justice system helped me make up my mind.

SPERGEL:  Why do you say it was them, it was just
the negative experience. It wasn't anybody, a
guard, a policeman in particular?

MICHAEL:  No, no. It was the experience of being
locked up and the possibility of remaining from
there on in, OK. That is an experience in itself.

THOMAS:  It's mostly the same thing Michael said.

SPERGEL:  You were shot, you were scared.

THOMAS:  Shot and being arrested. I was locked up
for murder once. That was really the thing that
changed me.

SPERGEL:  That was for a short time?

THOMAS:  Six months.

SPERGEL:  But you had the possibility of being in
longer?

THOMAS:  Right.

RAYMOND:  My thing was I went into drugs and I
didn't have no more time for gangs.

HENRY:  Well, like I said, I went to school, I
moved away, went in the Service, came back, then I
was older and there was drugs and no more gang
relations on anything. I just pulled away from that
gang activity all together.

SPERGEL:  Drugs were a big influence on you getting
out of the gang?

HENRY:  Yes, they were, because the type of drug
involvement I had was not equal to the younger gang
members who were actually running the day-to-day
activities.

MANUEL:  Like Michael said, being incarcerated,
finding out that the gang wasn't really my family.

MICHAEL:  I hope what we're telling them here ain't
going to make them think building more prisons and
putting everybody in jail is the answer. Believe
me, they'll do that.

SPERGEL:  But it helped you.

MICHAEL:  I'm a special case.

MANUEL:  I found my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ,
who I'm now serving and I'm never gonna get tired
repeating that. He set me free and broke the bond,
broke the chains.

ROBERTO:  Manuel, how did you find the Lord, I mean
was it through someone else, or just on your own?

MANUEL:  Through my pastor, and the experiences
that led me to the Lord.

ROBERTO:  Which were? What were the experiences?

MANUEL:  Just about everything, you name it.

ROBERTO:  Anything key though, anything that was
more important than the other?

MANUEL:  I don't understand.

ROBERTO:  When you say experience, like did you
ever get shot at? Did you feel like "man maybe this
isn't what I should be going"? Did you go through
some specific experience?

MANUEL:  Just about everything you could think of
like I said.

ROBERTO:  Which ones made you think more than the
others? Being locked up?

MANUEL:  No, I ain't never been locked up in my
whole life.

ROBERTO:  Something happen to family members?

MANUEL:  No, none of that either.

SPERGEL:  What about the pastor, how did you meet
him? He was very important to you.

MANUEL:  He was the key.

ROBERTO:  How did he find you?

MANUEL:  On North Avenue and Kedzie. He had his
ministry right down there. My pastor is El Fernando
Reeves for the record. He has a program there
that's helped two of my brothers who were heavily
addicted to cocaine. I seen that the Lord touched
their lives. To this day, they have never been back
or took another line or pass, and I knew I had to
give it a chance because I gave everything else in
life. I tried serving the Lord about ten years ago.
I tried and failed, and then like I said my two
brothers were heavily addicted to drugs, and they
both went into his program, and they both got
cleaned up and one's been clean for three years and
the other for about two years now.

ROBERTO:  There are about three or four churches in
your area. You pass them all the time. What made
this one special as opposed to the other ones?

MANUEL:  Because my pastor was consistent and the
other churches aren't. The other churches they're
in the neighborhood, and they don't really care as
long as you don't write graffiti, or bother, or
stick up people, or rob their cars. That's the only
thing that's wrong with some of the churches in the
neighborhood. They don't physically get in touch
with the heart. The gang members they deal with are
the Mickey Mouse cheerleaders in the organization
and they don't deal with the hard core. That's the
problem with a lot of these programs. All this
government money gets to these programs that aren't
really dealing with the hard core.

JACKIE:  Right on. You got it!

MANUEL:  I know the hard-core gang members and I
seen that they were hurting and crying inside,
because we all are. We all get up in the morning
and like I told Jackie we got to put on a
gangster's mask. Every morning you get up, I'm
gonna be Al Capone today. I'm gonna go out there
and kill and do whatever I got to do and the next
morning you wake up, you want to be Rudy Valentino
or maybe a lover that day, be a lady's man that
day. The next day you might want to be Scarface and
start selling your drugs and it all depends on how
you get up. I met my pastor on North Avenue and he
worked with me, and he constantly kept praying for
me, and praying for me. People would say this guy's
never gonna get saved. This guy he won't even make
it to twenty-one, he'll die sooner or later the way
he's headed and it was Jesus that touched my life.

I also got to thank Roberto, and I think we
should all give a round of applause to Roberto
because ten, fifteen years ago, if somebody said,
"Hey, we're gonna go sit down with Jackie and
Simon, and Yo-Yo and Dinosaur [members of the
opposing gang]. If anybody said that fifteen years
ago, we would have probably hung him by his neck,
or killed him. Nobody would have believed in that,
but Roberto really believed that we could all come
together as brothers and stuff. I feel that we
should all give Roberto a round of applause. He
stuck with us through thick and thin. Roberto has
always been there. I want to thank you, Roberto,
personally for having me on the job [at his
sister's factory]. I know if you hadn't helped me
with the job, I would have been right back out
there selling drugs and involved in more criminal
activity.

ROBERTO:  What do you think is the most important
thing, remembering that no matter how much money is
out there, there ain't never enough money for all
the kids out there that have problems. Basically
you got a whole bunch of kids out there that don't
have parents, or having problems with their
parents. They're flunking school. What do we do,
what do you recommend?

Let's deal with types of people, rather than
specifics. If it's a pastor, if it's a guy in the
gym that was coaching you, were there special
people that helped you after you been shot, after
you just got out of jail, after something happened
to a friend of yours, where you kind of think and
reflect and you kinda say, "Damn, am I doing what I
should be doing?".

MICHAEL:  Well, I did it myself. Now it was people
who helped me along the road, but it was me,
myself, who decided that I wanted to change. Now,
in order to do that change, I had to get a little
help from different people: my wife. A very good
criminal ex-offender program, the Safer Foundation
was influential. There were a variety of people
that were instrumental, but it was me, myself, who
wanted to do the change. If you, yourself don't
want to change no matter who's trying to help you,
ain't nothin' happening, OK.

ROBERTO:  If those people hadn't been there, do you
think you still would've made the change? Would it
have taken longer?

MICHAEL:  It would probably have taken a whole lot
longer. But I think I was so determined to make a
change that one way or another, I was gonna make
the change.

THOMAS:  Well, for me, there was my wife and
Roberto.

RAYMOND:  My thing was drugs.

ROBERTO:  But when you were getting out of drugs,
who helped you?

RAYMOND:  I did it myself, I was tired of doing
time. I was back to the street with the same
friends who along with me were doing drugs. I got
really tired of it and just got into a program. I
never wanted to go into no programs.

ROBERTO:  What program did you go into?

RAYMOND:  I went into methadone.

SPERGEL:  There were people who helped you there?

RAYMOND:  The program did, but I wanted it myself.
Once I went into the program, I stopped shooting
drugs, stopped going out to the corners that I used
to hang around and things like that. I feel like
Michael. There were resources around, but I did it
for myself.

ROBERTO:  OK, did the resources help?

RAYMOND:  Yes, they did.

HENRY:  I got out of the gangs because of school. I
had a counselor in school who was very influential
in changing my study habits, in my acquiring the
scholarship. After that, when I came back on drugs,
like Raymond said, one day I just decided that it
was time to change my ways: no more drugs, and no
more problems. Go positive with my life, and I did
it, on my own.

SPERGEL:  Sounds like both of you had reached the
end of the road. You were looking for a way out. In
other words, you came up against the wall. Things
were bad, so bad, you had to change for the better.
That's what you're saying, then somebody was
around, a program or something?

HENRY:  There was no change, it was just the same
thing over and over. And you can get high so many
times and after a while it just isn't the same
anymore. It becomes a habit rather than what you
initiated, which was for pleasure. Right? And so
you change your ways. You got a family that could
influence you. I had a wife and a child and that
influenced me, also. But, basically, I made the
decision to just quit, just change my life all
together and I haven't looked back since.

JACKIE:  My mom's suffering really changed my ways
when I was in jail. My mother came to see me and
she would cry and do all the things she should do.
I realized what she was going through. I really
wanted to make her happy. I wanted to do something
for her. Also, I had people around helping me. They
gave me different visions. I knew I wanted to get
out of the gang after being in prison and also not
having no support from the gang. The main thing was
seeing the suffering my mom went through. All of my
family went through the drama. I could see my
mother aging--five years in one year. It was me and
my little brothers that did it. That was enough for
me to know there was really no way out and no real
positive things coming out of the gangs. I knew it
was time to get out. I figured I would make the
experience that I had work to my advantage, telling
people to benefit from my experience. I became
involved in programs to help other kids.

ROBERTO:  Is there anything specifically you can do
to keep your kids out of the gang? What would you
recommend just to keep them out and stop them from
even getting involved?

HENRY:  There's a bunch of things though. There's
not one answer. Your school system which in
Hispanic communities is bullsh--. Your lack of
employment. The slums we're raised in. So there's a
bunch of answers to that. There's not one in
particular.

ROBERTO:  But if you're given a certain amount of
money, what would you recommend as the most
important?

HENRY:  Well, I think sports would play a good
role. Within the Hispanic community, it is the
thing that we are very much into. I think that
would help a lot of the kids.

THOMAS:  I was talking with ... I know Roberto
knows him ... He's into social work and we were
talking and he was telling about how if he had the
program he would like to have a place open from
like five in the evening 'til late at night to deal
with just gang members. Which is a very good idea
because all the agencies close at five, six
o'clock. Then the guys got nothing to do but hang
out on the street. An agency open from five to
twelve in the evening is a very good idea.

SPERGEL:  We've done a lot with sports for these
kids over the years. Does that help?

JACKIE:  I think we should see that sports helps to
some extent. The reason it doesn't help more is
because staff don't know how to combine the groups.
The groups are not combined right. If you get these
kids to work hand-in-hand, through an obstacle
course or anything or there's some kind of vision
that they can develop in terms of long-terms goals,
"Oh yeah, we achieved this together." "Why can't we
achieve this?"

ROBERTO:  Another question is, how do you keep kids
from getting into the gang?

MICHAEL:  OK, that starts in grammar school. You
have to develop programs in the grammar school. I'm
talking about going down to the fifth, sixth grade
where these kids are vulnerable. Start teaching
them something, start educating them to the life of
street gangs and stuff out there, intervention
right then and there. Don't wait till they're
already in eighth grade. They're already influenced
by what's going on out there. They're getting ready
for high school, you know, you have to start early.
You need some programs in the grammar school.

THOMAS:  It goes right back to the thing I said
about agencies being open from five to twelve.
Sports is good. I used to coach basketball. We'd go
over to the YMCA three days out of the week, but
the guys are only there for two hours. Sports is
great. I wanted to run a city-wide basketball
tournament. They wouldn't allow it, they said
sports was not going to do no good. But that's the
one way we get to know some of the youths, to get
in touch with them. Sometimes I can't deal with the
kids directly, sports or no sports. Then I will go
to the leader of the gang and tell him to stop this
or that. We had a kid up north, he wanted to quit
the Unknowns. This kid was fourteen years old in
grammar school. He wanted to get out and they
wouldn't let him. They wanted to kill him, so what
I did--I called the leader of the Unknowns and he
took care of it for me. It's like we need to get to
know most of the older guys. You need to deal with
the hard-core gang members. Just like Jackie was
saying, a lot of these programs do not deal with
the hard-core gang members. If you get a good
rapport with them, they could stop a lot of the
stuff that goes on with the younger guys. Just like
when me and Jackie used to work with the Doc. I
think, you know, we stopped a lot of things going
on by Clemente. If I wasn't over there, Jackie
would call me and say, "Thomas, the kids are coming
over here starting trouble," and I would go over
there or I would call Jackie, "Jackie, the Cobras
are over here starting trouble," and we would meet
over there with each other and we would separate
the two groups. Like I say you need to deal with
the hard-core gang members.

RAYMOND:  We gotta have some role models. We got to
start at least at fourth or fifth grade level and
we have to find something to use, some kind of
technique that would be able to make the kids feel
really, really negative toward the gang. Educate
them. Killing might scare them, but you can't show
a little kid a dead body. That might scare them
half to death. But it's gotta be something that the
gangs are doing that little kids don't like.

THOMAS:  You gotta control the gang problem in the
high school, too. I dealt with a lot of the grammar
school kids, but once in high school that's when
they got into the gang. For example, they couldn't
go to Wells. If they went to Wells they got jumped.
Then they say, I might get jumped on, so I might as
well join them. There was a kid in his last year of
high school. He had never been in the gang, but he
got jumped on and I see him now hanging with the
Kings out of Leavitt.

ROBERTO:  What could we have done to prevent that?

THOMAS:  Control the gangs. Wells says they don't
have a gang problem. For one thing, all the
principals have to admit that they have a gang
problem. There ain't a school in Chicago--even the
Catholic schools--that don't have a gang problem.
That's one thing they gotta admit. The principal
from Wells insists that he does not have a gang
problem, but I know a kid that got shot there,
inside of the school. We gotta control the gang
problem in the high school, too.

SPERGEL:  Let's say we did a sports program, or we
did a school counseling program, or we're doing any
kind of program, how do we find out who is more
likely to join the street gang and who isn't?

THOMAS:  You could tell by their attitude.

SPERGEL:  Even in fifth grade?

THOMAS:  Yes.

JACKIE:  Billie was one of the most quietest kids
in my whole school. Walked around with a big "fro,"
was shy. He turned out to be one of the biggest
killers in the Disciples. You wouldn't imagine he'd
be that.

ROBERTO:  Is there some way we can determine who is
the most likely to go into a gang?

MICHAEL:  I don't think you can, other than if you
can find out if there's trouble at home; if there's
a one-parent family home, if there are older
brothers who are in the street gang. In the
majority of cases you don't have sophistication to
find all that out. What you have to do is take the
group all together and find out who has this or
that problem and try to educate them all at the
same time.

RAYMOND:  My criminal activities started the moment
I got kicked out of high school. That was part of
the problem. They'd tossed out me and another 17 or
16 more guys. We ain't got nothing to do. So we get
up early in the morning and we're all gonna meet,
go hang out, get together, get high, do whatever we
got to do. So, how is it that you're gonna fix a
school problem if you're passing the buck? That's
what they really did, they passed the buck by
putting me out on the street. That wasn't really
the answer.

MICHAEL:  I think that programs have to be
developed inside the public school system, the
grammar school system to instil different types
values into our young people, especially Hispanic
and Black. Let's face it we don't have the same
type of values as the Caucasians do. You know, you
want to get your sons through college, you want to
make them professionals. Many of our Hispanic
families, like my father, didn't care if we got out
of high school. All they know is "get a job, get a
job," whether it pays you $3.35 an hour in a
factory or whatever. We shouldn't be doing that.
Our Hispanic parents should be trying to tell our
kids to go on to school, and show them the values
of a higher education. They can make more bucks
than $3.35 an hour that when they drop out of
school. Show them that they can make $15 an hour.

THOMAS:  I think the school has the major role,
especially in the Wicker Park area. They come from
Anderson School. Anderson School is controlled by
Kings, War Lords and Vice Lords. The closest high
school is Wells and Clemente, but Disciples and
Harrison Gents control those two school. So the
majority of the Anderson kids have to go to Schurz.
They have to take a bus all the way up North. It's
a lot of trouble. A lot of these kids don't like
school any way.

Even if you're not in a gang in some of these
gang schools, you're in trouble. This lady that
lives across the street. Her son is in no gang.
This guy's what they call a "nerd." He's got his
glasses and everything, but they jumped him. This
kid he doesn't even look like a gangbanger, nothing
near a gang member. They jumped him just because he
came from that school.

