Diamond, Andrew

Gilfoyle, Timothy J

Schneider, Eric

English

Loyola eCommons

Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons History: Faculty Publications and Other Works Faculty Publications and Other Works by Department 7-1-2002 Gangs in the Post-World War II North American City: A Forum Timothy J. Gilfoyle Loyola University Chicago, tgilfoy@luc.edu Eric Schneider University of Pennsylvania Andrew Diamond University of Michigan Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/history_facpubs Recommended Citation Gilfoyle, Timothy J.; Schneider, Eric; and Diamond, Andrew. Gangs in the Post-World War II North American City: A Forum. Journal of Urban History, 28, 5: 658-663, 2002. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, History: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0096144202028005008 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications and Other Works by Department at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History: Faculty Publications and Other Works by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact ecommons@luc.edu. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. © Sage Publications JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2002GANGS IN POST–WORLD WAR II NORTH AMERICAFORUMGANGS IN THEPOST–WORLD WAR IINORTH AMERICAN CITYA ForumSince the beginnings of urbanization in the nineteenth century, Americaninner-city youths have suffered limited economic choices. In the 1850s and1860s, it was either low-incomework or the street. Later in the century, youthschose between school and the street. In 1888, one journalist penned a typicaldescription:In the slums and the low saloons . . . wretched young men gather and listen to orrecount the crimes of others. It is not always the love ofmoneywhich spurs themon to the breaking of the law; it is an instinctive desire to be thoughtwell of, to beesteemed, honored by their fellows as the performers of deeds that others darenot do. Many of these rowdies would rather break a policeman’s head, or a citi-zen’s, than make an easy capture of somebody’s money. Some are little betterthan wild beasts in human guise. They are slaves to the worst of passions, and,moreover, glory in the fact.1By the twentieth century, theatrical and cinematic productions such as WestSide Story treated the gang as a common fixture of urban culture and the streetas a public arena of male authority.Despite gangs’historical importance and public fascination, historians havebeen slow to study them. For many, the journalistic works of Jacob Riis andHerbert Asbury, or sociological studies such as Frederic Thrasher’s, remainauthoritative.2 Recent historians, however, are beginning to question and chal-lenge many of the long-held stereotypes and assumptions regarding inner-cityyouth gangs. Eric Schneider’s Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: YouthGangs in Postwar New York represents one of the first attempts to revise andreinterpret this literature. Broadly speaking, Schneider attributes the emer-gence of gangs afterWorldWar II as an outgrowth of changing conceptions ofmasculinity andmale identity between 1940 and 1970. In a recent review essayin the Journal, Andrew Diamond argued that ideological and political factorsplayed equally important roles in gang formation during these years.658JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 28 No. 5, July 2002 658-663© 2002 Sage PublicationsAccordingly, the Journal of Urban History presents the following debateabout the origins and identities of gangs in the postwarNorthAmerican city.—Timothy J. GilfoyleAssociate EditorERIC SCHNEIDER’S RESPONSE TO ANDREW DIAMONDAndrew Diamond’s recent review essay on gangs, which includes my bookVampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York,focuses on one principal area of disagreement between us: the degree of col-lective political and racial consciousness expressed by street gangs during the1960s. Diamond seems to think that gangs were fundamentally instruments ofracial consciousness—white gangs as defenders of whiteness and communityboundaries, and African American and Hispanic gangs as expressions of na-tionalism and resistance to racist oppression. He argues, based on his own re-search inChicago, thatAfricanAmerican andHispanic gangmembersmergedinto a larger movement of empowerment that swept minority communities inthe 1960s. While this may describe the evolution of Chicago gangs, its widerapplication is more problematical and does a disservice to my work, whichcovers a much broader expanse of time. I will discuss five points that relate tothe overall theme of gangs’ collective racial and political consciousness.Let me start with the issue of racial consciousness. When I began myresearch, I was prepared to conclude that New York in the postwar period wascharacterized by subterranean warfare, with white gangs in the forefront ofresistance to integration and African American gangs organizing attacks onwhite storeowners and lingeringwhite residents in an attempt to drive themoutof territories they were taking over. However, this view was too limited toexplain the richness of my data. Racial consciousness was in fact central to theorganization of gangs at certain points in time—for example, among whitegangs in the 1940s—and in certain geographic locales—such as West Har-lem—and utterly irrelevant at others. What transcended periods of racialawareness was a driving consciousness of masculinity that took a variety offorms, many of them self-destructive, some of them political, but all of themrooted in economic inequality. The point is not that class trumps race or viceversa, but that one