Greetings, Digital Wanderer! This is your author back from the grave to present another piece of writing that would otherwise be lost to time. Again, not 479-related, but something I wrote while at Rhodes College for a Hip Hop Theology course taught by Dr. Earle Fisher. I ended up presenting this paper at the National Council of Black Studies and California University of Pennsylvania’s 7th Annual Hip-hop Conference in 2012. This paper opened up a whole world (Hip Hop) which I had not explored previously. I hope you enjoy it.
Revolutionary Spirituality and Youth Gangs
Skyler Gambert (2012)
In the early 1970s, youth gangs like the Ghetto Brothers, the Black Spades, and the Seven Immortals, among many others, took control of the Bronx and changed history. These gangs primarily composed of young Puerto Ricans and Blacks, combined the messages of empowerment and militancy of revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers with the creative energy of youth culture to create a phenomenon that would provide the foundation for the development of the Hip-hop movement. Hip-hop has gone global and owes a great debt to the young people of the Bronx who rose from the ashes of broken neighborhoods to take control of their own lives and stabilize their tumultuous environment. However, dominant religious, political, academic, and media institutions reduce early youth gangs and their predecessors to something vulgar and base. The US Department of Justice defines a gang simply as a group having a “name and recognizable symbols, identifiable leadership, a geographic territory, a regular meeting pattern, and collective actions to carry out illegal activities” (US Department of Justice). With the omission of the phrase “illegal,” it would be difficult to distinguish a gang from any church congregation. In short, the definition provided by the US Department of Justice is a sterile one and does great injustice to the achievements and legacy of youth gangs, specifically those active in the Bronx during the 1970s. As a whole, society must reconceptualize its understanding of these young people, not only as intelligent and charismatic figures capable of remarkable feats of networking and organization, but also as deeply spiritually driven individuals. Youth gangs, exemplified in this case by the history of Ghetto Brothers, can provide a spiritual catalyst for poor urban young people. By allowing members to reclaim their names and identities, implementing those reconfigured identities within the communal ethos of the gang, and taking direct action to better the physical reality of their neighborhoods, the Ghetto Brothers laid the groundwork for a prophetic vision of transcendence in dilapidated urban space that has inspired the displaced of every generation that has come after them. In the following essay, we will trace the story of the Ghetto Brothers, illuminating the impact of those aforementioned techniques, specifically their spiritual implications.
The Ghetto Brothers were founded in the late 1960s by Carlos Suarez and Benjamin Melendez who would serve as the gang’s president and vice-president, respectively. At this time, Suarez was twenty-one years old and Melendez was nineteen. Cornell Benjamin, age twenty-five, joined the group later and would serve as the gang’s “Peace Counselor” (Chang 52). These names however, would not serve their bearers during their time with the Ghetto Brothers. In those years, they were known as Karate Charlie, Yellow Benjy or the Preacher, and Black Benjie, respectively. These names were adopted by each because of their reputations; they called Suarez “Karate Charlie” for his martial arts expertise and short temper, they called Melendez “The Preacher” because of his inclination to employ “blood-and-fire Old Testament scripture” in speeches to his followers, and they called Benjamin “Black Benjie” because of his half-African-American, half-Puerto-Rican heritage. Most every gang member in the Bronx took on a new name. These names embodied some personality trait and were bestowed upon initiation. The following is an account of how one Michael Coral earned his name during his initiation to the Savage Skulls after having survived a round of Russian Roulette:
When the Skulls led him out of the room, they broke open a beer for him. It was the first one he had ever drank. That was how Michael got the name “Lucky Strike”—just plain Luck for short. He was thirteen years old (Chang 45).
This veritable baptism by fire captures the gravity and importance of the names given to new members. To the unobservant outsider, these titles could easily be equivocated with nicknames, but they are much more than that. These names have the power to transform identity and remove the bearer from the context of historical oppression. McDonald suggests, that the old names of these individuals are tied strongly to the era of Industrial capitalist society where social organization was based around “strong roles . . . hierarchy, and predictability” as well as the segregation of Jim Crow and the cultural scourge of colonialism (Kontos et al. 63). This structure is preserved by the surname, which ties the individual back to the family and ultimately, the slaveholder. By reclaiming a name, intrinsic to their own identities, beholden to no other, gang members are able to re-contextualize themselves into a reality where success is not dependent on obedience to any institution, but instead, is dependent on self-esteem and connection to a network of unique egos. This is a reality that is concerned with neither reverence to heritage or the future progress of the nation. It is a reality securely grounded in the present moment and the individual.
The aforementioned network of unique egos is, essentially, what makes up a gang. At its height, the Ghetto Brothers claimed “more than a thousand members in divisions as far away as New Jersey and Connecticut” (Chang 50). This vast network not only served as a means of marking and controlling territory, this community support network transformed the psychological and cultural landscape of the boroughs. Before the youth gangs, one resident of the Bronx described the neighborhood this way, “[Junkies] were shooting up on the rooftops, in the hallways. And then what else came with drug addiction? Burglaries. . . . The cops weren’t doing anything” (Chang 49). It was the gangs who would fulfill the duty of protecting the public from the cycles of drug addiction. These were neighborhoods that the police, those assigned to (and I quote the mission statement posted to NYPD‘s website) “enforce the laws, preserve the peace, reduce fear, and provide for a safe environment,” were afraid to venture into (http://www.nyc.gov). Gang members, the majority of whom were under the age of twenty-five, were able to transform a “wasteland into a playground” (Chang 49).
