Gwenaelle Gouloba

Gouloba 1

ESL 33B
Professor Carlisi
April 7th, 2015

Black Street Gang in Los Angeles

Commonly, gangs are describing groups of recurrently associating individuals or close
friends or family with identifiable leadership and internal organization, identifying with or
claiming control over territory in a community, and engaging either individually or collectively
in violent or illegal behavior. However, even if we know what their activities are, what we
usually dont know is the origins and what leads to the development of those groups.
Gangs are a popular phenomenon in United States, especially in Los Angeles. The great
diversity of population in this area make it more vulnerable to interracial conflict. The oldest
conflict that we can noticed is the one between Blacks and Whites. Indeed, the African American
peoples situation in United States have always been controversial. Since the slavery period, this
idea of White people being above Black people has been a source of issues and has mainly
contributed to exacerbate tensions between Blacks and Whites. These tensions largely
contributed to the development of what we call Black Street Gang.

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In 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff Department reported that the 43% of all
homicides was gang-related violence. So what factors have an influence on the development of
those black street gangs in Los Angeles?
Although Blacks are often blamed for their own difficulties, we can see that the evolution
of black street gangs in Los Angeles can be attributed to outside factors, especially those related
to discrimination and violence against Blacks.

In 2007, Los Angeles County reported more than 1,300 gangs with over 150,000
members. Around 50% of those are Hispanic gang, 35% are African-American gang, and the
others 15% are included Asian, White and Stoner (teenager of various races/ethnicities, who
listen metal or gothic music) gangs. Obviously, the majority of these gangs are composed of
minority. My researches are going to be focus of the African-American Gang who represented
15,208 of gang members in Los Angeles.
The County and city of Los Angeles are the capital of gang in the whole nation. Those gangs
have for most of them over 50 years of existence, and the number of gang has continued to
increase over the past 5 years.
Its not easy to gather all activities committed by black street gangs but as other gangs,
vandalism is a key words when people talk about them. Graffiti for example are a way of

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expression for gangs member, it allows them to show who their, make them more popular and
mark their territory. However, the society sees that graffiti as an act of destruction of public and
private property that contributes to decrease property values in residential neighborhoods and
negatively affects industrial and commercial areas. Furthermore, these property damage are also
synonym of loss of customers and employees for local business.
Gangs commonly thrive on intimidation and notoriety. Violence is needed to establish their
reputation. One of the biggest problem in gang members mind is that they see their activities as
a form a fun. Drug use, creating disorder, vandalizing property, robbing and sometimes even
fighting are amusement. However, what is amusement for them, the society describes it as
breaking the law.
Even though they have some activities inside their own gangs, gang members are frequently
involved in community activities. Indeed, they can be involved in normal activities as weekend
party, fund-raising car wash or family and neighborhood picnic. However, their presence
provoke a greater potential for violence and criminal activity. This is due to the fact that gang
members tend to always seek for confrontations with rivals everywhere, and that led in most of
the times to violence.
Rivalries between gangs is the stimulating factors of gang activities. As I was saying earlier,
gang seek for notoriety, and this notoriety is earned in showing that you are badder than the
others gang. Gang members fight and kill each other in order to be respected. Drive-by shooting
for example is the most frequent violent crime. Its an action during which a gang member drive
by and shoot at another gang members homes or vehicle in yelling out the gang name or a

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Slogan in order to make them recognizable by the victims. That demonstrates how serious is the
violence inter-gang.
Finally, the most popular gang activities is selling drug. Gangs have been fighting over years and
years to get the greatest market place. Drugs are one of the factors that contributes to the
development of gangs. However, where does the apparition of drugs in Los Angeles come from?
Even if gang have developed numerous activities inside themselves, what is the starting point of
those groups?

Numerous historical factors have had an impact on the creation of gangs. The first black
street gang in Los Angeles appeared at the time of the Great Immigration. The World Wars
required a great amount of labor to work in building ships and weapons for the military. At the
same time, most of the Black population from the South was seeking for better wages and also
for avoiding the big segregation laws settled in the South. The website History.com explained
that Around 1916, when the Great Migration began, a factory wage in the urban North was
typically three times more than what blacks could expect to make working the land in the rural
South.(History.com Staff). Therefore, Blacks took this opportunities and the African American
population doubled in California.
Before that, Blacks were restricted in where they could live, they had to live along
Central Ave. However, because of the migration, the West's black population grew up by 33%,
and California gained 338,000 of African American. As the population increased, some whites
feared that Blacks would start living outside of these restricted areas. At that time, housing issues