needs to be attuned to both to understand why adolescentsjoined gangs and how those gangs changed over time.My second point concerns heroin use among adolescents in the 1960s. Onewould never guess from Diamond’s essay that gangs were declining in NewYork in the 1960s and that most commentators (and gang members) blamedthe spread of heroin use for their demise. While the sources of decline weremore complex, heroin certainly played a role. I argue that increased heroin usewas an unintended consequence of successful New York City Youth Board,GANGS IN POST–WORLD WAR II NORTH AMERICA 659police, settlement house, and Great Society interventions in gangs. Thedestabilization of gangs removed themain peer-organized opposition to heroinuse, and the spread of heroin in turn disrupted the recruitment of younger ado-lescents into gang membership. In effect, youths abandoned gangs—not forthe collective activity of politics but for narcotics. Yet nowhere in his essaydoes Diamond mention the word heroin.My third point has to do with collective consciousness and the potential foradolescents to deal politically with their economic and social circumstances. Ithink Diamond expects a bit toomuch from teenagers. Adolescents respondedto a labormarket that exploited them by quitting or getting fired from jobs, to aschool system that did not educate by dropping out, and to families that failedto nurture them by hanging on street corners. Although the institutions of ado-lescent socialization encouraged only individual rebellion, adolescents in actsof creativity and imagination established street gangs and forged a gang cul-ture so evocative that its formswere repeatedly commercialized. Gangswere acollective response to the difficulties of adolescent life in poor neighborhoods,but in Raymond Williams’s terms, they formed an alternative rather than anoppositional culture. They organized not to overthrow the institutions thatoppressed them but to be left alone by them. That adolescents rarely tran-scended their circumstances to transform their alternative culture into anoppositional one when so much around them encouraged only individual actsof rebellion is hardly surprising.Fourth, we have to consider the actions of individuals versus the collectiveaction of a gang. As Diamond notes, when youths rioted against police, gangmembers were surely among them. Is that evidence of gangs’ political con-sciousness? Are acts that cannot be tethered to a gang the acts of gangs or ofindividuals? Sociologists have expended an ocean of ink in battling over whatconstitutes a gang and in distinguishing between delinquent acts of individualsand the corporate acts of gangs. That distinction is essential in examining howgangs changed over time in response to different social, economic, and politi-cal circumstances. Without it, one has analytical mush.Finally, as an urbanist, I think it important to pay attention to the specifics ofplace. Gangs inNewYork and Philadelphia did notmorph into gang nations orsupergangs that transcended neighborhood, while in Chicago, the BlackstoneRangers, the Vice Lords, and others apparently did. What explains the differ-ence? Is ideology a result of levels of organization, or did ideology create thecircumstances for organizational expansion? SurelyMr.Diamondmust appre-ciate that not all places are the same, nor are their histories.—Eric SchneiderUniversity of Pennsylvania660 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2002ANDREW DIAMOND’S RESPONSEEric Schneider misinterprets my thoughts on the formation and function ofracial attitudes within postwar street gangs. Rather than “instruments of racialconsciousness” (a phrase I never used), I suggest we view gangs as infrastruc-tures for the development of a range of shared attitudes and sensibilities. Icould not agree more with his contention that one needs to examine the inter-play of race, class, and gender to understand why adolescents formed gangsand how these organizations changed over time. The thrust of my critique ofVampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings is by no means that race “trumps”class or masculinity. It is rather that one should be wary of too readily dismiss-ing the role of race in the behavior of youth gangs, particularly in the late 1960sand early 1970s, when discourses of rights and racial empowerment pervadedthe cultures of everyday life of working-class adolescents in black and Latinoneighborhoods.More specifically, I question why Schneider virtually ignores the emer-gence of theBlackPowermovement that exerted such a strong influence on thestyles,music, language, and political views of the generation ofAfricanAmer-icans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. His account of gang culture islimited to the development of “bop culture” in the 1940s and 1950s. Conse-quently, he never considers how this culturemorphed into a very different formin the next decade, a milieu characterized by discourses and symbols of racialbrotherhood and militancy. The powerful rhetoric of MalcolmX, the assertivesounds of JamesBrown, the strikingAfrican clothing styles, and the black fistspainted on walls appear nowhere in his story. Are we to believe that NewYorkgangs with names like the Ghetto Brothers and the Black Spades and gangcoalitions called the Brotherhood and the Family were not somehow investedin this transformation?This context helps explain why sixty members of the Ghetto Brothers“‘barged into’the local job office at 306East 149 Street and demanded jobs” inthe summer of 1972.3While this particular event does in fact find briefmentionin Vampires, Dragons, and Egyptian Kings, its subsequent analysis is limitedto