SPERGEL:  Did he join a gang after he got jumped?

THOMAS:  No, not this guy. His mother would kill
him.

SPERGEL:  Also if the guy feels he's making it in
school, he's going to be less likely to be with the
gang.

MANUEL:  This is my experience with the school
system. Now the reason I was going to Orr, I was
goofing up and a troublemaker. I was sent to
Lorraine High to stay with my older sister. I went
to school there and there were no gangs. There was
nothing to cause me not to study. I made a "C"
average. I came back to the city. Now who is this
principal to decide what my future is when I come
back and show him and tell him I'm reformed. I'm
ready to go on with my life and leave all this
garbage behind. Who is he to tell me no. We can't
accept you because of your past? Who is he to
decide what my future is going to be? When he
didn't accept me, I thought well, I'm no good.
Where am I going to go to now? What do I have to do
now? I started hanging out with my friends again,
selling drugs and doing whatever I have to do to
get by in life.

HENRY:  Don't forget about the family's support,
too.

THOMAS:  The parents have the important role. I
have these two kids that we picked up at the
restaurant at Donald Dukes on Division. They robbed
this other kid. I take them home and I see these
kids everyday. The older one is thirteen, the other
one is twelve. This kid thirteen had about 12-14
records already with the police. He wears an
earring, he's a Vice Lord, he wears his earring.
Every time I see him I take his earring. Lately he
hasn't been wearing it, because I told him next
time I see him with one I'm going to cut his ear
off.

Last week me and my partner, saw the older
brother of these two kids, and I ask him, where's
his 13 year old brother? He told me "I haven't seen
my brother." He said, he didn't come home last
night. This kid 13 years old, what did your mother
say? Oh, she hasn't seen him. I see the older
brother two days later. I asked, have your brother
came home? No, but my mother said she saw him.

SPERGEL:  In the newspaper last week in California
they arrested the parents....

MANUEL:  Yeah, they threw the mother in jail and
she had to post bond because of her children's
activity. I don't know if that's going the right
way.

THOMAS:  A lot of these parents got an idea that
their kids are in gangs, but would not admit it.
With one of these kids, the mother said she found a
six point star with a pitchfork in his room, and
the dude's walking around with blue gym shoes, his
hat's cocked to the right. Mamma, "I'm not in the
gang," he says. A lot of moms do not want to admit
that their kids are in gangs. They know it, they
see it and they just don't want to admit it.

MICHAEL:  A lot of us come from large families and
our mothers have six, seven kids. Mom's got her
hands tied with all these kids and there ain't very
much that can be done. Maybe there needs to be
something to help her cope with all these children.
You know, she can't do it all herself. And it's
true like you said some parents just don't give a
damn. They might have one child, two children; they
still don't care.

SPERGEL:  The other thing is some of the kids are
bringing money in the family.

MICHAEL:  Dealing drugs for the gang, mom has
money. The welfare check wasn't doing it, that
$154, that $198 wasn't going to feed all them kids.
Her son's dealing drugs, she knows the icebox is
full. The children are being fed. That's why
sometimes they don't care.

SPERGEL:  What do you do with the mothers getting
money off drugs or the one in California that is
supposed to be getting kicks out of kids in gangs?

MICHAEL:  I don't know because that's hard to tell.
If that's the case it's hard to tell them to stop
that money from coming into the house. Live on your
welfare check or whatever it is they give you and
keep surviving. You have to provide an alternative
for them. What alternative are you going to pro-
vide? I don't know. You know your system here in
Chicago is one of the worst there is. They keep you
at the poverty level, if not below and they expect
you to survive with that. They don't give you
anything else.

So, what would you tell a parent: her son is
dealing drugs? He is in a gang but he's bringing
food into the house and she's getting only $198 a
month or whatever it is from Public Aid. She can't
support the family. What are you going to tell her?
What would you tell her? "Well tell your son to
stop doing that. Just keep surviving with your
$198." How realistic is that?

SPERGEL:  I'm asking you the question.

MICHAEL:  It's a question that's gonna keep getting
asked because there's no answer for it right now.

ROBERTO:  Okay, let's switch to one of the last
parts of this session. What did you feel should be
the role of the police, the courts, probation. You
guys have all had these contacts at one point or
another. Are there any things they should be doing
or not doing?

THOMAS:  I really don't know, because I'm not on
the street as a gangbanger now. When I'm on the
street I'm working. But I remember when I was out
there hanging on the street. The police used to
provoke a lot of the problems with the gangs. They
used to come by and tell you yeah this guy said
he's going to kick you butt. The cop cars would
drop you off there in enemy territory. They would
come by with crowns upside down or pitchforks
upside down, provoking things like that. Two weeks
ago they killed that kid over there. He was a "D."
Other people say that he supposed to have gave up
or something. The cops shot a Cobra a couple of
weeks before that. The police provoke a lot of the
problems.

SPERGEL:  You have a lot of experience with that.

THOMAS:  The police take sides. They actually wear
colors, have graffiti hanging in their cars. There
was one time where they went down Tolbart Street
with a Cobra sweater on a dummy tied to the bumper
of a squad car and drove around the whole
neighborhood. 

SPERGEL:  Do the police ever do anything good?

HENRY:  I'm going to go back to when I was a
youngster. The fact is that there was more respect
in the neighborhoods because there was more police
influence. Now it might have been somewhat abusive,
but things have changed, these youngsters are
running neighborhoods. People are afraid to come
out of their homes. The gangs stop vehicles, they
stop traffic. Now the police are either blind or
stupid or something is wrong with them or they
don't give a damn. That's the problem where most of
our police officers don't give a damn and they're
allowing all this to happen, allowing the gangs to
thrive, the drugs to thrive, and the problems just
keep on occurring. The minorities are being
affected because they're causing their own
downfall. Everybody around them is laughing. I
think that the police need to be more involved.
They should be a little more selective as to whom
they harass and who they put up against the wall
because we don't want the gestapo tactics of the
1960's either. I think that they need to get more
involved. They need to control these neighborhoods
and let people live again.

SPERGEL:  Let me I ask the question differently,
can you identify specific situations which the
police were doing good things?

JACKIE:  Never, the police department is the
problem.

MICHAEL:  The police department under the Byrne
administration. I know a lot of you don't like it,
but they used to bust you all if you were a group
of more than three on the street corner. They used
to take you all to jail for disorderly conduct. I
think that was cool, but then they started abusing
that power. They used it as a tool for racism. Just
because you were Puerto Rican, you couldn't be with
your brothers and whatnot. They took you to jail. A
tool like that is good--something like that to stop
known stone gang members on the corner, something
like that and bust them all, but not to start using
that as a tool to harass Hispanics per se.
Something like that was working but then it got
ridiculous. 

SPERGEL:  You say the cops have to know the
community. They have to know the people out there.

THOMAS:  That's right.

MICHAEL:  Chicago Police Department has a police
walking beat. Okay, you know where they have them
walking the beat? In your f---in' good
neighborhoods on Lincoln Avenue, on Clark Avenue,
that's where they have them walking the beat. You
don't see them walking down North Avenue or down
Division Street. They're walking down some of the
good neighborhoods and whatnot. It don't do them no
good to curb gang violence walking down Clark and
Belmont.

MANUEL:  That's where all the businesses and stores
are. That's one reason. But I remember they were
escorting the Gangsters to the funeral home. There
must have been about six or seven squad cars. The
other gang still opened fire on them and we had a
whole week of hell because of that night. The
sergeant came down on the police there. "How the
f--- were you guys there" and these gangbangers
still ended up shooting these Gangsters up? What's
the deal? They don't even respect the police
department any more.

SPERGEL:  Does it help if the police do what they
did under the Jane Byrne administration, just come
out and harass people?

ROBERTO:  People are scared. You know I work
politics and I knock on people's door and I see the
fear in these people's faces to even come out to
talk to you because it got dark outside. Yeah, we
need police intervention. We need the police to go
into community meetings: police who are truly
involved and care and listen to people and involve
themselves with them. People will pinpoint where
the problems are. And that's what the police should
key on, not going out like Nazis and the gestapo
stomping people. You can't just throw people
around. You'll have to know what you're doing while
realizing what's going on around you. I think the
police department is not that stupid, I think most
of those guys have a little education and they
should be able to deal with this problem.

SPERGEL:  What about Chicago's specialized approach
to gangs: you got special police, special state's
attorneys to deal with the problem?

HENRY:  I don't think that they're really trying to
develop a new type of structure to help the
community and to stop the gangs. In one instance, I
was called to be a part of a gang committee for the
states attorney and I asked what about those kids
that get busted and when they come out of jail
would like to stay away from gangs because of the
bad experience that they had. The states attorney
had the nerve to tell me that his office was no
social service program. That's the attitude they
have. I said what kind of logic is this, are we
here to help or what? And I quit that damned
committee.

JACKIE:  Now another thing is that the police
officers believe and I'm not saying all the police
(because there are a lot of good police)--they
believe that once you're a gang member you'll
always be a gang member. Once you're a big shot
within the gang, there's nothing that will change
their mind that you have a different view of life.
I experienced it myself and so did other people. I
was working on the University's project. I went to
the station to find out about a particular kid.
They threw me down on the floor. I was stepped on.
I was called a pimp, a hustler, a dope pusher. I
was told that my mother was all kinds of things.
All kinds of things happened when we worked on the
project. The workers out in the field know what was
going on. The police was actually participating and
also inflicting gang violence. I mean inflicting
it. They were actually responsible for these kids
going at each others throats.

HENRY:  I have to come to agreement with Jackie,
because the police, like he says you know some of
them get off on these head trips. They walked into
my gym. They are in their uniform with a badge and
a gun. They think everybody there is disrespecting
them. They tell somebody to "shut up man" and they
expect everybody to move when they give the word.
The kids can't accept this. The police don't
respect them. And yet I respect the police, because
I was saved by some police back in 1969. The
building was on fire, they came in and they got
everybody out. I respected the police, but when I
seen that they were harassing and trying to keep us
in this oppression, I no longer held any respect
for the police. That's the mentality that we have.
We don't respect them and they don't respect us.
But now some police officers we give respect to,
because they come and approach us the right way.
But it isn't right you know. They label you, and
you're this and that.

SPERGEL:  Crisis gang workers have to deal with the
cops, how do they deal with the cops?

THOMAS:  They still harass some of us. They don't
harass me now, but the first year I was on the job,
I had to call the lawyer in because they were
harassing me.

HENRY:  Some of the young police officers, they
have what is commonly known as the John Wayne
syndrome. When they come into the department
they're gung ho. You know, they want to bust
everybody. They want to be bad, they want to get
recognition in the street and so you have that
problem to deal with.

I think police officers have to deal with our
problems and serve our people. Can they relate to
these problems or are they just going to go there
and just extend the problem? So it's important that
we sit down with these police officers at community
meetings, but by the same token, they have to want
to be involved with these programs and help and not
just sit there for the sake of sitting there and
sizing some of you guys up and just waiting to hurt
you or the people that you represent. I think it's
important that where you have a high rate of
Hispanic population you have as many Hispanic
officers in that are who are gonna relate directly
to the problem, who can speak your language. We do
have problems a lot of the time. Sometimes, they
dislike you because you moved them from where they
lived and they moved somewhere else. So they're not
gonna relate to you in a proper manner. They're
gonna look at you like you're a pile of manure. And
that's the way they'll always deal with you. Now we
need to work with that problem.

ROBERTO:  I wanted to ask one last question, parole
and probation. Are they effective at all? Do they
do any good?

MICHAEL:  No, no. Your parole divisions and your
probation, their caseload is extremely high. These
parole officers and these probation (officers) have
caseloads of 100 clients. What can they do with a
caseload like that? They can't give any one
individual counseling.

They have to hire more parole officers, more
probation officers. That would cut their caseloads,
maybe then they can do some one-on-one counseling.
Other than that in the position they're in right
now, they really can't do nothing other than sit in
their office and wait till all these guys check in
and check out. They can't do anything, they can't.

ROBERTO:  Jackie, you mentioned Jerry Donovan, he
runs that outward bound program or something like
that?

JACKIE:  Right, it's a religious organization that
deals with gangs guys in prison and outside.

HENRY:  I was with probation earlier last week and
they told me about him, they seem to use him a lot
and I was curious.

JACKIE:  Right, I used to go to all the prisons
with him. I went to all the prisons, Stateville,
Menard, St. Charles, most of the youth correctional
centers and also some of the others. I would visit
the guys and I would basically be talking about
Christianity and stuff like that. We also take
groups of kids on retreats like for two, three days
and we would combine different gang kids in order
to get them to work together. At the beginning it
was kind of rough working with the kids but in the
end they respect each other in a lot of ways. We
had kids from the South Side, kids from my neigh-
borhood, we had kids from different neighborhoods--
there were Folks and People--and a lot of times it
worked even though when they first met, we had to
pretty much control them. This was a recreation
alternative to gang violence. His main thing though
was going to correctional centers and speaking with
the kids behind prison walls about Christianity and
stuff like that.

MANUEL:  Well, maybe the probation system can
select certain individuals that are known gang
members, that are rival gang members to work
together in order to complete their probation.

ROBERTO:  Do something like community work.

JACKIE:  Like part of their probation should be to
be able to socialize with an opposite member of a
gang.

MICHAEL:  That might be a good thing for the court
before you get to jail. In order for the judge to
give you probation, you have to do so many hours of
work, community work with this particular social
service agency or with this particular school
regarding this particular gang problem.

MANUEL:  I'm saying in other words, for instance,
you and me and Jackie come to court. We were
different gang members. We both got picked up on
kick. We both got probation. There's a school in
the area that we both know has rival gangs, all
right? We're both sent on probation. How about if
the system itself says okay we want you to give us
300 hours of community services, me and Jackie
would have to work and monitor that school for 300
hours as part of our probation in order to achieve
that probation plus what the guidelines say.

MICHAEL:  I agree.

JACKIE:  He's right because as long as they keep up
the violence we're always gonna have that hatred
and animosity between us forever. But once we're
together there's no way they're gonna separate us
again.

THOMAS:  That's how it used to be with me and
Jackie. We didn't even want to work together in
that University program. It was at first like I'm
not working with him.

JACKIE:  That's the same way I felt about Jo-Jo and
everybody else, but yet we went in and worked
together, like that year that we all worked and
nothing jumped off. We worked security in the
carnival in '85. We got burnt for some money. We
never got no recognition like in the newspapers. In
'84 we got dogged, we got talked about. It was
funny, but how many people died? There was a total
of like 14 bodies within one week. Do you know that
it is to line up 14 people that are gone and
deceased? And we got dogged in that year. We got
talked about and wrote up and we were animals, and
cannibals and everything you could think of. But in
'85.

ROBERTO:  We achieved the most important goal which
was there was nobody killed in the festival or
around the festival or outside of it.

MICHAEL:  Something that was even greater than that
in '85 when all the leaders from both sides got
together, and in not one location did anybody get
stabbed. We had one shooting, but we couldn't
pinpoint it and that was over on our end. Remember
I told you, Kenny had got shot at but we weren't
sure who did it? And that was the only incident,
can you believe we didn't get paid? We didn't get
nothing man. And I ... I said next year I'm not
gonna participate in sh--, I'm gonna try to go
crazy next year and do up for what I didn't do back
in '85. That's how my attitudes work, when we got
dogged liked that. Regardless whether we got paid
or not we should have got some kind of recognition.

ROBERTO:  The important thing that you guys are
pointing out that I hear are--is this that a lot of
programs regardless if they're probation,
correction and so forth should work at bringing
together different opposing gang members so that
they socialize, get to know each other, see that
they're basically human and that you think alike.

