Can't Stop Won't Stop (16 page)

But when the young Bambaataa saw it in the early ‘60s, he was captivated. The movie opens after the Zulus have routed the British camp at Isandhlwana, with a slow pan of hundreds of dead redcoats strewn across the African plain. It then detours to a majestic scene of a Zulu mass marriage ceremony and victory dance. The ragtag Brits are seen as individualists who tend to feud loudly amongst themselves. By contrast, the Zulus remain a primitive, undifferentiated mass. Here is the central tension of the movie: Can the divided, outnumbered defenders of white western democracy get their act together in time to prevail over the unceasing armies of ancient Dark Continent despotism?

But what Bambaataa saw in
Zulu
were powerful images of Black solidarity. Before the attack on Rorke's Drift, hundreds of Zulu warriors appear atop the ridge, leaving the imperial soldiers awestruck. They bang their spears to their shields, give a resounding war cry and storm the garrison. Although many of them fall before the British muskets, they just don't quit. Into the night, the Zulus continue their assaults and succeed in setting the outpost on fire.

“That just blew my mind,” Bambaataa says. “Because at that time we was coons, coloreds, negroes, everything degrading. We was busy watching Heckyl and Jeckyl, Tarzan—a white guy who is king of the jungle. Then I see this movie come out showing Africans fighting for a land that was theirs against the British imperialists. To see these Black people fight for their freedom and their land just stuck in my mind. I said when I get older I'm gonna have me a group called the Zulu Nation.”

Later he would give his followers a round Black face with white eyes and lips to wear around their necks—an emblem taken from one of New Orleans's oldest and most famous Black Mardi Gras groups, the Zulu Krewe. Civil rights groups had once pressured the Krewe to disband for what they took to be offensive blackface stereotypes. But Bambaataa approached
Zulu
and the Zulu Krewe the way he did political ideologies and his own records. He pulled out what was precious and tossed the rest. He created new mythologies.

Outside the political ferment of Bambaataa's household the revolution was being pre-empted. In 1968, heroin made a sudden, dramatic return to the streets of the southeast Bronx. Richie Perez, later of the Young Lords Party, was then a teacher at Monroe High School across the street from Bronx River Houses. “It came fast and there was a lot of it. It was all over the place. Students I knew were getting strung out,” he says. At the same time, white gangs joined together in a loose federation to prey upon on youths of color. Black and Puerto Rican gangs in the Soundview area surged in response to the junkies and the white gangs, and then they turned on each other.

Bambaataa was drawn into the gang life as inexorably as any young boy from Bronx River would have to be. The first gang that caught his attention was a group founded there called P.O.W.E.R., an acronym he says stood for “People's Organization for War and Energetic Revolutionaries.” P.O.W.E.R. took up the Black Panthers' rhetoric but had the somewhat less lofty, if no less urgent, purpose of protecting Bronx River from being overrun by Bronxdale's Black Spades. Bambaataa enlisted, but when the group began a war with the white gangs, he says, escalating violence and police repression eventually drove their leaders underground. “That's when I decided to turn Spades and then flip Bronx River into Spades,” he says. P.O.W.E.R.'s only remaining claim to history is to be the first gang named on the 1971 Peace Treaty.

As a Spade, Bambaataa made his rep by being unafraid to cross turfs to forge relationships with other gangs. He says, “I was a person who was always in other areas. So if I was a Spade, I still was with the Nomads. If I was with the Nomads, I was hanging with the Javelins. When I came into any group, I had the power, the backing of the other group I was with. Although I was a Spade, I still had power and control of some of the Nomads, some of the Javelins.” Soon, Bambaataa's ability to move between gangs did not look like a weakness, but a strength. “I was the person that if you had problems, I could rally up three to four hundred at one time and move on you,” he says.

The Spades' president, Bam Bam, made the whip-smart young Bambaataa a warlord. He was responsible for building the ranks and expanding the turf of the Spades. “I took my things of attacking areas from the history of Napoleon,
Shaka Zulu. I used things I was reading in school to attack areas and make them join up with us,” Bambaataa says. He helped consolidate Bronx River's control of the Black Spades and enable their spread to the Soundview, Castle Hill and Monroe Houses, and as far west as Patterson Houses. The Spades soon moved into the projects of Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens and became the city's biggest gang. “Everywhere there was a police precinct, there was a Spades chapter,” Bambaataa says.