a single sentence: “form gangs, be violent and youwill receive your share ofthe gang money” (p. 243). As I stated in my review essay, there may be sometruth to this, but on an issue so divisive as the involvement of gangs in the politi-cal sphere, we need to hear a wider range of voices. It is important to considerthat the “activist” who made the comment above did so in a report to theMayor’s Educational Task Force. In fact, nearly every document Schneidercites in depicting these actions as opportunistic originated in Mayor JohnLindsay’s administration.This episode of collective mobilization by the Ghetto Brothers and severalother gangs in the Bronx, East Harlem, and Brooklyn in 1972 beliesGANGS IN POST–WORLD WAR II NORTH AMERICA 661Schneider’s assertion that “the institutions of adolescent socialization encour-aged only individual rebellion,” as does the participation ofNewYork gangs inthe Mobilization for Youth, the March on Washington, and school boycotts.Once again, such events domake it into Schneider’s account, but his treatmentof them is so cursory as to seem consciously dismissive.I attribute this to Schneider’s adherence to an interpretive framework thatdefines the “one token agency” for working-class adolescents as “their abilityto cause trouble.” I find this to be problematic in the case of white gangs, who,in the midst of community decline, were doing much more than causing trou-ble when they attacked people of color. Applied to the case of black and PuertoRican gangs in the 1960s and early 1970s, it yields a perspective that ultimatelymirrors that of the right-wing backlash to the Great Society project of commu-nity empowerment.This interpretive tendency, moreover, causes the author to overlook somestriking instances of political action by New York gangs. In the early 1970s, aradical group called the Young Lords—the New York version of a PuertoRican Chicago gang of the same name that traded street fighting for commu-nity activism—enlisted gangs in East Harlem in their struggle against poorhealth and sanitation conditions in the neighborhood. On June 29, 1970, forexample, the New York Times reported that “a coalition of youth gangs andpolitical activists” staged a protest over conditions at a South Bronx hospitaland over the alleged beatings of demonstrators a day earlier.Although more a political organization than a gang, the Young Lordsrecruited many members from the ranks of Puerto Rican gangs. New York’sBlack Panther Party, which served as a model for the Lords, also drew numer-ous adherents out of the gang world. Leading figures in both groups, in addi-tion, were outspoken about how their gang experiences radicalized them. Inother words, the relationship between these political organizations and thegang world was much closer than Schneider would have us believe.Thus, rather than simply denying the political opposition of gangs, I find itmore useful to think of NewYork’s black and Puerto Rican gangs of the 1960sand 1970s as elements of a larger youth culture of the streets, which fostered anoppositional consciousness that under certain conditions crystallized into col-lective action. Eric Schneider is right to see masculinity as a driving forcebehind gangmembership and to emphasize economic inequality inmaking thequest for honor so destructive. As I previously wrote, on these themes hemakes a valuable contribution to the field. Yet once out on the streets in searchof respect, other forces influenced the hearts andminds of gang youths. I see noclearer example than police brutality, the spark of numerous ghetto uprisingsin bothChicago andNewYork and an issue that demonstrated to youngmen ofcolor, gang affiliated or not, that economic injustice and racial oppressionwereinseparable. “Nightstick justice,” as Schneider puts it, was essential to the gangexperience, but he deals with it only insofar as it was an alternative to city offi-cials in addressing the gang problem.662 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / July 2002Finally, Dr. Schneider makes too much of my neglecting his theory aboutheroin addiction’s depleting the ranks of gangs. First, most of his data support-ing this argument date before 1966; by 1970, observers were discussing thegang problem again, which suggests their resurgence probably began around1968 or so. Second, even if gangs did diminish, which should not be taken forgranted in light of the unreliable ways in which agencies counted them, theyhardly disappeared. As formy use of Chicago to reflect on the situation inNewYork, I trust the readership of this journal understands that comparative historyis not a precise method but one that can yield theoretical insights in a field asyoung as gang history.—Andrew DiamondUniversity of Michigan1. Unmarked clipping, District Attorney Scrapbooks, vol. 44, New York City Municipal Archives andRecord Center (January 23, 1888).2. JacobRiis, The Battle with the Slum (NewYork, 1902); JacobRiis,How theOtherHalf Lives: Studiesamong the Tenements of New York (NewYork, 1890); Herbert Asbury, TheGangs of New York: An InformalHistory of theUnderworld (NewYork, 1927); Frederic Thrasher, TheGang: A Study of 1,313Gangs in Chi-cago (Chicago, 1927). For a recentwork that reflectsAsbury’s influence, seeLucSante,LowLife: Lures andSnares of Old New York (New York, 1991.)3. New York Times, July 16, 1972.GANGS IN POST–WORLD WAR II NORTH AMERICA 663

Gangs in the Post-World War II North American City: A Forum

https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1107&context=history_facpubs

Gangs in the Post-World War II North American City: A Forum

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Loyola eCommons