HENRY:  Can I say something? It's all well and good
that gang members will get back together and be
friends again. Yet, they're still going back to the
same environment. Now are we talking about solving
the problem of gangs--of gang violence and of gang
members. How do we go about it? If these people
come out on parole or probation, we're putting them
back in the same circle of gangs, the same friends.

You know we should be talking about changing
these people's lives by educating them so that once
they come out on parole they can get a decent job.
They could support a family, so now they could deal
with the problems. Otherwise their solution is
gonna be, "well, I'll go back to the gang and I'll
go back and deal drugs and that's how I'll solve
all my financial problems." And that's the vicious
circle. They're gonna go back to jail, back to the
courts, and they're gonna come back to the
probation officer, and the family will be falling
apart. The youngsters that they leave behind are
going to be growing up in the same environment,
going back to the same gangs and starting it all
over again.

MICHAEL:  There's a new generation coming up. Now
this new generation has no reason to be out there
killing, stabbing or anything else. The young bucks
that are coming up ain't got nothing to be fired up
about.

JACKIE:  What he's saying is that back then when we
fought, we fought for gang purposes. I mean gang
purposes, you were a King, I was a Cobra. We did
not mix oil and water. We'd either get rid of the
oil or get rid of the water. See what I'm saying?
But now it's like if I was a gang member and I go
kill somebody I may be killing that person just to
get recognition from the gang, so I could be making
my drug money. The higher the rank the more
authority I got within the drug system itself and
on the corners it was being dealt on. There has
been a change but the purpose is still the same to
get recognition in the gang, to get recognition to
control money. The interests are different but the
purpose is still the same. They still want to be
the big shot in the gang. Now the interest is for
the money or the drugs or con-trolling
prostitution. Before it was less sophisticated. It
was just I want to be the toughest and I want to be
the most respected and so forth.

ROBERTO:  For Henry was the main question how you
got out of gangs.

MICHAEL:  The fact among the Kings was you killed
one of mine, I'm gonna go and kill ten of yours.
And that's what it used to be before. It was done
out of loyalty to the deceased.    But all I'm
saying is that the younger generation they haven't
really lost anyone. Anyone dear like we have.

MANUEL:  All I'm saying is if they see me and
Jackie together and they see me with another
Disciple or Cobra, what's their need for fighting
now? The only reason we were fighting back then was
because they came and killed one of our, so we
killed one of theirs. If me and him can bury the
hatchet and say "brother, you know what, forgive me
for any damage I caused to your organization," and
he says the same to me, what are all these younger
bucks fighting about?

ROBERTO:  Well, my feeling is that you and Jackie
would then become friends, but these younger guys
are not you and Jackie.

HENRY:  What we're talking about is that a lot of
you guys are older and grew up. What you need to do
is put together some role models for the younger
guys in the sense that if the old guys, brothers,
and cousins and friends, can get together and talk
stuff then maybe they'll see that there's a
possibility that they can get together. That's what
I wanted to say to you guys.

MICHAEL:  The problem with the whole gang situation
is that it's real complex. You need to work with
the schools, you need to work with the police. You
need to find jobs. You can't find jobs if there are
no jobs to be found. The economy ... if
unemployment is rising what control does anybody
have? The school system is real big and people all
over the city are working on that right now. Top
corporations, everybody's working on how can you
improve the school, how can you change them.
There's a massive effort underway. A lot of things
like schools, unemployment, and other things affect
what happens with the street gangs. Our job is
first to determine what are the most important
things, what are some of the things that you can do
to try to change the situation. No one has said if
you do a, b, and c you can change gang violence or
even street gangs. Gang violence is different from
gangs. You can have gangs in the neighborhood and
that doesn't necessarily mean they're shooting at
one another. There are neighborhoods that have
gangs where the shootings and the beatings and the
other stuff are relatively low. Okay? So there's
different questions that need to be answered.

SPERGEL:  Could I ask you a question about youth
agencies, social agencies? Nobody mentioned that.
Do they help or what should they be doing that
they're not doing now?

MANUEL:  I had a gym program that was real
positive. Real, real, positive. All these guys had
been getting all coked up, snorting every night.
Now they were coming in, working out, getting big.
The police department didn't like it. They were
stopping my guys, they thought my guys were on
pills, but all the guys were on vitamins.

RAYMOND:  You need an organization that is gonna be
based upon professional social workers like we did,
who are willing to develop a program with the kids
themselves. They have to participate together. They
have to have the thought and the dream in their
minds that they can achieve any goal as long as
they work together. Whether it be building a youth
center, whether it be rebuilding a building.
Whether it be sweeping the streets, or whatever it
might be. It has to be the kids participating.
Especially if you're gonna build a youth center
they would have to participate because when we
built a youth center on Division Street (still
today, they're still talking about it) they felt it
belonged to them. Something that they wanted to do
because it was a part of them. They said, "Hey, I
painted this wall." "Hey, I helped put up this 2
by 4. I did all this. I did this." They'd go home.
"Hey, I did this, mom." When the mother would get
all the kids home. "I'm doing something good, I was
over by the youth center. I was doing this."

MICHAEL:  A lot of these so-called youth services
that are supposed to be doing the job are just a
bunch of phony-ass individuals. They collect these
phony-ass statistics. They're doing this, this, and
that, when they're not doing this, this, and that.
I think we have to hold some of these social
service agencies or youth centers, whatever you
want ... accountable for what they're doing. Fine,
sports is all cool and whatnot, but don't just use
sports for going out and talking about because
we're having this baseball game, we're stopping the
killing and all that. That's not real. We have to
hold these people accountable and we have to watch
it because a lot of these people just care about
getting their money, and keep compiling these
phony-ass statistics year from year to keep getting
their money. And I think some of you know the
agencies I'm talking about.

THOMAS:  The problem where I work is they got a
video project going on right now. It's supposed to
have been for gang members. All the guys in the
project are goody two shoes. We got into a big old
argument a couple of weeks ago ... you see the
partner that I ride with, he's never been in no
gang. But from riding with me and meeting a lot of
the guys, he sees the things that I see now and
like uh, we had set up a thing to refer kids.
They're going to hire about 14, 15 guys at $4.00 an
hour so we told the assistant director that we're
gonna be doing this stuff ... we're going to be
referring these kids. He tells us, "well you can't
do this." I told him what do you mean we can't do
it. For one thing we're dealing with the gang
members, which we're supposed to be doing. We're
referring them to jobs. That's why I said we need
to start dealing more with the hard-core gang
members.

SPERGEL:  Why aren't they dealing more with the
hard-core gang members?

THOMAS:  I really don't know. I really don't know.
They really don't have much dealing with the hard-
core gang members like we're supposed to be. Me, I
don't care. I go and deal with them, break up
fights, or whatever.

HENRY:  On that subject a lot of those social
program should key on having craft shops, trade
shops, where neighborhood kids could go in and
learn something. It might change much of that gang
mentality out of them. They might become good
mechanics or something of this nature. Change their
ideas and thoughts about what's going on out there.
There is something else other than gangs.

SPERGEL:  One more thing (it's getting late,
everyone's tired) but what about the neighbors, you
have parent groups, you got mothers against gangs,
a lot of different groups. Are they of any use? Are
they doing the right thing? Should they be doing
something else or what's the role of some of these
neighbors?

RAYMOND:  They might not be doing all the right
things, but they're doing the right thing by being
involved. That's important, just being involved in
something that's right. See moms will have the
greatest interest for it, no doubt about that. But
how can the moms take on a task that's not fit
them? We can assist moms ... we can assist anybody
else, our neighbor, anybody else. But they gotta
have other people that are gonna back them up.

SPERGEL:  So you gotta have professionals or guys
who know what's happening to kind of develop this.

RAYMOND:  Right. That has the experience of dealing
with the problem itself. Let's say, for instance,
we might be standing on the corner trying to get
guys off the street and all of a sudden a passing
car comes by and shoots one of the kids and kills
him. The moms might go into a state of shock and
die there also. You gotta have somebody there to
that has experienced this before. There are
situations where anything can blow up, especially
when you're dealing with this kind of issue. You
gotta make them aware of that. It's how they
approach it. How they approach the problem itself
and the best way to do it would be if there were
professionals, social workers also with the
organization in the neighborhood and former gang
members, too, no doubt about it. If we're the
problem, then we gotta be part of the solution, as
well.

------------------------------

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO NATIONAL YOUTH GANG PROJECT
Symposium of Former African-American Gang
Influentials
August 26, 1989

Participants:

MELVIN: Age 37, formerly a leader of the Black
Gangster Disciples. Recent employment includes
assistant to a local alderman, community work for a
local church, and currently campaigning for State
Representative in the Illinois legislature. This is
a second effort to get elected as State
Representative.

NATE: Age 36, formerly a member of the Black
Gangster Disciples, and presently unemployed.

OMAR: Age 41, formerly a Black Gangster, presently
employed as a community worker in a West Side
housing project; also with extensive experience as
a youth worker for local agencies.

MELODIE: Age 25 years, formerly organizer and
leader of a girls' gang, presently mother of two
children and unemployed.

WILLIE: Age 27, formerly a Vice Lord, presently
unemployed.

DWAYNE: Age 28 years, formerly organizer and leader 
of the Unknown Nation, presently selling real
estate, also store manager.

JOE: 30 years old, African-American operator of
tape recorder; employee of Audio-Visual Equipment
and service company.

SPERGEL: Professor, School of Social Service    
Administration, University of Chicago, National
Youth Gang Suppression and Intervention Project.

RON: Coordinator, now Project Director, National
Youth Gang Suppression and Intervention Project.

OTHERS:

MELVIN:  May I have everyone's attention? May I
have your attention? Now this will basically
explain what we're doing here at the University of
Chicago and the purpose of what we're doing. Well,
what makes us -- that separates us from being
active members of a gang as opposed to members of
the more productive society. So, I need your
undivided attention.

SPERGEL:  We applied for and received a grant from
the U.S. Justice Department to develop ideas about
how to deal with the youth gang problem. We looked
at the research literature. Then we carried out a
survey. We sent out questionnaires and made phone
calls to people in different cities where there
were gang problems and organized programs to deal
with them. We talked to people in forty-five cities
and six special programs.

MELVIN:  Let me explain who Dr. Spergel is to
everyone sitting here. Dr. Spergel did initial
research with the cats. He knew Jeff Fort of the El
Rukns and David Barksdale of the Devil's Disciples.
And I'm requiring you to give him your undivided
attention. We are not here to be setup by the
United States Government. We are not here to be
setup by a police department. We are here for the
purpose of solving the problem of Black Negroes
killing each other. Omar, let me make it very
clear, this guy is one of my top guys -- I trust
him with my life. Make that clear across the board,
Nate, Dwayne, Melodie. Okay, so we can move forward
with what we got to do. There is no police
recording of what we're doing here. Okay, ain't
nothing to do with the FBI. It has to do with us,
who being grass-root people, come from where we be
able to solve the problem and relate to young
people, whooping and hollering, act out, pissing
and sh--ting in the hallways. Okay? Now, Spergel, I
trust with my life. I expect each one of you to pay
him the same courtesy as you pay me.

NATE:  No problem.

SPERGEL:  We talked to people around the country,
and we visited a few places where we thought there
were promising programs -- programs that were
really dealing with the problem. In some of those
places we talked to some of the younger fellows . .
. in corrections, a social agency, a church
program, to get some of their ideas. The one group
that we missed was some of the fellows, or girls in
a few cases, who had gone through this stage, who
were a little older; who were settled down, maybe
in their twenties or thirties and could tell us a
few things. You are here to help educate us about
the problem and what to do about it.

MELVIN:  We need to breathe, you know, we're
stacked up on one another. We're choked on one
another. You know, we don't catch as much fresh air
as those who run around in their planes and
motorboats and whatnot.  You know, our mind need to
breathe, too. And our children's minds need to
breathe. Listen, I'm telling you, it's like a
penitentiary in the neighborhood we stay in, you
know. Understand what i'm saying? They still leave
us boxed in where we can't breathe, you know? No
relief. You know what I'm saying. We got children
out there. We want them to progress and motivate
themselves and whatnot. How can they? How can they
get it when every time they go to someone, they
say, "No, not here. You from this area."

OMAR:  What you're sayin is that they judge you by
the area you from ... rather than the extent of
your mind ... right.

MELVIN:  Can I get a point of order? For the record
when you speak, please mention your name so we can
have this for the record, okay?

SPERGEL:  Should we get the names of the people
present and begin to ask some questions?

MELVIN:  Let's deal with the questions first. Okay,
you understand this is what we call research. We
are here for the purpose of studying the problem of
anti-social behavior and gang violence. That's the
purpose. It ain't where your Mama been. It ain't
where your Daddy been. It ain't who you screwed
last week. The purpose is to study anti-social
behavior and gang violence, period. Now if we can
not do that, you can all get the f--- up out this
muthaf---ing room! Let's make it very clear. We
touch what's on this agenda. Cause we got very
serious problems in the city of Chicago, across
this country that crackers, white folks do not
understand, where Black folks, and particularly
young Black men, young Black women be coming from
when they call us gangs. How come we steal, use
pistols in the streets of the city of Chicago? What
political influence has to do with it? What
influence in the home has to do with it? That's the
purpose of this. Let's open the agenda and get down
to the business at hand.

SPERGEL:  This morning, I hope we'll talk about
your involvement in the gang -- why you got in, why
you got out. Later in the afternoon, we'd like to
get your ideas about what should be done about the
problem.

MELODIE:  My name is Melodie. I have two kids. I am
nineteen now. When I was thirteen, fourteen just
entering high school, I joined a gang. I wanted to
be a follower and see what they were doing, see
what it was about. The fellows was making a little
money, selling drugs, doing this and that and going
against the other men for their name. Their name
was Disciples, Vice Lords. All they names mean
something to them. And I was runnin up behind em,
just to see what they was doin. Runnin up behind
them -- I wanted to be a leader, too, and do what
they was doing. They was leading me around to do
bad things. When I got up to that point, I got up
to be a leader. Then I seen it wasn't nothin to it.
It was nothin to it but to tell the girls what to
do. I told them what to do, ruled them around and
got my little money. There wasn't nothin to it. I
had fun for a while.

Then I got pregnant. So after I got pregnant,
I said, "What am I good for? What I'm out here
for?" It's all was stupid. Stupidity. I had my
baby. I realized I didn't want my child to grow up
doing what they was doin. I didn't what my child
runnin around, busting car windows, and trying to
steal radios and sellin drugs. Sellin drugs to the
other men and all the brother men and doing what
they don't s'pose to be doin. I wanted my kids to
go to school, get an education. Something that I
didn't do. I left the gang. I left it alone. Cause
there wasn't nothin left for me. It couldn't help
take care of my kids.

I could have stayed there. Had them bringing
me money like I wanted, too, to take care my kids
but that ain't enough. I should have had someone
there to teach me education, tell about the
importance of education in school, what the school
could do for you. I didn't want to go to school.
Cause I wanted to run behind my friends. Run behind
the gang leaders. And I wanted to be a leader to
see what they could do. I did all that stuff. But
now I'm fightin to get back in school. I start
school next month. I want to get my education so I
can teach my kids to get theirs, cause without
their education you can't do nothin for life but
join a gang.

MELVIN:  Amen.

MELODIE:  Join the gang, sell drugs and sell them
to another brother man. And the drugs ain't doing
nothin but eatin up the body. Eatin up the body --
killin em. That's all it doin. You get a little
high on. You feel good right then and there but you
ain't gettin nothin out of it. Ain't gettin nothin
out of it for life. I have a daughter and I have a
son. I don't want them to go through what I went
through.

SPERGEL:  What's their ages?

MELODIE:  My daughter is two and my son is one.
They were back to back. They nine and a half months
apart.

MELVIN:  Melodie, what could they have told you in
the school when you was dealin in crime? What could
they have done? What could they have told you to
make you take your education as opposed to being in
the streets?