By stabilizing the Bronx, gangs opened up new possibilities for creative expression and intellectual pursuits, in other words, the finer things in life. In a capitalist consumerist society, it is often difficult to conceive how one can derive enough peace of mind to engage in art, celebration, or intellectual development amid impoverished and dilapidated conditions, such as those present in the Bronx during the 1970s. However, the Ghetto Brothers band, who took their name from the gang and of which Melendez was a member, was able to release an album and create their own unique musical style by combining funk instrumentation, pop harmonies and Latin rhythms. They also organized “Friday night block parties plugging their amps into lamp posts and inviting all gangs to their turf” to celebrate in peace (Chang 65). The Ghetto Brothers, The Savage Skulls, and the Savage Nomads also developed “salon” style discussions, where they debated “youth crises, Puerto Rican independence, the criminal justice system” and other global issues amongst many who had a less-than-complete high school education. The communal ethos of the gang as “family” created enough stability and peace to allow these meetings to happen (Chang 49). Mutual respect developed a safety net, which allowed for the imagination to explode beyond its urban confines.
Gang control of the Bronx not only led to a rebirth of youth intellect amongst the Ghetto Brothers and those seeking enlightenment beyond the violence of the streets, it also materialized in tangible benefits for the entire community. In addition to driving heroin junkies out of the Bronx and facilitating intellectual and inspirational dialogue, gangs brought in opportunities for the improvement of the quality of life and healthcare that they had previously gone without. One gang, the Young Lords, contemporaries of the Ghetto Brothers, once “seized an X-ray truck from the Lincoln Hospital and placed it on Simpson and Southern Boulevard to provide free services for the community” (Chang 48). The Ghetto Brothers also “forced slumlords to allow them . . . clean tenements and set up a free-breakfast program and free-clothing drive” (Chang 52). With support from local community organizers Manny Dominguez and Rita Fecher, the Ghetto brothers secured a storefront clubhouse where they kept musical instruments provided by “contacts at NYU” (Chang 54) to provide an alternative location for the Bronx’s youth. This ability to control what rapper Chuck D refers to as the “three E’s: Education, Economics, and Enforcement,” exposed the true potential of the movement (Erskine 83). These young people had not merely “colonized the borough,” they were on the verge of independence. However, whenever something this profound threatens the dominance of the reigning order, those in power will, in the words of Afeni Shakur “always try to destroy what [they] can’t control” (Shakur 163).
By the mid-1970s, national law enforcement and local police had infiltrated Bronx gangs. Following an ultimately unsuccessful Peace Treaty attempt spearheaded by the Ghetto Brothers, organized and facilitated by the gangs to put an end to street violence, members drifted away as their organizations fragmented and age took its toll. Some went to “the armed services, others to family and jobs, still others to drugs and jail” (Chang 63). Whatever history defines as the ultimate legacy of these young people, it is undeniable that they were much more than “young people lost in drug and gang culture” (Priest 230). If anything, they tapped into something that has allowed youth similar to them to find a place for themselves within post-modern existence. Youth gangs have provided Hip-Hop with the spiritual ammunition of self-defined identity, a community of support, and the ability to alter the physical and spiritual reality one inhabits to combat the complexity and uncertainty of the day-to-day. The legacy of youth gangs is the realization that, as Louis Barrios phrases it, “all humans are a combination of the spiritual and the material, which function together dialectically” (Kontos et al. 123). That there is an active, spiritual present which we exist in and may define for ourselves.
Works Cited
“About NYPD Mission & Values.” NYPD: New Yorks Finest. New York Polic Department, 2011. Web. 27 Oct. 2011. <http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/mission.shtml>.
Barrios, Luis. “The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation And the Spirituality of Resistance: Agency, Social Cohesion, and Liberating Rituals in the Making of a Street Organization.” Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives. By Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 119-35.
Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: a History of the Hip-hop Generation. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.
Howell, James D. OJJDP Fact Sheet: Youth Gangs. Working paper. Vol. #72. Washington D.C.: US Department of Justice, 1997.
McDonald, Kevin. “Marginal Youth, Personal Identity, and the Contemporary Gang: Reconstructing the Social World?” Gangs and Society: Alternative Perspectives. By Louis Kontos, David Brotherton, and Luis Barrios. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 62-74.
Pinn, Anthony B. Noise and Spirit: the Religious and Spiritual Sensibilities of Rap Music. New York: New York UP, 2003.
Priest, Robert J., and Alvaro L. Nieves. This Side of Heaven: Race, Ethnicity, and Christian Faith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Shakur, Afeni. “We Will Win: Letter From Prison by Afeni Shakur.” The Black Panthers Speak. By Philip Sheldon Foner and Clayborne Carson. New York: Da Capo, 2002. 161-63.