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started to create the first tensions between Blacks and Whites. In the chapter 9 of his book,
Wartime Tensions and the Struggle for Housing, Albert S. Broussard explain that This duality,
toleration and ambivalence, made the adjustment of wartime black migrants unpredictable and
uncertain in a city that had been renowned for its racial toleration. (Brossard, 166). This
situation was complicated to handle because White people knew that this migration was
necessary for the war needs, but at the same time, they was not ready to get along with the fact
that Black people could live in white areas.
In 1948, the United States Supreme Court held in Shelley v. Kraemer that courts could
not enforce racial covenants on real estate. Quickly, the White population started protesting
against the fact that black people would start to live outside restricted areas. That time was the
apparition of the first white Gangs. They was called themselves the Spook Hunters where
spook was the derogatory name given to the black people. From the way they was celled
themselves, we can understand that their goals was to use violent way to make the black
population leave the white areas. At the meantime, Ku Klux Klan also emerge. And while the
Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had been officially dissolved in 1869, it continued underground after that,
and intimidation, violence and even lynching of black southerners were not uncommon practices
in the Jim Crow South. (History.com Staff). Thus, its this fierceness against black people that is
the origin of the first black street gangs. Feenix, an old man from Los Angeles, explained in his
article on Hubpages.com that Essentially, each of those organizations grew out of a need by
blacks and people of Mexican descent to protect themselves from brutal attacks by violent white
racists. (Feenix). At that point, we can understand that the first black street gangs goals was to
protect themselves and not to harass other people.

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As the black population in Los Angeles still increased, the Spook Hunters finally give it
up little by little, and the black population took possession of South Central and the surrounding
areas. Logically, as there were no longer any white gangs, black gangs would had been supposed
to disappeared at the same time. However, things turn illogical because some of the gangs
beginning to fight each. As their enemies was gone, their needed to find another enemies to keep
their identity and their existence. Those rivalries lasted for a short time, until 1960s, when the
fight against the Segregation took place.

Indeed, discrimination and violence against black people in Los Angeles played a big role
in the evolution of black street gangs.
Since 1875, most of the states worked under the Jim Crow laws which are the basis for
the Segregation. Most likely, those laws distinguished citizens according their race, and enforced
a separation between Blacks and Whites in all public places and public services. In the 50s-60s,
the black population started protesting against these laws asking for the end of racial segregation
and discrimination against black Americans and for a real application of the citizenship rights
enumerated in the Constitution. Its the Civil Rights Movement. Many leaders are on the top of
this movement like Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Jesse Jackson
Among them, the Black Panthers which is a revolutionary organization born in
California and leads by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. During this period, many of gang
members became a part of this organization. In "The Ghettoization Of Blacks In Los Angeles:
The Emergence Of Street Gangs.", the authors affirms that This was a time of relative quiet in

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the rise and expansion of gangs, as AfricanAmerican youth instead found constructive ways to
immerse themselves in Black Power. (Brown, Vigil, Taylor 220). For example, Bunchy Carter,
originally a member of a Slauson street gang became the leader of the Black Panther Party in
LA.
The Black Panthers wanted Black community to control businesses, employment,
education, and the media in their area instead of letting rich white people and organization
controlled everything. In October 1966, Newton and Seale specied the ten-point Platform and
Program of the Black Panther Party. Demands included freedom; full employment for blacks; an
end to capitalist exploitation of the black community; decent housing; education, including
African-American-based education; exemption from military service; an end to police brutality;
freedom for black prisoners; fair representation in trials; and, ultimately, land, bread, housing,
education, clothing, justice, and peace. (Tyner, 110) In "Defend The Ghetto: Space And The
Urban Politics Of The Black Panther Party." , James A Tyner clearly explained that the Black
Panthers goals were to act like a community army against police brutality, racism,
discriminations and to claim for equality. At this time, street gangs completely switched to
political organizations (US Organization, the Malcolm X Federation, the Black Panthers)
fighting against discriminations issues.
The Black Panthers Party has been very active in the 60s-70s. In the late 70s, the
government started to be really concerned of this group and to see them like a serious threat.
Therefore, they actively worked to break up these organizations by jailing members, spying on
members, and placing undercover agents in them. Some members were even assassinated by the
government. This has been called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

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As all the leaders from Black Panthers was lock up in prison, black teenagers lost their
models. In "The Ghettoization Of Blacks In Los Angeles: The Emergence Of Street Gangs.", the
authors write: As Mike Davis suggests, the decimation of the Panthers led directly to a
recrudescence of gangs in the early 1970s (Davis 1992, p.274). (Vigil, Brown, Taylor 220).
Indeed, after the decimation of the Black Panthers, teenagers try to reproduce what their model
used to do. They started with the Crips who was an association of several gang of South Central,
and lately the Blood would be created in opposition of the Crips. They both started first with the
same ideas of community power that the Black Panthers had. However, without the leadership of
the Panthers, both street gangs quickly spiraled out of control.
Cointelpro has also show to the youths an image of the Black Power Movement leaders,
fighting each other. Indeed, one of the action of Cointelpro was to drove a wedge between the all
the AfricanAmerican organizations in Los Angeles at that time. Therefore, the FBI disseminated
defamatory information between those groups to incite violence. Alejandro Alonso argues that
these events, as incidents of AfricanAmericans murdering each other, severed the last ties of
racial unity and led to a severely divided AfricanAmerican community, perfectly positioned for
the explosion of gang activity. (Vigil, Brown, Taylor 220). In fact, even if it was not the first
intention, after Black Panthers, followings gangs such as Crip & Blood would developed a
violent rivalry between each other.
In the documentary Crips & Blood Made In America by Stacy Peralta, we can observe
how was the life of these youths inside of those gangs. Almost all of them was disoriented kids
who have no bearings. Skipp integrated the Rollin20s Bloods at the age of 13. He said I grew
up in a home where my mother worked two jobs, but had three boys We were unsupervised so