MELODIE:  Somebody should have been there to tell
me what would happen in the gang and what was I
gonna get out of a gang. Didn't nobody tell me
nothin bout the gang but the gang members. Who just
told me all the fun I was gonna have and this and
that. The teachers -- the teachers can't tell you
nothin cause they don't know nothin bout no gangs.
So now I want to grow up to be one of them teachers
that tells kids the gang ain't goin to nothin for
you. I have two kids; I'm their leader. They gonna
be my followers. And I'm goin try to keep them in
school to let them know that education gonna get
them a job and what they want.

SPERGEL:  The teachers are pretty ignorant about
what's going on in the streets so they can't help
you.

MELODIE:  Right. They couldn't tell me nothin cause
they was just tryin to teach. They was just tryin
to do their job. Besides, I didn't want to do what
they wanted me to do. That wasn't fun. What was fun
was try and sell drugs, and tell somebody else what
to do; that was fun to me.

SPERGEL:  So once you got in, it was fun?

MELODIE:  Uh huh. To hang out with the crowd, to be
with them.

SPERGEL:  Crowd being other girls, fellows,
combination?

MELODIE:  Um hmm, combination. Girls, boys and all.
The one's who try to be hip. Try to be hip, they
hip-hop, they doin this, they doin that.

SPERGEL:  Yeah. What did your mother, what did your
teachers say or do at that time? Now you were about
thirteen, you say? They didn't pay much attention
to what was going on?

MELODIE:  Naw, my mother kept tellin me to stay in
school, quit cuttin class; quit doin this; quit
doin that. But she didn't explain to me. We was in
the projects during all this time. I was growin up
in this environment. She didn't know what was goin
around us but even if she woulda knew what was goin
around us, she couldn't explain to me. And I would
have took it another way. She didn't know what was
goin on out there. If she did she didn't tell me. I
wish she hadda. By her not telling me, I found out
on my own. I wanted to be in the hip crowd. The hip
crowd ain't nowhere. And I got to teach this to my
kids and tell them what to look for, and what not
to get themselves into.

SPERGEL:  So, how long were you there? Was it a
group? Or just a bunch of people? Did it have a
name?

MELODIE:  It was a group, uh huh, it was a group.
Different groups for different people. Like some of
em was too big and high-powered for me. I couldn't
deal with it. So I became a leader of my own little
group. My own little group was the Mack Crew. We
did this and we did that. To be more specific, we
ran the streets, we talked about people, we tried
to dress better than other people. We tried to
dance better than other people and we couldn't do
it right because it was always somebody else who
was jealous of us. Jealousy is what makes the gangs
get violent. They get jealous. They don't like to
see what you do. So they get violent. That's when
the knives and everything came along. I couldn't
deal with the guns. That's when it got too rough
and we left. I wasn't gettin none of my follower no
gun. I wouldn't get none of em no knives cause I
didn't like to fight. I didn't like to fight so my
followers didn't like to fight. But the other
leaders ahead of me they like to fight in a violent
way.

SPERGEL:  Are these girls or boys you are talking
about?

MELODIE:  Girls and boys.

SPERGEL:  Girls are involved in use of knives and
weapons?

MELODIE:  It's like different groups. This group
right here want to fight. They use violence and
guns. This group wanna fight in dancing. This group
wanna fight in rap. One group get jealous of the
other group. I ain't got no weapon. I just want to
beat them out with my singing and rappin and all
this. They wanted to beat me out with they guns and
knives and all that. And I couldn't handle it. I
couldn't handle it. I took my gang to another part
of town. And everywhere I went it was the same
thing. Cause the leaders, the higher they got up
into what they was doin, the more drugs that's the
more they got involved with knives and guns,
breaking into houses, trying to get more money. And
I got pregnant during that time. I got pregnant and
I realized that I didn't want my kids to go through
that right there. So I'm tryin to teach my kids to
stay in school. I want to be a teacher.

SPERGEL:  So, how long were you in the group all
together?

MELODIE:  I quit when I was eighteen right after I
had my baby. And all my followers didn't understand
why I wanted to stop the gang. All of us is
runaways -- left home tryin to be with the hip
crowd. But now, all of em back. I don't know what
they doin now. I lost contact. A lot of them went
to other groups; but they goin to realize in the
long run that they shouldn't have did what they
did. And I hat what I did. I had fun doin most of
the things but a lot of it I regret doin. And I
have two babies and I want to teach my babies
what's the wrong and right things to do in life.

SPERGEL:  You got us off to a good start.

OMAR:  I want to say that the quote, unquote "gang"
does not always mean a bunch of Black men or women
carrying pistols, using drugs. There are gangs that
are dancing gangs. There are gangs that are singing
gangs. A bunch of guys and girls that are break
dancing are still a gang.

SPERGEL:  Some people would call them gangs; most
people would not.

MELVIN:  Well that point needs to be straightened
out immediately.

SPERGEL:  The police, the schools aren't going to
call those groups gangs, are they?

MELVIN:  I think what you find quite often, is that
-- and it goes back to your initial studies -- that
there is no clear definition to what gangs are.
When Dwayne gets involved later, I'm quite sure he
will tell you a different story of what a gang is
and what needs to be done.

Her definition, she clearly explained was,
"Look, we got involved because it was a social
thing to do." That you get together -- people
become envious and jealous. It's a basic human
instinct. So, if someone is envious and jealous of
you -- you gotta protect your stuff. You gotta
protect your territory. You gotta protect your
thing that you represent.

MELODIE:  We had a group of girls that looked good.
They were the Sexual Seven. But by they lookin so
good and people jumping on them, they had to come
and band together and get some knives and stuff to
protect themselves. They didn't start off at that.
Anytime that there's more than five people they
consider that as a gang but it's a group.

SPERGEL:  Who considers that a gang?

MELVIN:  What makes the group a gang is when they
retaliate to defend theirs. Some people might come
from the Taker Family and some people might come
from the Givin Family. They take the kindness for
weakness. Now if you was to walk up to me and ask
me can you borrow something, I would let you borrow
it. But if you come to me and take it, I'm goin to
defend myself. So, I feel that the reason why
people join gangs is for help. Cause it's one of
you and it's a thousand of them. Now, if you can be
one of them thousand, I think you would be.

SPERGEL:  Your chance of survival is better right?

MELVIN:  Right.

SPERGEL:  Maybe we ought to stop here? Would some
of the others tell us about themselves?

MELVIN:  Okay. Omar, you got something to say?

OMAR:  Well, my name is Omar. We did not start off
as a gang we started off as a social club. We could
be compared to the Boys' Club. We organized
ourselves very well. We had various social clubs .
. . and then we had one united social club. Okay?

SPERGEL:  How old are you?

OMAR:  I'm forty-one years. When I was in the club,
no guns and knives were used. We did not gang-bang
even when we got together. All our club members are
still together, right now. Understand? We have a
new name but we are still together. And we do not
consider ourself a gang because we are made up of
everything that's on the West Side, some of what's
on the South Side. And we do not believe in gang
violence, do not believe in drug dealing, we do not
believe in any of those things any more. We are
trying to get to our young brothers who are there
now who will listen to us because they won't listen
to the elders now. This is the only problem that we
have with them. They will not listen.

MELODIE:  They ain't gonna listen. They gotta go
through it theyself. They gotta be hit by another
man. They can't be told. Cause there's a lot of
grown-ups out there to tell them. But they will not
listen. They wanna stay with the crowd. If they
don't, they'll be square. You ain't nothin, you are
junk. I'll take this from you because you're
square. And if you ain't square, if you don't wanna
be square, you gotta go blend in with the crowd.
And to blend in with the crowd, the leaders make
you do things you don't wanna do. And you come out
and tell the leader, "I don't wanna do this because
I don't think that's right." The leader hook it,
"I'm the leader. Kick his ass. Because I said he do
what I say do. If he don't do what I say do, kick
his butt. I want his ass whipped." So he's all
scared cause they gonna whip him. He gotta do what
they say. And the only thing gonna be on his mind
is I'm gonna be bigger one day, I be a leader one
day. They ain't gonna be able to do this to me. I
do this to somebody else.

WILLIE:  My name is Willie. And it's a shame that
you can't walk down the street with a smile on your
face because people will take advantage of that.
They'll think you soft. You know, you gotta walk
around looking like you kill't your mother or
something to get your respect. But there are some
people who will challenge you anyway.

MELODIE:  They gonna try and take something from
you. But he take nothin from you. Cause they see
that you're something that they would like to be,
you are something they wish they was, or you are
something that they wish somebody else had taught
them to be. Now, he'll have to take on that whole
gang.

WILLIE:  And don't nobody wants to feel oddball.

MELODIE:  Sure don't.

WILLIE:  Now if we can just go along with the
program there's something for you. But if you ain't
in this program, then somethin' wrong with you. You
stickin' out like a sore thumb. And they'll do
everything they can to convince you what they want
is what's happening. Guys, you run around with are
here in a pair of fifty dollar, seventy-five dollar
gym shoes, with gold chains. You think that's
what's happening. But he didn't tell you what he
went through to get that. About the initiations and
the violations and everything. He earned that.

SPERGEL:  To get gold chains and the other things,
you mentioned initiation and violation. What do
they consist of?

WILLIE:  Okay, well initiation is probably going on
a hit. I want his head, let me hear him being dead,
or we f--- somebody up who represents something,
right. Okay, now that's initiation. And the other
part is if you do this for me, I will do something
for you. I might put a pound of crank in your hand.
Get you some safe friends, some people, gold
chains. You'll get rewarded. But you're not
promised it. Just like you hit somebody, you can
get hit.

I was in a gang. They wanted me to hit my cuz.
And I refused to do it. And I got pistol-whipped,
they knocked my teeth out. They chipped these teeth
because I wouldn't hit my cousin. So I was one of
the fortunate ones. I was staying in the projects
and I moved to the suburbs.

SPERGEL:  How old were you when you started getting
into it?

WILLIE:  Fifteen.

SPERGEL:  How old are you now?

WILLIE:  I'm 27.

SPERGEL:  Why did you get into the gang?

WILLIE:  Why did I get into the gang? Because I
didn't want to be no outlaw. That seemed to be the
hippest thing to do. Fast money spends fast. If I
was to spend a hundred dollars, it didn't bother me
because I didn't earn it, I didn't work for it, I
didn't slave for it. Now if I was working for it, I
would budget it in a more responsible way.  And
then I didn't have no responsibility.

SPERGEL:  You were going to school at that time.
How were you doing in school?

WILLIE:  Ahh, that, ugh! In fact I was just going
for lunch and gym. Lunch and gym that's all. I'd go
shoot me some pool and play some softball, go eat
lunch and I'm gone. When I quit school, my parents
quit dressing me. So I had to go out there and get
my own wardrobe. "You don't go to school, then all
I can do for you is give you a bed." As far as
eatin, it wasn't going on. As far as sleeping, I
could. As far as dressin, I couldn't do nothin. All
I could do at home is just lay my head down.

SPERGEL:  So you had to earn a living. You had to
survive somehow.

WILLIE:  It's a lot of them out there that's doing
that. And they ain't got no other choice.

MELVIN:  So now you're saying they become dependent
on each other.

WILLIE:  Especially if you're good friends. You
live next door to me, I live next door to you, you
belong to the same organization. I spend the night
at your house tonight, tomorrow you spend the night
at my house. Today we eat at my house, tomorrow we
eat at your house. We get along the best way we
can. And then when that runs out, when your parents
or whatever get tired of what you do, then you have
no choice but taking stuff. The next thing you
know, back in jail, you in jail. You know you're
going to resort to crime eventually. You see the
gang is a dependency type thing. You depend on each
other, you know, it's all social.

SPERGEL:  Can you say that gangs are groups that
depend on each other for the basic necessities like
food, clothing, and shelter.

OMAR:  They ain't got nobody to give that to them.

MELVIN:  But then again sometimes if they put you
in the drug treatment center, then you gonna be a
dope spy. What the social service agencies say,
here I am, I'm sitting here. I'm depending on food,
clothing and shelter from you, Melodie, from you,
Omar, from you Willie C. When you go into the
social service agency like Mile Square Health
Center, What do they do? You go on the street with
10 small kids. Or mostly, they give you a box of
food. You got to find your own shelter. You
understand? Or you go to St. Matthew, you get
clothes, you know, secondhand clothes. They're not
as good, but you know, they're clothes. I wanted
the clothes that all the hip people was wearing. So
I had to do things to get my clothes.

SPERGEL:  What do you call hip people?

MELODIE:  Hip people. The leaders of the day.

WILLIE:  With gold and diamonds, people with
savings.

MELODIE:  Uh huh. I didn't want to get all that
fast because I didn't have the money for it. They
get theirs by selling drugs. I had some of the
drugs too, to get mine. Selling drugs helped me to
get my food and my clothes that I wanted, and my
shelter for over my head. They called me their
friend because I was paying them. Honkey friends.
They was my friends because I was paying them. I
had to pay them to sleep in their home.

WILLIE:  You get lonely, you get frustrated, and
here there's somebody younger than you got the
things that you want. Being older than them, you
don't realize how they got it. Everybody that's
young probably came from a wealthy background and
that don't mean they're no gang. If I feel that I
should have what he got, I'll probably take it.

SPERGEL:  Do you take it now?

WILLIE:  I don't think I will. But some of my ex-
gang members. I seen them gonna head out, I want
that car right there. Bring it to me. And I, you
know, go to the junkyard, buy an old car same
model, make, and I take the plate out of it. And I
get a car for that plate. That be my car.

MELVIN:  Is the reason for taking the car because
you want to have the finer things of life or
because you want to showboat and clown?

WILLIE:  I want to have the finer things in life
but I ain't got patience.

OMAR:  If anybody takes a car of mine, I would kill
him.

WILLIE:  Omar, I feel brother you understand me
knowing you could ride in that car. So why sit on a
promise. Now I'm just talking about a young punk on
the street. If you put yourself in that category,
then we ain't friends. It bothers me taking
something from any of you brothers and sisters in
this room. It will never happen. And if I hear
about it I would do my damndest to block it.

MELVIN:  Would it be a violation?

WILLIE:  No, because I'm not in no gang.

SPERGEL:  Why did you decide to leave the gang and
how did you leave the gang?

WILLIE:  I left the gang because they wanted me to
hit my cousin. I left it, by moving.

SPERGEL:  And why did they want you to hit your
cousin?

WILLIE:  Because I was a gang member and I had some
artillery in my house and my cousin came to visit
me in a different gang and confiscated my
artillery. Our artillery was pistols.

OMAR:  The upkeep of a gang, the major portion is
discipline. You have to be disciplined. You
understand? If the leaders are not in control, then
you're going to run amuck and that's what happens.

WILLIE:  You know what I mean about discipline is
control. You understand? You have to be controlled.

MELVIN:  Why don't y'all define what discipline is?
Can we say discipline is order or control? You do
what I tell you to do, and if you violate that,
they'll kick your ass.

WILLIE:  That's it. If I say do it, do it. It's as
simple as that. No questions asked. You understand?
Otherwise, you gonna have a whole lot of conflict
within your organization.

DWAYNE:  The word gang was a bunch of bullsh -- as
far as when we started. The Unknown Nation started
in 1978. That was in my junior year in high school.
I attended Walter Lutheran in Melrose Park, a
suburb just outside Chicago. A group of us, a group
of high school youngsters, decided let's do
something to sort of form a society to deal with
something that was plaguing us. What was plaguing
us was what was going on the 7th Congressional
District, the Congressional District that I lived
in. We seen a vast amount of money being shipped
into the Downtown area. Okay, we didn't see
anything happening in the neighborhood. Well we
formed a gang, if you want to call it that, to deal
with that problem.

SPERGEL:  You formed an organization?