When racial tensions exploded at Stevenson High School, Bambaataa led Spades in confrontations with white gangs all across Soundview and West Farms. But he also showed signs of ambivalence. “For the first week things seemed to go okay,” he wrote in a class assignment. Then, in the third person, he described the escalation of racial gang tensions to a climactic shopping center rumble. “After that day Stevenson was never the same peaceful high school again.”
⁴

As these battles were escalating, the 1971 truce brought together Black and brown gangs in the South Bronx. The peace treaty, particularly the Spades' president Bam Bam's personal commitment to it, had a profound impact on the young warlord. Bambaataa began to search for a way out, and he found his skills in mobilizing for war could just as easily be turned to peace. As his friend Jay McGluery told journalist Steven Hager, “There were so many gangs and he knew at least five members in every one. Any time there was a conflict, he would try and straighten it out. He was into communications.”
⁵

Herc's New Cool offered Bambaataa a way forward, and two former Black Spades had also become DJs—Kool DJ D at Bronx River and Disco King Mario at Bronxdale. Bambaataa apprenticed with both ex-Spade DJs, then began throwing his own parties in the community center just steps from his front door. “When I did become a DJ, I already had an army with me so I already knew that my parties would automatically be packed,” he says.

That year, he began the Bronx River Organization as an alternative to the Spades. In some ways, the move resembled the Ghetto Brothers' transformation.
⁶
Bambaataa says, “We had a motto: ‘This is an organization. We are not a gang. We are a family. Do not start trouble. Let trouble come to you, then fight like hell.' ”

But some battle lines were dissolving. Partying was a new thing. Bambaataa
formed a strategic alliance with Disco King Mario's Chuck Chuck City Crew at Bronxdale, and people from other housing projects came into his fold. The Organization eventually dropped the Bronx River prefix, and evolved into a vehicle for Bambaataa's expanding gatherings and parties.

While Kool DJ D, Disco King Mario, and other Bronx River DJs like DJ Tex played uptempo disco music popular on the radio, Bambaataa was taken more by DJ Kool Herc's break-centered—as opposed to song-centered—style. Bam's sound became a rhythmic analogue to his peace-making philosophy; his set-lists had the same kind of inclusiveness and broad-mindedness he was aspiring to build through The Organization. He mixed up breaks from Grand Funk Railroad and the Monkees with Sly and James and Malcolm X speeches. He played salsa, rock, and soca with the same enthusiasm as soul and funk. He was making himself open to the good in everything. He eclipsed the other DJs as the most renowned programmer in the borough.

Each weekend Bambaataa would preside over a ritual of motion and fun. Jazzy Jay says, “Block parties was a way to do your thing, plugging into the lamppost. Sometimes we used to play till two in the morning. And we had the support of the whole community. It's like, we'd rather see them doing that, doing something constructive than to be down the block beating each other upside the head like they used to do in the gang days.”

He had found something that was powerful, creative, something that signaled life. But it was a death that reversed Bambaataa's course for good. On January 6, 1975, police killed his cousin Soulski—he will not divulge Soulski's real name—in a bloody shootout.

Deep in Section B of the January 11 edition of the
Amsterdam News
was this police-blotter clip:

TWO SHOT DEAD IN BRONX DUEL

Two young men were shot to death during a gunfight with the Bronx police Monday night on Pelham Parkway off White Plains Road, and another was taken to the hospital suffering with injuries. The dead men were identified as Ronald Brown, 20, who lived at 2187 Washington Ave., and
Ronald Bethel, 17, who lived at 2100 Tiebout Ave. Taken into police custody was James Wilder, 20, of 2507 Washington Ave.

Disobey

Police said Officers Jeffrey Matlin and Robert Visconti were on patrol on Pelham Parkway when they observed three men in a car who were acting suspiciously.

The police motioned to the car to pull over. The car stopped and the three men got out but instead of walking toward the police car the three walked to the rear of the car.