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I found my supervision outside of home. (Peralta). What Skipp explains was true for most of the
youth of South Central and the surrounding areas. They was looking for a new family in the
street. Economics difficulties is a major factors that led youth to delinquency because it push
parents to be outside the house working most of the time and therefore not having enough time
for education. Thats also why most of the child had joined the Black Panthers, but after their
disappearance, AfricanAmerican youth were desperately searching for a new identity which
they would quickly find in those street gangs (Alonso 1999, p.111).
In the 80s, the number of gang in Los Angeles has hugely increased. South Central
became much separated. Each block had a different gang, and sometimes even more than one
gang on them. The culmination point of those gangs came during Crack Epidemic. The Crack
Epidemic is the apparition of drugs and cocaine in South Central.
In the early 80s, the U.S decide to partner with rich Nicaraguans who were involved in
drug distribution in order to use the money to supply weapons to fight the communist group
named Sandinistas, who was leading the civil war in the Nicaragua. For this purpose, the CIA
helped ship cocaine from Nicaragua to El Salvador and then to Texas and Arkansas, and lastly to
Los Angeles. After that, the CIA also set up connections between major drug dealers in LA and
Compton, and Nicaragua. The CIA allows the sale of the drugs to the drug dealers in South
Central, and sent the money to buy weapons for Nicaragua. The drug dealers first distributed the
drugs among gangs, and then to individual smaller drug dealers. Thats South Central finally
became a big drugs markets. (Southcentralhistory.com)

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The apparition of drugs became the new main activity of gang members, and provokes
more rivalries between those gangs who fight for territory and market place. In the Stacy
Peraltas documentary, Scrap, a former Grape Street Watts Crip said I grew up in a house where
my grandma and my uncle, everybody was sellin drugs. You know what Im sayin? I grew up
to where when the police raid, they handed me drugs to hide (Peralta). This testimony
describes how big the impact of the drugs in South Central was.
Drugs traffic continued to be the main activity of gangs until the early 90s. On March 3,
1991, an African American taxi driver, Rodney King, had been beaten by the Los Angeles Police
Department officers. On a videotape, we can see four officers surrounding King and striking him
repeatedly, while other officers stood by. The diffusion of this tape around the world inflaming
outrage in cities where racial tensions were high, and raising public concern about police
treatment of minorities. In 1992, the acquittal of the four police officer on trial generate huge
riots in Los Angeles. (Wikipdia.com)
The day before the riots, black street gangs in Watts declared a truce between each other.
On April 28, 1992, the day before the L.A. Riots broke out, hundreds of young black men from
warring factions of the Blood and Crip gangs were gathered to declare a ceasefire. At that time,
they realized how far the violence between each other was going. In the article Forget the LA
Riots - historic 1992 Watts gang truce was the big news by Frank Stoltze, Skipp declared I
mean I couldnt even pump gas. I couldnt go to the grocery store, I couldnt do anything without
interacting with someone who would want to hurt me or Id have to hurt them. (Stoltze).

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Moreover, the Rodney Kings events make them understand that they was more important
reasons to fight. Not only the Rodney Kings beating, but also all the others discrimination act
where justice wasnt established. Townsend was less upset by Rodney King than he was by the
shooting of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was killed with a single bullet by a
Korean convenience-store owner who suspected her of shoplifting. (Thedailybeast.com). The
reasons that lead to this truce perfectly emphasizes the whole issue discussing here: What are the
basis for street gang violence?

Finally, through those researches, we can noted that gangs are so far from being
independent of the social events. The real issue is that gang members themselves dont realize
what motivates their actions. Jim Brown, a former gang member said: Back in the '60s our
brothers and sisters was hanged, how could you gang bang?" (Stoltze). Unfortunately, even if a
truce occurred 20 years ago, and even the gang violence significantly decrease over the last
years, the volatility of gangs is out of gang members control. Lomas, an ex-gang members and a
now LAPD agent said: Nothings changed since the 65 riots, and nothings changed since the
92 riots, (Thedailybeast.com) Lomas said.. Nowadays, with some events as the Mike Brown
case or the Trayvon Martin case, what can we expect? A riot thats going to lead to the
reappearance of gang? A quote from Huey P. Newton said Once emancipated, U.S. black, who
were neither owners nor workers in the Marxist sense of the terms, were shoved into ghettos,
where they were given neither reparations for years of institutional chattel slavery nor
employment in the new industrial state. This phrase shows that whatever what we say or
whatever what we do, when a hunger is settled, it last. As long as the African American would

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be shoved in ghettos, the hunger wont be forget and in a way or another, will continue to be
felt and to come out in inappropriate means. From their beginning to today, gangs have been
dependent from social and political changes. An issue can only be solve from its sources. If we
really want to stop gangs, we need to work on deeper issues.

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