DWAYNE:  We never chartered it. We didn't get to
that. It wasn't chartered by the people that
initially started it. We decided just to form a
coalition. We did call it the Unknown Nation. We
didn't put signs up on walls, Unknown like the
Disciples, the Gangsters. We never did that because
that wasn't what we were about. We were about
education. We decided to form a coalition because
we understood that gangs were nothing but guys and
gals that didn't know about their government. And
government controls society. But as it went on,
renegades took over. People began to call
themselves Unknowns, Unknown things. And all of a
sudden it got into a sort of frenzy whereas it
wasn't what we initially started, but it evolved
into a gang. It evolved so that people were selling
drugs, it evolved into killings, it evolved into
gang war, it evolved into something that we didn't
initially want to happen.

SPERGEL:  Right. How old were they?

DWAYNE:  When we first started? I would say around
17. I was 16 I believe. I was 16 when we decided to
do it.

SPERGEL:  Which school was this again?

DWAYNE:  Walther Lutheran, it was in Melrose Park.

MELVIN:  Walther Lutheran for the record is a
private school that's run by the Lutheran Church
with a so-called suburban intelligentsia.

DWAYNE:  The school would allow 344 students at the
maximum. I didn't have any problems paying for it.
As a matter of fact I have three years at Loyola
University.

SPERGEL:  So these other fellows were at school
with you then?

DWAYNE:  Yeah, they were at school with me. Some
graduated with me. Not all of them were at school
with me. A couple of friends came from the
neighborhood I lived in. Their parents wanted them
to get ahead. So they were sending them to private
school. And we told the principal that a lot of
money wasn't coming into the neighborhood and the
only way to stop that was to form some type of
organization.

Usually, if a person starts an organization
when they're young you can make it grow into
something good, into something big. Again it got
off into something else. That's when I met Melvin.
And we got into the government program thing. We
created what was called the C.E.T.A. programs. Then
things really got big. They started to call me the
leader of the Unknown Nation. I did an interview
with the Reader and I did one with the Defender,
Tribune, Sun-Times, Daily News.

A few years ago, we came with a proposal for
the Mayor, for the city. The next thing we know is
that people from Philadelphia were coming in,
people from New York were coming in, the Guardian
Angels even came in because the Mayor was going to
send some money down in order to cease this gang
warfare.

MELVIN:  I think the general sentiment is that
gangs are guys and girls who don't know government.
Many of us at this table, we've been involved in
the political process. We're talking about the
precinct level, knocking on doors because the only
one that the politician can get is us, because we
are unemployed. We aren't working. Working people
really do not participate in the political process.
They use our working people as cheap labor, as
consumer or military personnel, straight across the
board. The government, not directly but, through
our so-called political leadership has used us,
used young people, used the so-called gang
structure. You understand we ain't got no job and
no money. We don't wanna sell no drugs. But, we had
two alternatives. Sell drugs or deal with the local
politicians. You ain't got no other choice. You
just a peon, you ain't got the clothes that you
need. You not gonna have the gold chains that you
wanna wear. The big people in our community drug
dealers and the politicians. That's a reality. The
precinct captains use us because we are the ones
that's unemployed.

SPERGEL:  You said that you started Unknowns to
influence government and then it turned into a
renegade type of organization.

DWAYNE:  We were out there trying to do something.
It wasn't all Black. We had white people, you know,
we had guys and gals who were concerned about most
of the things we're talking about. And that's what
we essentially tried to do. Obviously we didn't
organize this renegade stuff. Some of them called
themselves the Unknown Vice Lords, the Unknown
Travelers, the Unknown this. And the word Unknown
lost. Again, the word Unknown was initially meant
to be anonymous. I know some people who called
themselves Unknowns in the suburbs. They do
cocaine. Miami cocaine.

I formed and coordinated the colleges and
universities for -- in her campaign. She knows me
very well. I coordinated Concordia, Triton, Lake
Forest. I coordinated high schools for her. I did a
lot of things.

As far as the gang goes, most of the guys that
I attended school with I also attended college
with. They're lawyers and stuff now. Okay. But this
Unknown still exists, but it is not the Unknown
that we established. It's a gang now. It is a
street gang now. It did drugs. And it's going on.
Deals going on. There's so many chapters now to the
Unknown Nation. And Unknown is country-wide now.

MELVIN:  I want to say two things: one, that what
you, the time you started putting it together, it
was not a gang?

DWAYNE:  No it wasn't.

MELVIN:  They started out as a social club. The
Vice Lords also started out as a social club. Other
organizations started out that way.

NATE:  May I, may I ask you all a question? What do
you call a street gang?

DWAYNE:  Violent folks who don't know governments.
We know government, we're part of the Council like
Danny Davis and Richard Daley and the rest of them.

MELVIN:  A gang is a group of street people who
live as a gang. A gang is an organized people who
are doing certain things. It was very evident what
was going on with them gangs in the 7th
Congressional District. It was very evident. I'm
not really blaming her and others in the Mafia for
having my cousin murdered. I'm not going to blame
anybody in particular. The real gangs are
government officials. They are the government.

OMAR:  The biggest gang is living in Washington.

MELODIE:  There is no one to blame.

MELVIN:  But there is someone or something to
blame. Because a person can be educated and get
whatever they want out of life. But again it will
depend on the environment. You guys were in a
community where people were doing well in school.
You were in a comfortable community. And you guys
were trying to do good. Why did it suddenly turn
out the way you didn't want it to?

DWAYNE:  That's something I never understood too
well. The Unknown Nation headed wrong, probably
because it had grown too fast.

SPERGEL:  It was not what you started out with.

DWAYNE:  People came into the thing, people came to
the meetings. We thought we could use this name to
get ahead. What gives A to B. It grew and in three
years had something like 400 members and the
organization still wasn't chartered. The
organization got chartered when a convict, fifty
years old stated that he was the head of the
Unknown Nation. He's dead now.

SPERGEL:  You said that change came when there were
more fellows and they had to go from A to B. What
do you mean by A to B?

DWAYNE:  We had an organization going. Right? But
there was nothing happening. I mean, we did pickets
and stuff like that; we picketed construction sites
and stuff. We did all sorts of things to try to get
people a job. You don't have enough money to run an
organization -- you can't have lights, you can't
have gas, you can't have water. In order to get
money to give to the organization, well let's do
this, let's do that. Stealing stuff, taking a car,
taking a battery, taking anything that was needed,
even take your wife. Everything that's negative,
that's dangerous. Want to take over the pimp gang.
You know Omar is sitting over there, he still won't
tell about taking over the pimp gang now.

OMAR:  What Black people trying to do is eat and
sleep. Pay our bills. You know, this is surviving.
There are different levels of the problem. The
educational system feed into the gang structures
because they allow the gangs the opportunity to
organize. The school system is responsible for the
gang violence in America. They are not teaching
kids. They are not teaching them socially.

MELVIN:  They're not going to make you do your
homework. The teachers in the public system are not
taking the responsibility for the child in their
hands. You see, when I was brought up, my teacher
was responsible for me. If I did something wrong, I
got my butt whipped before I went home and then I
got my butt whipped after I got home. And it was go
home, do your homework, then you clean up the
house. It was regimented. It was organization. And
there was discipline.

OMAR:  Instead, the gang system provided the
discipline. The school system has become lax. Look,
you went to school and no one was concerned there.
So, you formed your own group, your own coalition,
with your own set of rules. The school system had
no set of rules, had no one tell you when you were
wrong. We could smoke dope and shoot dice in the
washrooms, didn't make no difference. And get high
in the lunchroom.

DWAYNE:  A private school is more contained. But
the majority of the Black community could not and
still cannot afford to get you into a private
school. I went to a private school, yes. And they
didn't do none of that. After school there was
something to do. There was dance, there was music,
and all this was included in the curriculum. It
wasn't something you had to pay for.

MELODIE:  I wish there had been one more teacher or
my parent, so I wouldn't do what I wanted to do.

But it's going to be someways else for my
kids. I will be there to tell them what to do and
what not to do. They might not listen. They might
just do the same thing that I did. That's why I'm
not going to tell them what they want to hear. I'm
going to tell them what they don't want to hear.
Therefore they'll know what they're supposed to do
too. From the public school system they're not
telling them anything. They take their 9 to 5 for
their paycheck, they go home. They ain't telling
them nothing.

OMAR:  The schools created the gangs. Yeah, I got
to be here and sit here. I'm bored. They do not get
the children involved.

WILLIE:  And half the kids are retarded. We didn't
stay after school. Ain't no after school. All we
did at school was gym and lunch. That's all.

MELVIN:  The gang-bangers told the teachers what
and whether they should stay in school.

MELODIE:  And they called them educators. The gang
leader is the educator.

MELVIN:  And Omar he isn't educated. How can the
blind lead the blind? If you can't see for
yourself, get a dog. [Laughter] A hundred dollars
won't make it. When I was going to school we had
this thing called a social center. You understand?
We had social activities. That's what kept us, kept
it down low. But then again, that's also what
destroyed us. Because if I go to Washington High
School, across the bridge, and you go to McKinley
on this side of the bridge, and Washington have a
social center this particular day and McKinley say
well it's ours today, we'll go off the bridge to
Washington and take their social center. You see?
That's how we was left out. Or chased out. You
understand? If I live in his neighborhood, or that
neighborhood, then friction started.

NATE:  I say that's ugly.

MELVIN:  That's ugly, Nate. It's all ugly. But it's
got more rapid nowadays then it was in the fifties
and sixties and seventies. This is what this forum
is all about.

SPERGEL:  You're mentioning something. How is it
different now than it was?

MELVIN:  Because when I was coming up, that's like
we had social centers and we had the Boys' Clubs
and they were kind of active. And, you talk about
this discipline thing. We went to play basketball,
football, baseball. We did social events. We had
dances. Things to go to. Now these children don't
have things to do.

SPERGEL:  Those programs don't exist now is what
you're saying?

MELVIN:  They do not. The government has cut them
out. They cut them out.

MELODIE:  Point number two along this same line.
The home structure is kind of screwed up because
the Black men cannot support their families. The
majority of Black men are out of work now. And the
Black woman is making the bread. So who is home
taking care of the children. You can't afford a day
care center for this. Nobody can day care my baby?
You know, it's not possible. The family structure
has to be put together again. The economic system
is bad because instead of having a job for these
men, the woman got to take the man's role, I got to
make the bread, I make the gravy, I got to do all
of this.

OMAR:  There's a lot of sense to what she says. If
a Black man or a Black woman goes ahead on the
block for the same job, because of affirmative
action, or the equal rights amendment, if they're
going into the block for the same job, same
qualifications, the woman will get the job. And she
won't get any more pay later. You understand,
'cause she's glad to get it.

OMAR:  I got into a group being a little different.
I come in on the politics side. But I was injected
directly into the gang and gang members with
politics associated. I got to exist. By socializing
with them, my position, you understand, that made
me one of them automatically.

SPERGEL:  How old were you then?

OMAR:  I was about 28. I started late. I started
educating gangs about politics. And so after the
law had got a little handle on what I was doing;
they accused me of being head of a gang; they
accused me of bringing destruction to the
community. So I had no other choice but to become
what they was accusing me of being. So they gonna
cry a lie, let it be the truth. You know, it's not
lying, let's just speak the truth from now on. So,
the law, you see the law capitalizes on gangs and
gang destruction. So they draw a paycheck from
this. They feed their family from gang and gang
activities.

All I injected into community was politics.
This is how things gonna be run, this is how things
gonna go. This is how the politicians look at it.
They don't count you as an individual. They count
you as a group. They looking at votes, you know.
They not just looking at one vote, they looking at
thousands of votes here.

As we be going along, guys kept telling me,
man, we can't depend on the law because the law is
so much involved in crookedness. He looked at me
and said we look at the law like being angels. He
said no man. They ain't no more. I said what you
talking about? How do you think we get our weapons?
Huh? How do you think we get some of the drugs that
we get? So I started looking at it in a different
light. I said we gotta start like weedin' those
peoples out, the ones that are pretending to be law
and are not law. Law is more than a badge and a
pistol and exploiting you. You know what I mean?
And they said, well, it would be kind of hard to do
that because both sides got their own members down
at the police department.

MELVIN:  So everyone understand. You see every time
you found a good program, like our program, for
example. A Job Coalition, in which I was very
active -- and every time we try to set up a program
-- it was degraded. Not the political issues, but
law, the police did that. We had an organization --
a regular president, vice president, we had
officers. We didn't have no gang organization.

MELODIE:  The police created the problem.

MELVIN:  What I'm saying is, basically the same
thing as Omar is saying. See, one night, what made
me realize is what guys are saying is true about
the law. One night we was all sitting around,
getting ourselves together. Mayor Byrne at that
time, ex-Mayor Byrne at that time, had promised us
so many jobs. Then we got a phone call from the ex-
police superintendent telling us that we wasn't
gonna get no jobs. So I had pulled all my guys and
we was going down to the alderman at the time. So
police come along. Nobody doing nothing. Nobody
drinking, nobody smoking no marijuana or whatever.
They come along and they just disrupted the whole
group, looking for something, searching all around
because they knew they job was at stake at that
present time.

DWAYNE:  You know they say we'd all be in jobs. You
hear that for a month or two. They say we gonna try
that program on you. You go do this extra amount of
training, and at the end of your course, we will
give you a job. This is our promise made to you.
That's just a word. Promises. Promises. See, all we
do is talk. We never act. I have a problem, we been
talking for 550 years. We ain't been acting on it.

NATE:  We can't act. We try to act and somebody
stops us.

MELVIN:  Divide and conquer. They practice it all
the time. You divide, cut the head off the body,
it'll die. You see, they knock off all our leaders.
They find some reason to put them behind bars. When
they're behind bars, that gonna stick with them for
ever. And they can't get no credibility from the
newspapers, the media, just always play it up.
Whatever way they set it up, because I know. I'm a
victim of it. You understand? You damn right you
all.

OMAR:  If they pick up a Disciple, they'll drop him
off in the Vice Lord's territory. They cause
trouble. If any cause there's a reaction to your
effect, man? Cause and effect.

MELVIN:  Let me answer your question. The law
suppose to serve and protect, right? Why would they
pick up one member of a gang and drop him off in
the next member's territory?

NATE:  Rile up the other gangs (laughs).

SPERGEL:  Drop him off. Why would they do it?

MELVIN:  So what you're saying is that they're
starting trouble. A lot of this happens. I've seen
it happen. They're bored. They're stupid. Yeah.

OMAR:  I know back in '80 when I constructed the
Job Coalition, they gave me all kinds of trouble.
Whenever an organization is functioning in a social
manner, you know, for social change, if they think
that you're gonna get organized, they identify the
leaders. They call it gang. They put our pictures
on the wall. They let every police in that district
know if you see these two, do something, you
understand. Arrest them. So the next day, I got
arrested for disorderly conduct. Sure as sh--ting.
Then I got them to take my picture off the wall.

SPERGEL:  How did you get that influence?

OMAR:  You don't really have to be smart. You have
to let them know that there's another side. They
began to understand that you have to deal with
politics and politicians.

SPERGEL:  So you didn't really get started until
you were about 28. What did you do all those years
before then, when you were an adolescent?

OMAR:  I was working, you know, in school, you
know, and following all the rules that the parents
injected into me. And I also carried that
influence, too.

SPERGEL:  You knew the street even then, at least
parts of it.

OMAR:  Yes, sir, yes. You see, some people are not
really forced to join gangs. Some people join
because they want to be outlaws. It's a protection.
They throw people against other groups. You know.
And some really, really be in the gang as decent
peoples, you know.

SPERGEL:  There's all kinds of gang members.

OMAR:  All right. All right. You see, you even got
some from house of preachers, you know what I mean?

SPERGEL:  What makes someone get out of the gang?