Police said one of the men had a shotgun and the other two were also armed. The officers reportedly ordered the men to drop their guns but were fired on instead. The police returned the fire and the three ran into the wooded area of Pelham Park.

Shootout

The three suspects ran East on Pelham Parkway with the police chasing them. The two officers were later joined by Officers Charles lacovone, Donald Powers and John B. Kelly who aided the two officers in the shootout.

Police said the 1968 Mercury, in which the three were riding, is owned by Brown's mother, Mrs. Sarah Williams. Det. Edward Heck of the Ninth Homicide zone is assigned to the case.
⁷

Bambaataa, who still keeps a copy of Soulski's death certificate, does not speak much on the incident. But he clearly believes something else was going on. His voice lowers to a whisper as he says, “They shot him all in the lungs and the chest, a whole bunch of spots. They tore him up.”

A month after Soulski's killing, Bronx cops shot dead a fourteen-year-old who had been joyriding in a stolen car. A police spokesperson claimed the officers fired after the boy had lunged at them with a knife, but autopsies showed he had been shot through the back. Both these incidents precipitated a different kind of crisis than Cornell Benjamin's had for the Ghetto Brothers; they directed the gangs' rage outward against the authorities.

Representatives from the
Amsterdam News
joined community leaders in a
grassroots effort to reduce tensions in the neighborhoods. They urged Bambaataa and the Spades not to retaliate, to let the justice system do its work. But the Peacemakers gang had already declared open season on police and firefighters. Other gang leaders called Bambaataa to offer their support should he choose to declare war on the cops.

Many years later, he would do a song that he called “Bambaataa's Theme,” an electro version of the score from John Carpenter's 1976 movie,
Assault on Precinct 13
. That movie had ushered in a new genre—the urban horror flick—which would come to include films like Daniel Petrie's 1981 remake of the 1948 John Wayne vehicle
Fort Apache
, called
Fort Apache: The Bronx
. Instead of Indian braves, Zulu warriors or graveyard zombies,
Assault on Precinct 13's
heroes defended themselves in a desolate police station against marauding waves of dark, heavily armed gang members seeking revenge for their cop-killed brothers. Bambaataa's attachment to the movie raises intriguing questions: Did he sympathize with the attackers or the attacked? What kinds of emotions could that filmic assault have fired in him?

At the conclusion of
Zulu
, the South African warriors appeared on the mountaintop above Rorke's Drift once again. But instead of attacking, they raised their
assegais
and their voices in praise-song and tribute to the bravery of the British soldiers. Then they withdrew quietly back to KwaZululand. In 1964, a year after Kenya gained its independence from Great Britain, it may have seemed the perfect ending for the nostalgic audiences of the fading Empire—the natives retreating, despite their overwhelming numbers, before the bloodied but unbowed exemplars of imperial virtue. But in 1975, Bambaataa, thinking not of the past but the future, may have seen that ending much differently.

At the request of community leaders, Bambaataa and his followers had agreed to watch the white cops go to trial in both the police shooting incidents. But the cops were acquitted and the Bronx gangs were ready to roll. Bambaataa had finally reached his turning point. The gangs never launched a final do-or-die attack on the police precincts. Instead, like the chanting Zulu warriors, Bambaataa and his followers withdrew, to live.

The alienated youth of the Bronx needed something to believe in. While Bambaataa had been in the Spades, he says, “a lot of the organizations came to
speak to us. You had some Christian groups that came around from different churches, radical reverends that came out and spoke to a lot of the street gangs. Some of us just pushed it aside.”

After Malcolm X, who would hear of a heaven for the meek? Only controversial prophets of the Garveyite tradition like the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and Dr. Malachi Z. York (also called Imam Isa, or As Sayyid Issa Al Haadi AI Mahdi), the leader of the Ansaaru Allah community, could speak to alienated youth. Bambaataa says, “They held the teachings of ‘You're not a ‘nigga.' You're not colored. Wake up Black man and Black woman and love yourself. Respect your own. Turn back to Africa.' That started sticking with a lot of the brothers and sisters.”