OMAR:  You're never out. You are never out. You
see, once you know the literature and you become a
member you're not out. As for me myself, I'm
retired but I'm still part of an organization. You
understand? I'm active. I'm on call at any time. If
they call me and say, "Hey, do this and do that."
You understand, I have no choice but to go ahead
with it. You dig? Unless it something I disagree
with totally. You got to do what you believe in.
When I grew up it was the same way. You can't tell
me to go over there and hit that brother just
because he's a different flavor. You know? Cause I
ain't gonna do it. You got to have a reason for me
to go upside your head.

SPERGEL:  Explain that.

OMAR:  Uh, you could not tell me to violate one of
my own. Which means, beat up one of yours cause he
did something wrong. You couldn't tell me to go hit
one of mine. A gang is a community organization,
you know. We group together to organize ourself. We
look out for each other and we look out for each
other's family.

MELODIE:  You all playin the gang game. The main
gang. I didn't really join no main gang. I made my
own gang. The gang you all say you can't get out
of, that's the gang I didn't join. Cause I wasn't
into Spartans. I wasn't into no Kings. And I got
out of my own gang when I had my kids. And I want
to raise them not to be in no gang. Cause it ain't
nowhere.

DWAYNE:  I know most of them. I'm still respected
as a head of the original Unknown Nation. I know
drug dealers. I know the pimps. I know the whores.
I know all of them. I know all of them in the
community where I live at. And I'm at ease with
them. I can talk to them. If I want something from
them I can get it. I'm respected.

NATE:  When I walk down the street it's always,
"How you doing, Mr. A.? What's up for the day,
Mr. A.? What we gon do? Is we gon get some of these
good things workin' again, Mr. A.? I say sooner or
later, brother. We gon try something. But right now
they got our hands tied. You know? They got our
backs against the wall and ain't but one way out of
there.

OMAR:  Amen.

NATE:  We gonna have to break up out the trenches
with the "Freedom Stick."

SPERGEL:  Freedom Stick?

MELVIN:  I was one of the original people that
formulated the Executioners. Later on, we become
Black Exodus Disciples. And I'm proud to say that
I'm one of the very first members to have the
audacity, nerve to run for state representative in
the congressional district. I understand the only
thing going to solve the problem is through active
participation, political process, because the
government makes the laws and we have very little
influence on them. But until we can become actively
involved and begin to participate in that decision-
making process, gangs going to exist as long as we
got West side Nigras. We have associated with
gangs, and gangs have proved to be what we call a
proving ground for social development. I said, they
was a proving ground to prove yourself in order to
prepare yourself for life when you did not get
through the educational institution that was
deliberately designed to miseducate children of the
ghettos and children of the street. So gangs were
very helpful to me because you get a proving. If it
wasn't for gang leadership, I would not get this
far. I got leadership from SWU, "Side-walk
University."

SPERGEL:  How do you think the situation is
different in the Black community compared to the
Hispanic community?

OMAR:  What I feel the difference between the
Hispanics and the Blacks is no difference. You
understand? If there is a difference it would be
this, when they are together, they are more
organized than we are. They stick together more
than we do. See, like, they don't have violations
unless you really do something serious to another
member, certain things like that.

NATE:  The difference between us and them is their
color. It's the mentality, also. They ain't seeing
it the way we see it.

MELVIN:  They think they half-crackers. They think
they half-white, see. I know in our community, we
can't hide our color. They can pretend because they
have no racism in Puerto Rico where in our
community we have the very fibers, the institution
of racism. In Puerto Rico, if you a light-skin
Puerto Rican or you a dark-skin Puerto Rican, it
makes no difference. The difference is the
institution of racism and the circumstances that
derive from our various cultures. In our community
we are identified as being niggers. They can go to
Puerto Rico and go back to their own island
wherever they come from, wherever in the f--- they
come from.

OMAR:  There is no difference between them and us,
except skin color. They need the same thing we
need. Some freedom. Some air to breathe. And then
they been oppressed as well as we are bein'
oppressed. So they resort to get--well see they
bring they own gangs, too. What I meant was that,
by them being more unified is that if they got two
different organizations in the community, when they
go up in that jailhouse, you understand, they only
one organization, they Puerto Ricans.

The reason also is that they can get more jobs
than we can, see? They work for cheaper labor. When
we're out of work, we have to relate to whatever we
can. Whatever is available to us. And drugs are
very available to us. You understand, just like it
is to them. If we can't get a job. We going to do
something. We going to take some money from
somebody. We going to survive. I got a family, I'm
not gon let my family starve, you understand, I'm
going to get me some.

Ron:  One of the questions we're interested in
which is very important is: In terms of the
communities that you guys are familiar with, how
much in control are gangs, of the drug trafficking
situation? Or are there other players involved?

MELVIN:  The drugs in our community are provided --
and it's no secret -- by law enforcement officials.
Hispanics have direct pipelines because they come
from the country where the sh-- is grown. And we
have to go to them to get it. When we want some
good sh--, we got to go to them to get it. They
have a direct connection with the Herrera Family
and the rest of those motherf---as cause they from
there. Well, we been here for four hundred years.
There is a difference. I cannot call uh, John Doe
in Mexico to get me some Mexican Heroin and send it
to California. I cannot call uh, Nate in Colombia
and Bolivia and all those other crazy-ass places.
The best dope in town we know in the Black
community come from where?  When you lookin to go
get some good dope, where you go get some good dope
at? You either get it from Sicilians or Mexicans.

SPERGEL:  Why then is the Drug Enforcement
Administration and the FBI concerned about the
movement of the Black gangs across the community,
especially Bloods and the Crips?

OMAR:  The Bloods and Crips are not here.

MELVIN:  It's a business. It's just like McDonalds.
Just like Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know, they
want to set up franchises.

OMAR:  Four blocks from my house is the biggest
drug bust in the city's history. Four blocks from
my house. And it starts out that these police were
selling it. They have overseas connections to the
international market to import drugs. We been here
400 years, we do not import a motherf---ing thing
into the country. They got plenty drugs in my
neighborhood. I mean, if you look at my
neighborhood, you say, well this is a pretty decent
neighborhood. But it's all drug money.

MELVIN:  That's historical. We be analytical. And
let's go to New York, let's go to the West Coast,
and even with the Crips and Bloods gangs, they
cannot walk across the border because of the color
of their skin. Drugs come into this country because
the Hispanic people have families there. Our drugs
either come from the Hispanics or directly from law
enforcement. We been here 400 years in this
country. There's a difference. We do not have
connections for drugs in West Africa, or South
Africa.

OMAR:  That's a reality. The Drug Enforcement
Administration know that. Every bum on the street
corner know that. You want to get some good drugs,
you want to get some good dope, good cocaine, where
do you go?

DWAYNE:  You go to the Hispanics.

MELVIN:  To get the sh--. Yeah. The nigger gonna
cut it up. We don't have the import/export
potential. Okay, because of the culture, because
the language barrier, the communication, the
cultural barrier. We do not have no mechanism that
the so-called Hispanic or the Asian community have.
We do not have that. We were stripped of our
culture, we were stripped of our weapons. We cannot
go to West Ceylon or talk Swahili and talk a man to
give us a pound of good African mud. We can't do
that.

SPERGEL:  All this talk of legitimizing drugs, for
example, you know, would that be the answer.

MELVIN:  Naw. Numbers and Policy, they already
doing it. Already giving the jobs to other people.

OMAR:  A major deterrent for this to make a
solution to this problem could be more on the job
training programs for the younger guys, see? We had
plenty of them when we was coming up.

DWAYNE:  Jobs don't solve the problem. You become a
wage slave? It's nothing. I could be an executive
in the Clerk's office right now. Okay?

SPERGEL:  The job is not the answer.

DWAYNE:  The job is not the answer. How could the
job be the answer? A job with economic development
is the answer. That's why I bring up what happened
in '78, '79. We seen what was evident, what was
happening. All the money, all the federal thousands
of dollars in the 7th Congressional District. You
look it up, the 7th Congressional District is the
richest Congressional District in the nation. There
are more banks, more schools, more universities,
more hospitals, more drugs than is anywhere else in
the nation. All the money that comes through the
banks in the 7th Congressional District goes where?
To New York to the Chase Manhattan Bank. The answer
is economic development. You develop your own
economics. I mean the Irish did it, the Italians
did it, everybody did it that came over to this
country to develop their ownself. They all came
over as poor immigrants, wage slaves. All of us. I
can develop a business, I'm a Chemistry major. I
was very good. Again, look at my record.

NATE:  Designer drugs. Where do they come from?

DWAYNE:  You know, I could sit back and make
"Encyclodan," which is PCP. I can sit back and make
"Encyclodan" with no problem. I know a couple of
veterinarians. I can sit back and get it. I don't
want to put a loose epidemic on the street. You
know, we talking about crack. The reason crack
doesn't exist really in Chicago is because as
anybody knows crack is a mixed up PCP and cocaine.

MELVIN:  A lot of it is decided at the university,
like the University of Chicago, University of
Illinois . . .

DWAYNE:  Like Dr. M., a good friend of mine. He's a
chemist over at the university. Okay? He told us
he'd give us drugs. I mean, you can teach kids to
make some.

SPERGEL:  You lost me. "Economic development," what
do you mean by that?

DWAYNE:  Economic development. To secure one's own
economic growth. Okay, I mean, you can get a job,
work at IBM on their computer program, work 4 hours
a day, get paid for 8 hours a day. I can make
$50,000 a year and I can open up a business in my
community and grow. It'll take me a hundred years
to maybe get a building. It'll take me some time. I
don't know of any large Black businesses. I know
Taylor which is a large Black accounting firm.
They're the accounting folks at County Hospital. I
know of Ebony. I know a few successful Black
businesses. Right. But, they don't make their own
paper. They don't even grow the trees. That's the
only way you can do anything. That's what the big
struggle is over South Africa. That's what we had
here in the 60's.

It's simple. It is all about economic
development. That's one reason why King was
assassinated. Because that was the next phase of
his plan. A lot of people say Harold Washington
died of a heart attack. Harold Washington, he
didn't die of a heart attack. The day before he
died there was twenty-five billion dollars passed
in the Congress, the United States Congress for
inner city neighborhoods for housing. Harold
Washington wrote the program. The day the program
was passed Harold Washington had a heart attack.
Harold Washington was the figurehead of that
program. So we see going on all across the country,
our housing being closed down and the head of
housing now are white people now. I'm not a racist,
I'm not prejudiced, but they're the ones heading
this program and they don't know our problems, man.

We have pride in my neighborhood. The whites
got everything, which they own it already because
there was this Catholic foundation. But if you look
at the set of directors, the money -- I'm not
basing what I'm saying on something that I hear.
I'm basing it on fact. The money goes into the
suburbs. They build housing here with HUD dollars,
okay with federal dollars, but the money goes to
the Oak Park bank, you know that is a fact. Okay
its supposed to be against the law. But they have
political say-so as to where the money goes. They
make the houses for the community but the money,
the money is not in the community. And from what I
hear, the federal government, they're trying to
phase out social programs anyway. Section 8, you 
know, loaning companies. They're trying to phase
everything out. So you know, I know there's a plot
to bring back whites into the community.

There's a lot of things going on and it's
deeper, it's much deeper than a person has an idea
of. It's not jobs. It's really not education,
because you don't really need a starched education
to be successful in life and to build a family and
to do things that will be feasible for your
surroundings. All you have to have is a desire,
okay, and be self-motivated, and do these things.
The thing is, just like the brother here said, when
you have a group that's trying to do something like
when the Unknown's initially started, when you have
a group that's trying to do something positive from
a community that's considered low-class, that's
surrounded by, if you want to call it, poverty,
ignorance and disease, someone is always gonna do
something to try to destroy what you're trying to
do.

For instance the Panther Party. Now the
Panther Party initially started, you know they
weren't really about violence, you know? They were
trying to do something for the community, for the
surroundings, for the children. And what happened
is the law take it out. And that's what happened
with the Unknowns. I could have been more violent.
I could have gotten into drugs, into selling drugs.
I could be -- I chose not to do it.

------------------------------

BREAK FOR LUNCH

SPERGEL:  Let me ask you about your families and
gang membership. Do you have brothers?

WILLIE:  Four.

SPERGEL:  How many of them are gang members?

WILLIE:  None.

SPERGEL:  How come the other four didn't get into
the gang and you did?

WILLIE:  They probably was pulled away. I was the
black sheep.

OMAR:  They probably was pulled away by their
mother. He was the black sheep of the family.
That's what he said.

SPERGEL:  In other words, when somebody gets into a
gang it isn't just because he is in a particular
neighborhood.

OMAR:  He knows some people who are gang-bangers.
You can stay in this vicinity. You have your head
cocked whatever way, then go somewhere else, bang.
So they're neighborhood gang-bangers. I had eleven
brothers and I'm the only one.

SPERGEL:  What was it that made you get into the
gang?

OMAR:  I told you that. I organized it. I didn't
join it. Like I said, we had an idea. You see, what
we did, we protected our community. When our
mothers went shopping, we went with them or we
waited for them to come home, that's the rules.
When it came to groceries, everybody helped
everybody. Everybody looked out for everybody. You
see we lived in a very small community. So
everybody knew everybody. And so there was really
no reason for any garbage, although, excuse me, we
had various denominations, we still were the best
of friends. And we still are, those of us who are
still left. You know. We just haven't changed. We
get together every Sunday now. And we possibly have
a little celebration, during the summer, every
Sunday. And on Labor Day we have a big barbecue.
And everybody comes who's free. Anybody who comes
is welcome. It's in a neutral territory. Everybody
is welcome.

SPERGEL:  What makes one person get into the gang
and another person not?

OMAR:  Some of them need protection. And some of
them is not afraid of us. Somebody isn't.

MELODIE:  I have two sisters older than me and two
brothers younger than me. I was in the middle, like
he says, black sheep of the family. I got forced
into my own. I couldn't compete with my sisters.
And I couldn't compete with my brother. I went out
to be with my friends. I liked what my friends were
doing. Then I started my own so I could be known
and recognized and looked up to. And my brother is
a gang-banger. He went one way. I was going behind
him. But I went another way. He still with his
crowd. But he's not off into it like he was, though
he's still with them. I'm with my kids now and
forgetting all that other bullsh--, I left that
behind.

OMAR:  She's not going to let her kids go through
what she went through. You understand, that's what
I meant. It starts with your home life.

WILLIE:  If you are unhappy at home, you gonna take
that unhappiness somewhere else. You see. You gonna
wail, so you gonna hit somebody else.

MELODIE:  And another thing then. It's got a lot to
do with their mothers, too. I thought my mother was
telling me something that I already knew. But what
she told me wasn't enough. Now I'm caring for my
kids, to tell them the right and wrong way. I'm
telling them whether they want to hear it or not.
And the way I may explain it to them is going to be
good enough for them to open their eyes and see not
to get into what I got into. They ain't gonna want
to get into what I got into when I tell them. They
won't if I tell them, because I'm going to give
them the facts.

SPERGEL:  What was the thing that made you change,
that made you suddenly see that this doesn't make
sense?

MELODIE:  Having the kids and watching and knowing
what I shouldn't be. As I was growing up, I didn't
see, I didn't see this happening. I just wanted to
find out what was happening.

SPERGEL:  Did all this happen after you had the
kids?

MELODIE:  Uh huh. When I had my first child I still
didn't realize that I was still out there doing the
same thing, running with my baby. Running wild. But
after I had my second baby, I realized what I was
doing the months I was pregnant.

SPERGEL:  Did anybody talk to you, was it a teacher
or an uncle? Or did you do it all on your own?

MELODIE:  My mother. She started talking to me like
I wanted her to talk to me. After it's too late.
She started after I had my baby. That's when she
got to telling me about responsibility and what to
do. That's when she starts telling me. And I looked
at her. I look at her right today and tell her I
wish you had told me this years ago. Because if you
had told me this years ago, I probably would have
been all right. And wouldn't have had to go through
what I did. That's why I'm gonna tell my kids
before it's too late.

SPERGEL:  What about the rest of you? Were there
any particular people, any particular situations
that made the difference?

WILLIE:  I think my conscience was bothering me.
And I didn't want to live a life where I had to
watch my back and both sides. You know, I just
didn't want to watch my back anymore. Cause one day
I might get caught nodding.

SPERGEL:  So you were just battle-weary? You had
enough?

WILLIE:  Yeah.

OMAR:  I never been part of gang-banging. I
organized my group for another purpose. I was the
president. My partner was the vice-president. They
put us both in the penitentiary. When we come back
to the street, we gang-bangers.

SPERGEL:  What did you do when you got back to the
streets?

OMAR:  We gang-bangers. I don't mean in the sense,
I'm talking about we got another name. Our name had
changed to something. We have been organized as
something else.

SPERGEL:  So the jail didn't make a difference?

OMAR:  Not for me, it didn't, you know, I just, I
was still a part of them. Our purpose was still the
same.

SPERGEL:  Which is what?

OMAR:  Well, to protect our community. Our parents,
our little brothers and sisters. See, we had
patrols. We didn't have but a four block area. Four
blocks in one direction and one block in this
direction. So we all knew each other. We were all
just like one big family. That was it.

SPERGEL:  So you're still protecting the community?

OMAR:  That philosophy went out. What, ooh, about
seven or eight years ago, huh, Melvin?

MELVIN:  You can't protect the kids. You better be
protecting your own ass.

SPERGEL:  So how are you protecting your own ass?

OMAR:  Me? Mindin my business. Gettin up, goin to
work in the mornin, coming back, going upstairs,
puttin my T.V. or radio on.

SPERGEL:  When did it start? When did you suddenly
see the light?

NATE:  Let's see, when I came home from the
penitentiary.

OMAR:  When I came home. But I still was with the
organization.

SPERGEL:  But you did it a different way?

OMAR:  Yeah. See, I received notice while I was in
the penitentiary that this and that was going on.
You get the news in the penitentiary before you do
on the street. And I wrote back disapproving but,
it didn't do no good. You know? I wasn't there to
call the shots so it went on and on and on. But
like I was telling you, the organization is non-
violent now. They done got older. The financial
situation hasn't changed. They still poor Blacks
and want to do certain things. And so they do
whatever they can to survive. And I mean whatever
it takes to survive.

NATE:  A lot of stupid sh--.

OMAR:  See I'm goin to church tomorrow. I'll be
there Wednesday and I'll be there Thursday. I got
other things to do with my time other than get
around that mess. You not gonna get rid of a
problem like that. But you cannot speak on this
situation without gettin you head tore off. You
speak on this situation, "Man look, what you
dealing beatin up that stud?" You know? You gon get
your head tore off too. "Ain't your business sir!"

But see when I was comin up the older guys --
our older guys taught us. We had sessions everyday.
We had boxin lessons everyday. You understand? We
had sessions and discussions. You understand? We
were taught. We listened real good. But now you try
to tell one of these youngsters something, huh, get
gunned down. Shooot!

SPERGEL:  So, Omar, you sayin that if something was
happening you would have no influence over it. You
couldn't chill it somehow?

OMAR:  I wouldn't even try. I'm trying to tell you,
man, the mentality is so, I don't know how to
describe it. It's spaced out. They have no respect
for their elders. They'll tell you man, "Take your
antique ass some muthaf---in where, fore you get
the same thing!" [LAUGHTER] You know?

NATE:  You know what a kid told me last night? He
said,"Mack," he said, uh, "You goin in the crib?" I
said, "Yeah, man." "He said go on, man. Lock you
door and don't come out no mo." You know?
[LAUGHTER] You will be buried six feet under. Gon
be some sh-- happenin. I mean it's critical out
there.

OMAR:  Drugs and gang banging is prevalent twenty-
four hours a day. Violence is jumping off. Drug
dealers is jumping off. You understand? It wasn't
like that in the old days. When you had a patrol in
the old days. We stood up under the building for
protection of the people comin in that building.
People wasn't scared to come in the projects back
then. They'd come in there any time of day or night
and wasn't worried about nothing. Come up in there
at night now, and see what happens?

NATE:  You better go through the side door.
[LAUGHTER] And you better look out to see if
something goin on.

OMAR:  If you come up there you better have a Uzi
in you hand. [Laughter] And we have no influence.
This is the thing. It's like what Melvin be saying,
If they could be talked too then maybe they'll see
the light. You understand? They don't want to hear
nothin bout what you done in the old days. That was
then, this is now. You see? They are not
inquisitive like we were. Cause see, we seek
knowledge. Everyday we had them sessions like I was
tellin you. And uh, we asked. Anything we wanted to
know we would go to one of them older brothers and
ask. And they would us sit down and explain. They
held the neighborhood down without that mess. And
when we come up it was our turn to hold it down.
You understand? Now these young fools don't
understand and we can't tell them nothing. You
know?

MELODIE: It haven't always been that way. It just
recently got that way about seven or eight years
ago. Maybe about ten years.

MELVIN:  That's because, I believe, the structure
of the Black home has been dissolved. See a woman
and a man have to be head of a household. It have
to be both to influence these children. A woman
cannot go to work and a man goin to work or
whatever and leave the child in somebody else's
care and all their doin is carin for themselves and
gettin a dollar. You have to have your discipline.
This starts at home. You cannot turn your children
over to somebody else and they discipline them.

OMAR:  And we got all these babies havin babies,
that's another problem with it.

MELODIE:  We have to have a whole nother day to
talk about that. [Laughter]

SPERGEL:  So, what happened? So, what particular
people or situations seems to make a difference at
some point in terms of not getting into trouble?
What makes you suddenly see the light?

DWAYNE:  Everybody's different. Everybody's got his
reason.

OMAR:  My jail situation was created in '69 and the
'70s when the Black Panthers were around. I was
framed I was not guilty of anything that they say.
See I let a gun discharge. I wound up with four
counts of attempt murder against the Chicago Police
and armed-robbery. Just because I discharged a gun.
One shot. You understand? But I got four counts of
attempted murder. One shot. A shot in my own foot.
You understand. I don't know if that just increased
it. But you know? That's one shot. Cause I was
pulling the gun up out of a waste-basket and it
discharged and the police just happened to be going
past. And they heard the shot and they saw me. You
understand?

They jumped out the car, they see a black man-
-Oh, you want to shoot at the police, huh?--You
must be one of them Black families. I said, "No,
I'm not. I'm not even from this neighborhood.
Understand, I was livin way on the South Side. But
I wasn't comin to this West Side without my piece.
And when I saw the police I was fixin to get rid of
it. But as I was gittin rid of it, it discharged.
You understand? They heard it and they didn't see
nobody but me. And I had no defense so I copped
out.

That's another thing they have you--they have
a policy of doing. They'll bring you that plea-
bargaining stuff. I learned too when I was in
there--see I went to the law library every day that
I was in that joint. Every day, because my partner
worked at the law library and I could get a ticket
to go there every day. Even on Sunday. You
understand? Every day I would go. Every day I go to
jail, every time I go to jail, the first thing I do
is put in a ticket to go the law library to fight
my case. I didn't need no public defender. I
couldn't afford no lawyer. Cause the public
defender ain't nothing but an extension of the
state attorney's office, that's all. First thing
comin out his mouth, "Well, I see we can't beat
it." [LAUGHTER] "We gotta cop-out." You know?

MELVIN:  Those that leave the gang, they leave out
on their own. They're fed-up. Unless they go to
jail and they learn something in jail like he said.

OMAR:  See the thing of it is, if you get a jail
sentence, if you get a jail term, use it wisely.
When they go in jail now, all they do is bang.

MELVIN:  Bang some more. All you going to get out
of banging is gettin kilt. You can get kilt in
jail, too, cause you gotta bang in there in order
to survive. Survive. If going to really bang, you
got to bang in there, too.

NATE:  And jail feels like the projects. [Laughter]

MELVIN:  Projects look like a jail.

OMAR:  It's the same thing.

MELVIN:  You feel at home.

OMAR:  And they sho'nuf lockin them up down there
now, down there in Rockwell Gardens Project. They
lockin them up now. Cell-block H. You gotta be in
at nine o'clock or you can't get in.

SPERGEL:  What do you do about the gang problem at
the different levels: with the younger kids, with
the guys in the gang, the guys in jail?

MELVIN:  It starts with the home structure. It has
to start there. We need more social agencies. You
need more social programs.

SPERGEL:  But you say we don't need social
programs.

MELVIN:  What I'm saying, listen to what I'm gonna
say now. The ones that exist they are not
functioning because they're not funded. Right,
another thing about those programs is, since I've
lived in this neighborhood, the only social program
are the Boys' Club, but it's in the next
neighborhood where the opposition is at. Therefore,
I'm mad because I can't go to the Boys' Club.

SPERGEL:  So how do you deal with that? What if you
want to go to the social center that's in another
neighborhood, and you can't go?

MELVIN:  Set up social programs. You have to set up
your own. We did that in the '70s, or the '60s. We
had an organization called a Local Advisory
Council. And we had building committees where
parents disciplined their children. They got
together. They'd have a floor meeting once a week.
That was dissolved. No money, you see.

SPERGEL:  You had the parents come in. They
discussed how to raise the kids right, how to deal
with the kids? How did you get the parents in?
Often you can't.

MELVIN:  There was no trouble. During that time
they were coming in themselves. But they're on
drugs now. The kids are catching it because all the
motherf---ing bitches smoking the cocaine pipe and
they ain't got time to take care of their families.
So you go back to the original drug problem within
the family structure, and that if the drug problem
is not solved in the family structure, you not
gonna have anything else because you ain't got the
eye on the children. The parent cannot even begin
to give them the information. So by the time the
child reaches school, you got another problem
because the school teachers on drugs their
motherf---ing selves.

SPERGEL:  Well, how are you going to reach the
parents who are on drugs?

MELVIN:  They got to be drawn to account, man.
That's the only way. Door-to-door outreach. They
got to go from door to door. In poor communities,
they are hiding. There's fear. The social service
agency is not trained to really observe the problem
that does exist and do the follow-up care. There is
no effective outreach to deal with educational
questions. How can you raise our children with the
proper type of diet that they have. There is no
effective community cadres or outreach going out.
The University of Chicago, the University of
Illinois, all them high professors, they sit behind
their damn desks on campus. Yet, they should do
field work, effective field work. Now they're not
doing effective field work and going out to the
community because they scared because of the drug
problem. They're not going out to the projects.
There's a breakdown of the trust.

So, it always goes back to one thing, the only
time that we do have children in our control is in
the educational system. The only time we do have a
structured activity program and counsel them is in
the educational system. The only time we check the
quality of the health care, to help people come up
before they get old is in the educational system.
The educational question in this country is
foremost for delivering effective social service,
effective quality care, counseling, in terms of
being able to effectively develop a comprehensive
community social service outreach program. That is
not done. It should be done in the elementary
school, the preschool. That is not done.

SPERGEL:  What are you going to do about that?

MELVIN:  Outreach. What happened on the East Coast?
The Muslim brothers, they is respected. They got an
effective outreach, social service program
basically. They are out there in the hood, they are
basically going door to door, providing counseling,
also providing a strong sense of responsibility,
say "Look, we gonna help you to clean your act. If
you don't clean your act, you gonna get that
ambulance."

SPERGEL:  Any of these things going on in Chicago?

MELVIN:  I don't see it going on in Chicago. I sees
there's a possibility for it to happen. I see it
going to take a combination of things, parental
groups that's working elsewhere. But who is going
to provide the resources to train people how to
begin to organize the parents, how to begin to have
Black men take responsible leadership to eliminate
fear? If this is going to be a program that is
funded for that specific purpose, to set up that
type of study, it become a question of an effective
outreach program that gonna have to involve not
only the female but the male part of the family.
I'm talking about outreach and going from door to
door. Until that is done, you cannot address the
educational question because you don't know the
basic educational needs. The school system is not
going to address it.

SPERGEL:  But you said earlier the school might
address it.

MELVIN:  And you know the reason why? Because the
union in the school system has control. There's
gonna be no reform in this town until you break up
the union. Until you use that money that's going to
pay extravagant salaries, that's going to pay the
astronomical medical benefits of pipe fitters who
get $25 an hour for sitting on their fonky ass.
Until you break up their union and break down the
district and put the money back into education, and
back into education I mean also the social service
end of the educational process. And the school
reform ain't nothing but a joke, it's a hoax. They
look at Bedford-Stuyvesent and Harlem where you
initiated the first community control of schools in
this country, because it was effective because they
broke up the school districts and in fact the
people in each district were elected from the
community. School reform in Chicago, that is not
the case. They still going to be controlled by the
same lords of the Chicago City Council and those
individuals whom the mayor will, whoever the mayor
will employ.

SPERGEL:  But you cannot sit around and just talk.

MELVIN:  And I never seen more passing a bunch of
bullsh-- resolutions and it's not gonna really mean
nothin. And yet the school system ain't got a
social worker who understand the new complex social
issues of gang violence. They're not set up with a
study course. Oh they identify kids, who belong to
a gang. But a study course on how to go into a
community, how do you make in-roads in a community,
how do you make inroads with this guy who's on this
corner, with this woman who's down on that corner,
with this man who controls that building in public
housing. Do you have that type of finesse, that
type of stamina, and that type of commitment and
courage to do that.

I figure the public schools system, at this
point, under it's present structure, no place in
this country, could not address that issue of
recognizing problems and doing effective outreach
with the younger children, mainly, and dealing
basically with the younger parents. When a woman
gets 40-50 years old, she's too late. Her children
are too old. All they want is to survive. I don't
know. Maybe a program, a design and study program,
needs to be set up. I don't know if it exists in
the country.

Is there an effective outreach program that's
going on that involves the school system, that
involves the community? If you try to do that, you
could have the same crazy sh-- they had on the West
Side of Chicago. What they did, they hired some
sophisticated Negroes who don't know sh-- and the
whole thing was nothing but a sham. It was a
complete farce and a damn joke. The program
designed, the research was not followed up, and
there was no reform.

SPERGEL:  When will it be time for reform to be
effective? How do you make reform possible? And you
suggested a number of programs that might work,
outreach. But you say outreach is impossible with
the present conditions.

MELVIN:  We also talking about the problem on the
East Coast when the Muslims became involved where
you had discipline, Black men who come from the
streets who know what the f--- is going on, who
cleaned up their acts and lives. I think the
combination of what I said and that the two can be
integrated in Chicago. If we set up a definite
target group, we set up a model by which we could
go by. But at present, there is no model for the
gang problem in Chicago. The question also is the
funding available to set up such a model. Where we
gonna get the resources to set up such a model.
And, if the model is set up, are they going to kill
the follow-up research? Is that still gonna be
done? Yes, there are things that we can try. We
cannot try them on a massive scale. Well yet with
the proper funding from various sources, caring
foundations, we can probably set up a model that
become a nation-wide model, yes.

SPERGEL:  Let's move from there then to what do you
do about the key people in the system that we
depend on? In other words, what do you do about the
police, the teachers, the social service people?
They're part of the solution and part of the
problem. I mean you can't wipe them out. They're
there. How do you change them?

MELVIN:  You got to get them to do what you trying
to get us to do, to identify who the bad seed are.

OMAR:  Try butting some of them.

NATE:  That's right.

OMAR:  Purge them. Let them start going to jail.
Start trickin' on them. With evidence. You
understand? What I told you. There's unquestionable
evidence against them. I'm speaking of the police
now. You know. Then maybe some of them see the
light. They still gonna make you a target. I don't
see no actual solution to that. To the police
officers. I don't see none of that.

MELVIN:  And where the universities at? I'm talking
about where is the urban mission from the
universities who in fact have on tap resources and
talent to go into the urban areas. Where are the
students with the degree, the damn degrees of
Social Service Administration. They don't go to the
so-called battle zone to get their field training.
They are nothing but theoreticians. What about the
medical doctors. They don't do no outreach. Where's
the mathematicians when they get their damned
degrees. The university got to set up a policy
within their own departments to give so much and
perform an urban mission to the community. If the
universities of this country don't do it, who
always have taken a great step in terms of leading
mankind do not take initiative and steps, then we
have a lost generation to come because our richest
resources come from the universities. Until the
universities across this town set up a conference
and agree to do a certain amount of things and
agree to offer their skills in a model project to
solve the problem and bring in the research
scientists, the social scientists, the political
scientists, the business scientists, in a model
type of program to impact a given area, then it's
not going to be done.

SPERGEL:  What should that model be?

DWAYNE:  I think that model should between the
various departments across this town, the model
should be the social service agency providers, the
School of Social Service Administration that you
belong to, the model should be between the medical
unit, let's say the University of Illinois, the
model should also be between the Anthropological
unit with a program for Anthropology, the ones that
deal with Psychology, they come together and target
a particular designated region and pump in the
necessary resources and provide a laboratory of
experience in the community with college students,
number one who are more highly motivated, who have
actual apprenticeship and an in-lab training as
opposed to the theoretical bullsh--.

SPERGEL:  What are these people going to be doing?
The college students going out to the community.

MELVIN:  They can go gather the data.  They can go
in and make sure that the children are not
suffering from measles, infant mortality, poverty,
basically, okay? And the laboratory for them to
begin whatever fields that they are in, it touches
human lives. Whatever field that they are in they
can designate an area, particularly the field of a
particular section of the West Side of Chicago, or
Humboldt Park, to bring those resources in and come
back to the table, and see what we have done, and
see what the problem is. We can go in and really
propose a model program. But right now there's not
enough trained leadership in the community that
lacks leadership.

That's why Jesse Jackson can't solve the
problems. Because there's not enough leadership.
Because they go around globe trotting. Seriously,
globe trotting is showboating. And according to the
psychiatrist, there is sickness that grows in the
Black community; there is a high degree of mental
illness; there's a high degree of apathy. And to
the social scientist, say look, we understand the
size of human and urban development, we can have an
impact on human urban development. We should
provide a living laboratory where they can get
college credit for that. It can be a part of their
thesis, to get their doctorates or their masters
degree. The problem is not going to be solved as
long as the universities of the country continue
going along the theoretical bullsh--. [Amen]

SPERGEL:  Let's blame the universities. Okay. But
how are you going to get to these fellows on the
streets? You got 20 guys on the street corner.
They're making a living. Some of them selling
drugs, some of them just hanging around, maybe some
of them working. What do you do with that bunch of
guys from the ages of 15 and 18?

MELVIN:  What we do is we bring them out. You
cannot be productive in the unproductive
environment. In other words, if you live in this
sh--boat, like you gonna drown in sh--. So you
gotta come out of the sh-- to solve the problem.

SPERGEL:  All right. Suppose you're at the
university. You're working for a Ph.D. You got a
fellowship, a $30,000 a year fellowship. You go on
out to the neighborhood to deal with that problem
and you're focused on two streets. This one group,
one gang, whatever you want to call it, one
organization, some of those guys are selling drugs.
You're coping with older guys, young kids there.
How are you gonna deal with that?

MELVIN:  You cannot. People get a certain age, you
cannot influence them. You cannot teach an old dog
new tricks.

SPERGEL:  So you can't do anything with those guys?

MELVIN:  Basically no. I mean, that's been tried
over thousands of years. You can change young
people. And those teenagers we can reach. It's
gonna take time to change the attitude and the mind
set of making, selling drugs and prostitution or
maybe not going to school. Right now, that type of
antisocial behavior is universally accepted in poor
economic communities in this country.

SPERGEL:  So the answer may not be on that street
corner. Maybe elsewhere.

OMAR:  If you could reach one, or two, at least
those will set an example for the other ones.
Maybe, then maybe, but the group as a whole. I
don't think you can do it all in one whole set, you
can't do that.

SPERGEL:  What can you do with those fellows on the
street corner? I don't understand you. What are you
going to do? You got 20 guys on the street corner?

MELVIN:  The more educated the society, the more
the antisocial behavior stops. So therefore, the
children who make grown fools who piss on the
street corners and drink wine are animals. That
happens in any society that is going to move from a
Third World type of civilization into a high-tech
age. That happens. The young people will fit
because the old are going to die off anyway. It's
not a one day, one week process. The work that we
do today will not have an influence on the given
community until 5, 8, 10 years down the line. Those
measures have to be put into place. I'm saying you
must have a re-creative process whereby you clean
up people's attitudes or behavior. You clean up
their attitudes or thinking.

The only way you are going to do that is to
identify with the need, find out where the problem
is, and bring that into a controlled environmental
type of situation. I'm saying, look, let's create a
human laboratory whereby social scientists,
psychiatrists can come together target a community,
whether Lawndale or Humbolt Park as a prime model
for the rest of the country. It's gonna take that
type of Peace Corps effort to rescind and resolve
the problem. They threw the sh-- overseas. They
sent Peace Corps to all of the f---in countries.
How come they didn't send nobody to the ghetto?

SPERGEL:  So you're suggesting a massive approach.
You don't need many researchers from the University
of Chicago for that. That could be done in a lot of
different ways. All right. That's an idea. That's a
very important idea.

DWAYNE:  They can at least analyze the problem. At
least we can have a point where we can measure two
variables.

SPERGEL:  So let's suppose you have the money to
use a Conservation Corps or Peace Corps and you get
the universities involved. What do you think about
the cops out there?

MELVIN:  You can't work on all the problems.

DWAYNE:  I say that if the people are educated, if
people are enlightened and they are informed, you
have less chance that you'll be brutalized.

SPERGEL:  People are enlightened and informed.
There's education. But how are they going to make
money; how can they get a good job?

MELVIN:  Then you want the economists, the people
who sit up in those damn universities and theorize
about economic development and theorize on economic
change. Hold up! The university departments as must
set up a lab on how to develop business in the
community. Simple as that. That could be done as a
project. You have 15 universities from across the
country each involved in a different part of the
problem: one dealing with the business aspects;
another with the social service aspect. You have a
program by which to measure and to say, "Look, this
was done, that was not done."

SPERGEL:  What about training and jobs for the kids
on that street corner? Or is that part of the
problem?

MELVIN:  That's up to the business community.
That's what the social scientists evaluate. How do
we create economic development? Do we have to
recycle cans? Do we recycle bottles that niggers
down on the street corner drink and throw away? I
mean, there's a lot of potential there of things
that need to be done that can be done. But until
the actual study and research is done, and you take
the classroom out of the university, and the
university performs an urban mission and take it
into the community, then the problem basically will
not be resolved. There will be no commitment on the
part of the people in the community. They will
remain ignorant, not knowing, uneducated, faced
with life and death situations every day and trying
to find time to make ends meet. You don't have time
to think about all this complicated business when
you have to go to the store and steal a loaf of
bread and someone's chasing you around the other
corner. Sh--. You don't have time. Because the
environment is not conducive for you to become
creative. Yes, you have one or two creative
thinkers that come out of that environment. But
there should be more creative thinkers. The
environment is not conducive to an atmosphere of
learning to be productive in society. There ain't
no theoretical bullsh-- in that.

The attitude in the neighborhood has to be
changed. And it is gonna have to come from an
external dedicated force, because we are caught up
too much in our own existence and fight for
survival. We can talk about the problem; we can
make you aware of the problem; but we are caught up
in too much living from day-to-day to effectively
resolve the problem.

OMAR:  The point is, it's gotta come from people
who care. They gotta come from people who care.

MELVIN:  It's the commitment that counts.

SPERGEL:  Suppose the commitment is not there in
the university, because no one's paying for it.
It's got to be paid for from some other source,
maybe from government. How that starts and
develops, I'm not sure. Maybe it takes a big crisis
for that commitment to come. Usually it's a
function of fear.

DWAYNE:  When you have a high school drop out rate
that's 70 percent, that's a crisis. Okay? I mean,
that is a very serious crisis. It is devastating.
You mean, 70 percent of the potential work force
that goes into the marketplace are unproductive.
That is a crisis. But the question becomes, who
will bring the focus of attention of the crisis to
those who have the funds and resources? I say rely
on the intelligentsia, the educated, the business
development people to bring that attention. Let's
go back to the professors across this town.

SPERGEL:  What's the role of the people in the
neighborhood? What's the role of guys on the street
corner in all this? You mean you're going to leave
it all to the people on the outside to do?

MELVIN:  And who and what is the enemy. We simply
do not have the skill to answer that. It takes a
trained individual to view the problem from a
different perspective as opposed to being caught up
in the conflict to resolve the problem. We say,
look, there has to be a mediator to solve the
problem. The police department is not a mediator.
They're part of the problem. Gangs and those who
belong to gangs is not, they cannot be the mediator
because they are part of the problem. Although both
can give you information. So you have to have what
you call a neutral intelligent party that go into
the community and make sure that people get
educated to know how to run their churches, their
homes, their schools, their government, their
business, their clinics as opposed to their being
cheap labor, just consumers, and military
personnel.

That is the problem. We cheap labor. We are
going to work for some other bum. We are guilty of
not knowing how to run our own business or how the
brother can work with me. I have not met one
professor that's admitted that at any university in
this country. Intelligence does not have anything
to do with making money. You have to have the sense
and the direction and know the protocol and where
the market is to market your commodity. Once that
is done business is developed and goes into the
community. The guys on the street corner can be
hired. They can be trained. They can feel like
they're a part of the community, because they
contribute to something.

But if the Black bloods is cheap labor then
we're going to sell drugs and dope. We are not
going to make three dollars and fifty cents an hour
working at McDonalds. Until that's gone, until
there is education in the community, until the
social service community address that issue and set
up a model project by which to really study the
obscenity, we are not getting anywhere. Could there
be some design flaws? Yes.

SPERGEL:  Suppose you're selling drugs out there.
Some people are making money. Isn't there
sufficient money being made so that maybe all these
other things are not going to be that important?

DWAYNE:  The monies being made are not worth it, if
you lose human potential. We saw a 70 percent drop
out rate, we talked about that this morning.

SPERGEL:  You said schooling is not important.

DWAYNE:  No it's not. Not for making money. The
question is, is you gonna make drug money or you
going to make money for making auto parts?

SPERGEL:  For making what? Auto parts?

DWAYNE:  Are you going to be the owner of Toyota or
you going to be the big heroin dealer? The big
heroin dealer! They both make money. But which one
makes the most? I make $1,500 a day. You know what
I mean? That's no sh--. That's enough to die rich.
That's why education is not important.

SPERGEL:  Why stop selling?

DWAYNE:  Hey. I'm not used to killing people. You
understand what I'm saying? I'm not into selling
something that'll take your life. Okay? You know
the big time white folks bring that stuff into this
country. You the ones that want people dead. See
they figure it wasn't going to be no problem with
that. They said, "We'll give it to the niggers and
they is addicts." And now that sh-- that's
spreading like measles, all over, not only in
Harlem. "Whoa, whoa, whoa, we all gotta stop it!"
Hell, you started it. You started it your goddamn
selves. We don't bring that sh-- in. Your military
personnel bring a keg of that sh-- in, nobody pats
their medals or search their kits. Your
ambassadors, nobody search their f---in brief
cases. Huh? No, those bitches and bastards bring
that sh-- in here by the ton.

I guess they say, "Well, we'll give it to the
niggers." Well the niggers turned the sh-- around
and gave it back to them.

MELVIN:  You gonna take the question of how do one
if they are to provide a decent living for
themselves without violating anybody else. Of
course there's gonna be violation. How can a
community that's been violated not violate anybody
else? That becomes a question. So how do we stop
the violation? I'll say that the way to stop
violation after you've been violated is through a
process of human development. You want to become
socially conscious and responsible and committed.
You can't teach an old dog new tricks.

If you want to address the educational
question of the young children, you're going to
have to take them out before they get turned
around. You might have to accept an outreach in
which you bring them in. Then what do you do once
you have the outreach program to bring them in when
they begin to come of age and they begin to
develop? Can you develop them into junior leaders?
Can you develop them into business? Can you develop
them into scientists? Can you put them into
industry?

SPERGEL:  You sound more like a professor than I
do, but all right.

MELVIN:  Just get deep!

SPERGEL:  I don't know what follows that. But
anyway, what are some of the ideas of you other
guys?

OMAR:  I agree with everything that he's saying. I
mean, it has to be more effort from people not just
in the community but people outside the community.
People who live in the suburbs got to travel from
the suburbs to go to the ghetto. You know? And if
anybody really wants to help, I mean with the
social problems such as gangs and what's going on.
You know, time has run out again. You know what the
central city drop out rate is. The kids are growing
up selling drugs. The only thing I can figure out
is Revelations, what's stated in Revelations. Stuff
about how everything in the world has come down
from above, how the world is going to be destroyed.
And that's what's going on now. Destruction.
Spergel:  Revelations?

OMAR:  Yeah. Destruction. That's what Revelation is
about: the End. And that's what's going on. I mean,
people are trying to do this, people are trying to
do that, but they're not looking at what really has
to be done.

SPERGEL:  The time is late. Any other comments or
advice?
Joe, Tape
Recorder

MAN:  I have a comment. It's respect. And it's a
philosophy that's involved. A perspective from the
standpoint of the allegory of the cave. I'm sure
you're familiar with that. Where a person only
knows what's taught to him, or what they perceive.
But it's a reality that a lot of people just don't
see. The gentleman on the end mentioned that people
have got to have space to breath. And that's really
part of the problem. But then you got people who
says where does that motivation come from? That's
one of the problems. It has to be self-motivation,
self-education. I believe that the education is
available for a person to proceed and go out and
get many things from the market. He can get that
education to want to change a life style. That's
where the change comes. Change doesn't come from a
social agency. The answer to a lot of problems
comes from within, from a person who wants to make
himself just a little bit different, that takes it
upon himself to say, "Okay now. I'm gonna be
different. I'm gonna get out of this situation."
And you can't really be tied down to the same
situation. Each time that you come to the same
situation you become part of the problem all over
again. So you've got to tell yourself, brothers and
sisters, the answer to the problem is thus and so,
let me move out of the situation so that I'm not
part of the problem any longer. Then you'll find
that you've stepped beyond the cave. And then you
can look at the situation a lot differently and
improve on it with a larger mind.

You're not going to remake society. "Well
here's some money that's gonna solve the problem."
You're still under somebody's thumb. The society
wants that thumb like that. And you're not going to
change the status quo. Who is society? Society is
the philosophy that puts up this allegory of the
cave to the masses of the people. They project this
type of thinking. The communications media projects
this philosophy.

MELVIN:  There has to be a man in the middle.
There's gotta be a re-creative process, to stop
Negroes from pissing in the hallways. And in that
re-creative process, you think a little bit
differently than you normally would think. But you
have to create the action to have that type of
reaction. It's gonna have to come from something
that we can tell each other.

And maybe it's gonna take trained police,
social, educational workers to be hired for this.
But a stage has to be set for the program and how
it's going to be measured. All those things gonna
have to be set. And a model's gonna have to come.
That's all.

OMAR:  You have to have a certain mentality to be
helpful, you have to have certain principles of
love to deal with one who does not know what love
is. You have to have a certain Jesus principle, a
prince of peace principle just to do that. We need
a prince of peace principle just to tell them to
eradicate the problem of gang violence and be able
to go into a community and get young people out.

MELVIN:  I think the brother summed it all up when
he said, "the main thing to do is begin at the
beginning."